Throwing down this topic for mimsy and others to take a crack at breaking open the epitaph. If you want to solve the Epitaph on your own, you may want to leave this aside. If you wanna work together with other people, then feel free!
I may have reached a breakthrough!
So in this episode, we learn that Natsuhi and Krauss traveled to many Asian countries, including Taiwan. Krauss tries to get Natushi to share areca nuts with him, and claims that Kinzo loves them. I didn’t think much of it, but it’s interesting, since Kinzo is much more interested in European traditions than Asian ones.
I was also still trying to figure out the riddle, and where Krauss’s beloved hometown might be. I don’t have an atlas, so I googled ‘map of Taiwan rivers’ and sure enough, there are lots of rivers, too many to really narrow it down. So I tried to be less literal. I looked over the maps, and looked for something that flows like a river. And that’s how I found a map with the Taiwan railway system.
See those red and blue lines running through Taiwan? Those are railway lines. I had to do a lot of googling, half-suspecting it was all a wild goose chase. If the epitaph refers to a railway line, it has to be a line open before the events of the game. Actually, if this is Kinzo’s ‘beloved homeland,’ it has to be a line open even earlier than that.
The oldest railway system I could find was the Alishan railway line. Established in 1912 by the Japanese colonial government in Taiwan … doesn’t that seem like a fitting choice for someone from a distant branch of a Japanese aristocratic family, used as a puppet Head by the Ushiromiya elders? And in this railway, there’s one line that stands out to me … The Shuishan Line. I’m no expert in Asian languages, but Shan shui is a style of painting like flowing water. Sure enough, it’s the same characters: 水山, 山水. Mountain-water. Like a fresh water stream. Just as Rosa said, the ‘sweetfish’ ends up not being too important. EDIT: I’m no longer certain Shuisan is the right line – nothing in particular can be found along it-- but there’s a major Tamsui line also containing the character 水. I believe it’s written 淡水, which translates to ‘fresh water.’
Now I might as well share the rest of my thinking. The word I think the key unlocks is ‘quadrillion’ – as in ‘you will only be blessed at a probability of a quadrillion to one,’ the quote above the door to the chapel. The chapel represents Kinzo’s desire to be united with his beloved Beatrice, so it makes a fitting entrance to the golden land. George attempts to translate this word in an early episode, and Kumasawa has a picture of the door among her belongings. Basically, if I look at this story with love, and trust the clues are there for me to solve the riddle, I can conclude that word is important.
‘Quadrillion’ is eleven English characters long. I think after you follow the right railway line, you find the key, and the key is a word. You remove the characters in that word from ‘quadrillion.’ That’s the first twilight. On the second twilight, you ‘tear apart’ the two characters that are closest alphabetically – either remove them entirely, or put one letter at the beginning of the word and one letter at the end of the word. On the third … I’m not sure, but I think you either remove the characters that are in the word ‘Beatrice,’ or you introduce them. On the fourth through eighth twilights, you ‘kill’ characters based on their placement in the word. The first letter in the word could be the ‘head,’ the middle could be the ‘stomach,’ etc, etc. Either that or it’s something physical that you have to do with the actual door on the actual island. On the ninth twilight, you must use the keyword ‘Beatrice’ again. I’m still not sure how. But it seems like it’s the end of the puzzle, where all the characters have been used up and ‘none shall be left alive.’ On the tenth twilight, you reach ‘the capital where the gold dwells.’ Whether that’s another character, or something more literal, I can’t say.
Even though I’ve made this breakthrough … I still haven’t figured it all out. I’m still having trouble finding what the village and the shore are with the maps I have available. I’ll keep looking, but I’d like your help! If I find anything new, I’ll let you all know right away.
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Perhaps we should make a separate forum thread for Epitaph theories?
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That sounds like a good idea! Epitaph theories draw on more than just one episode, so it makes sense for them to have their own thread. The areca nuts were just a throwaway hint.
… Okay, one small addition. Alishan, or 阿里山, has the central character 里 that is also in Maria. It’s the character the epitaph uses for ‘village,’ which I only know because the characters talked about it in an earlier episode. I still don’t know what ‘the shore the two will tell you of’ means. Is it the other two characters? I may be getting in over my head here.
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I’m just being careful not to look at the rest of the thread because I’m not actually finished with ep5.
It’s hard to give you advice on where to go here because many of the people up to this point in the story on the forum have already been through this process with my theory, or so I’m told.
I think you’ve clearly made good use of the clues we’ve had up to this point. None of the thinking you’ve done is without reinforcement from the theorising the characters have done in-game up to this point, and that means you have a strong foundation. Things like starting from a geographical clue, the use of characters also from the epitaph, and matching the number of characters in Quadrillion are all potentially useful extrapolations on the clues we’ve been given. I don’t want to lead you too heavily because I’m sure you could solve this on your own (and trust me, you’ll enjoy doing so), but I think there are certainly clues and components of the epitaph that have been mentioned in the story that you haven’t used yet that you could look to if you wanted to take this further.
I’m certainly a big proponent of trying to solve the epitaph as early as you can, since I think I was able to, and I had a lot of fun doing so, so good work and keep it up!
Also @Aspirety I think maybe a full spoilers discussion on the greater meaning of the epitaph would be useful (if there isn’t one already), but I think a topic dedicated to solving it wouldn’t last very long before a solution is obvious and we’d have to delete it and start again. To quote @MagusVerborum;
This is the way Ryukishi writes; he doesn’t give you explicit answers, he gives you a ton of clues, so when you see the answer, you think ‘everything makes sense’, all of those misdirecting moments, all of those clues, all of the things people said lining up like some golden road
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I think it’s required to mention that solving the epitaph requires knowledge in Japanese, which makes things very complicated and impossible for non-Japanese speakers!
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Nothing you can’t look up in a dictionary or a google search.
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It does mean looking at an English map might be what’s tripping me up, right? I’m starting to think the right railway line contains the character 水 or ‘water’ and cross through a town that could conceivably be Kinzo’s hometown. But since the epitaph says ‘river,’ it might contain the character ‘川’ … Rosa said ‘sweetfish’ wasn’t important, but Eva said it was still a marvelous hint.
Regardless, it should reach somewhere that contains the character 里 or ‘village.’ Because I was looking at an English map, I didn’t really notice that until I looked at the characters for Alishan and remembered what they said about Maria’s name. But I can’t find anything once I get to Alishan.
Maybe I should look at some of the other characters in the poem? I’ll put the poem and the translation side-by-side for other riddle-solvers.
懐かしき、故郷を貫く鮎の川。
黄金郷を目指す者よ、これを下りて鍵を探せ。
川を下れば、やがて里あり。
その里にて二人が口にし岸を探れ。
そこに黄金郷への鍵が眠る。
Behold the sweetfish river running through my beloved hometown.
You who seek the Golden Land, follow its path downstream in search of the key.
As you travel down it, you will see a village.
In that village, look for the shore the two will tell you of.
There sleeps the key to the Golden Land.
As a non-Japanese-speaker … it’s tough for me to look at that sea of characters and pick out anything important. But I do have to respect the complexity of the epitaph. After all, as an English-speaker, I have an advantage when it comes to any reasoning about the word ‘quadrillion’ or any other English words the key might contain.
At this point, I can at least say this is a riddle that you need both an Eastern and a Western perspective to solve. It combines aspects of Kinzo’s Eastern upbringing with his love of Western culture and the occult. You have to look at it with ‘both eyes,’ to borrow a phrase from Ange’s chapter.
And it is really tough, but I feel like I’m getting close. I just need that other perspective.
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Hmm, the theory that the sweetfish river is a railway line is definitely percolating nicely around here… I do enjoy @mimsy’s theories though, she definitely seems very persistent with her research. Though I have a question for you, if your theory turns out to be correct, how do you think one of, uh, these characters leads to the word quadrillion?
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Heh thank you for the compliment. Your question is so specific, it almost seems like a hint … I came to ‘quadrillion’ based on the evidence around the island, not from the epitaph itself, but maybe if I looked at the epitaph itself I’d find new clues. Or maybe you’re asking: if the key of the epitaph is in Japanese characters, how am I supposed to use it on an English word like ‘quadrillion’?
I’d guess I have to use the romanization of the word. And not just any romanization, but the romanization used in Taiwan prior to the 1980s. It really does get more complicated the more I look at. Actually, I’ve started to look at it backwards – I’ve started to look at stations with romanizations that include letters from ‘quadrillion.’ And there are two stations along the Tamsui line that start with ‘Q’ …
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Well, I am fond of spoilers, so it might as well be a hint, but who knows… you’ll just have to wait and see. And yes, that’s exactly what I’m asking, how do you use a Japanese character in quadrillion, an English world? Well, you seem to have an idea, about train stations starting with the letter Q, and I do look forward to see how you’ll elaborate on it.
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