Hyouka is an unexpectedly subtle story at the intersection of mystery, comedy, and romance. This is a collection of loosely chronologically ordered miscellaneous thoughts on the Classic Literature Club light novel series by Honobu Yonezawa, compiled slowly bit by bit over many weeks as I reread all 6 volumes and rewatch all 22 episodes.

Synopsis

For those not in the loop, the basic premise of the series goes something like this: A boy by the name Oreki Houtarou is impelled to join the Classics Club of his high school by his sister, currently travelling in India. As all previous members had graduated, the club was in danger of being abolished, something his sister, a previously avid member, couldn’t bear.

However, Houtarou isn’t just a teen that would jovially comply with anything he is told to do. It turns out Houtarou adheres to a stringent doctrine: “If I don’t have to do it, I won’t. If I have to do it, make it quick”. And he isn’t exactly happy about his life getting derailed through a letter from India.

But being the good little brother he is, he eventually complies (with a little bit of fear to motivate him¹) and thus meets the venerable Chitanda Eru, a member seeking to join for “personal reasons”. Fukabe and Mayaka, two of Houtarou’s friends, also eventually join the club. Together, as the four of them go about their club activities, Houtarou’s previous conservational lifestyle is repeatedly challenged. As the story progresses through each new arc, each time he solves a mystery, each time he contradicts his motto, and his evolving relationship with Chitanda, Houtarou’s life starts to epitomize the nostalgic, family fact that everything goes well.

Initially: If I don’t have to, I won’t

Truth is the daughter of time.

(Old proverb. Quoted in Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time²)

Houtarou’s indolent motto: “If I don’t have to do it, I won’t. If I have to do it, make it quick”. While this could be interpreted as Houtarou being motivated to follow through with his identity, I personally think that Houtarou is just lazy and uses this motto as an excuse not to do anything.

We are not told much background about Houtarou (at least in the span of the anime, the later novels go into more detail). We know he has an older sister who travels a lot, and as a consequence he is alone at home most of the time. He isn’t very social and doesn’t do things like hang out with friends. In fact it is shown that his two closest friends (Mayaka whom he has known since first grade and Satoshi from middle school) haven’t ever stepped foot into his house.

Laziness is defined by a lack of motivation. In Houtarou’s case, he is unmotivated to participate in club activities and other hallmarks of a rosy-coloured life. Right off the bat, I can think of a couple of causes from the three big schools of thought in psychology:

Psychoanalytic - The pleasure principle: The Freudian idea that we will put off doing activities that cause negative emotions like stress and anxiety in an attempt to avoid these emotions. However, I don’t think that Frued’s psychosexual stages is responsible for Houtarou’s behaviour. First of all, there is little actual scientific support for the theory³, but more importantly it appears that Houtarou is purposefully adhering to his motto (more on this later), and fully aware that he is doing so. This is something out of scope for Freud’s theories, which involve the patient’s unconscious thoughts. I am not completely dismissing the possibility though. Houtarou could have an unconscious trigger for thinking this way that influences his conscious decisions (a generic example would be some types of cognitive biases, where our mind is unconsciously irrational which leads to consciously making irrational decisions).

Neuroscientific theory - Lack of dopamine: Dopamine is given off when a reward is anticipated (independently of whether a reward is actually received or not^{4, 5}), and low dopamine is highly correlated with low motivation (remember, correlation is not causation though⁶). Moreover, dopamine is one of the major factors our brains use to decide whether something is worth the effort or not⁵. Houtarou deems that a large majority of seemingly normal high school activities are not worth the effort, including things like joining a club, or going for a run outside (these two are direct examples from the anime). The cause of this could be that he doesn’t anticipate reward from these activities.

Behaviourist theory - Incentive motivation: Behavioural psychology is based around the idea that the individuals are a direct product of their environment, and thus we should be considered about the observable characteristics of individuals⁷. Motivation is highly associated with the conditioning process⁸, specifically the ideas of reinforcement and punishment. He may not see any tangible short term or long term incentives for wasting his energy (this is related to the dopamine theory talked about above). From this, we can gain that the behaviour of Houtarou could come from reinforcement of his energy conserving lifestyle (either through adding a desirable stimulus, or taking away an undesirable one). Additionally in operant conditioning, if a behaviour can be trained through reinforcement, it can also be ‘untrained’ through punishment, which we can interpret to be Chitanda.

The Curse of Knowledge

I know that I know nothing.

(The Socratic paradox)

It’s actually quite common among skilled individuals to underestimate themselves. The converse is also true, incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their ability. The typically accepted explanation for this is that competent individuals are subject to the infamous bias known as the ‘curse of knowledge’. As an individual improves at a task, their perceived standards go up, and they assume that other individuals will be competent enough to understand them. Incompetent individuals often do not have the necessary skills to recognize their own errors, and thus believe they are performing better than they are in reality. You can imagine that this has practical applications in education, where teachers may not sympathize with why students don’t understand concepts.

This could be something that Houtarou is experiencing. Conceiving ideas from the perspective of others is actually excruciatingly difficult, and whether we like it or not, it influences our decisions to some level. This egocentrism is something everyone faces to some degree, because accepting someone else’s view oftentimes means neglecting our own.

Therefore, it could be that Houtarou, adept at solving mysteries, is simply too indifferent as to why the people around him cannot do the same things he is doing. He considers himself ordinary, and thinks that if he can do it, everyone else should be more than capable to match him, especially Chitanda, with an astounding memory, top scores at Kamiyama high school, and part of a wealthy family. Chitanda thinks the exact same about her grades, and that anyone is capable of doing what she is doing given that they have all the pieces, but that she wants to look at the “big picture” (more on this later). Note that the curse of knowledge is largely subconscious, meaning Houtarou himself may not be aware that he is thinking this way.

In many ways, egocentrism and the curse of knowledge are forms of pride, though not in the traditional sense where one has exceedingly high regard of oneself. As stated above, accepting other’s views means neglecting effort and energy focusing on our own, and potentially requires amendment on our part or in some cases finding out that you are flat out wrong. Pride is referred to in the series when the characters talk about it as one of the seven deadly things. Chitanda notes that the sins are not necessarily bad, and having a balance of them is important. For example, she thinks that if you have no pride, then it follows that you would have no self-confidence either. Personally, though he feels he is, I do not think that Houtarou is victim to pride. He clearly shows he is capable of looking at things from another’s perspective, not only to solve mysteries through reasoning through the culprit’s motives, but in his everyday life with the other club members as well (such as through the Valentine chocolate mystery).

Zugzwang for Oreki

When I was reading the newspaper club mystery arc (episode 3 of the anime), I thought it was interesting how Houtarou falls to blackmail-like tactics in order to find the location of the anthologies through threatening to publicize the smoking habits of the club president. Interestingly enough, Houtarou is a victim of another kind of blackmail by none other than Chitanda. Although this is seen throughout the entire series, it is especially apparent in Chitanda asking the favour of finding out about her uncle.

One could argue that asking any kind of favour from another person could technically be considered emotional blackmail, and they wouldn’t be wrong. When asking someone to help us with something, to some degree, we always have expectations of them⁹, but there is definitely a difference between friends expecting to cater to each others needs and a blackmailer purposefully acting in a controlling way to make the victim complete tasks that are undesirable and uncomfortable doing.

Note that Chitanda may or may not be doing this on purpose, and is certainly not doing it for malicious purposes, I just thought it was interesting how Houtarou falls for it. And even realizes he does, but can’t get out of it.

But then: An evolving relationship

To Commit a Misunderstanding

But what was it that made me angry? I find myself difficult to understand sometimes.

(Chitanda. Vol. 4, Story 2/E 6)

In volume 4, story 2 of the novel, or episode 6 of the anime (both are titled ‘To Commit A Deadly Sin’), Chitanda yells at the math teacher Omichi-sensei, who had mistaken the progress the class had made on the textbook and asked a question on a topic that hadn’t been covered yet. What’s interesting is that Chitanda is unsure the precise reason she was angry. She denies a couple proposed possibilities:

1. Because the students did not know the answer to the question, Omichi wrongfully criticized them for “attitude towards lessons” and “love of learning”, all while keeping a violent air by slapping the blackboard with a bamboo pole. Chitanda says that she wouldn’t get angry over this because she believed that if students were slacking off, Omichi had every right to punish them.
2. There were people in the class who knew the answer (presumably because they had studied ahead) but kept quiet out of fear of the angry teacher. Chitanda denies this as no one would want to answer in the given situation anyways. Also if someone had answered, the lesson would have continued while it was already too far ahead.
3. No one pointed out the teacher’s mistake. Chitanda denies this, probably due to sympathy. Talking back to an angry teacher slamming a blackboard with a pole is scary.
4. Tamura, the person who Omichi singled out to answer the question, looked pitiful. Chitanda also denies this, saying that although she did pity him, and she wouldn’t get angry over just that.

Regardless, thanks again to Houtarou’s deductive skill, Chitanda learns that the situation is simply a misunderstanding, and that Omichi probably mistaked the lowercase letter “d” for “a” because of sloppy handwriting.

In this story/episode, the group is quick to associate Mayaka with the sin of wrath, and Houtarou with the sin of sloth. In reality though, the message of this episode has to do with possibly the deadliest sin of all, from which all the other sins stem: pride. The mistake Chitanda made (leading to her wrongfully getting angry) was assuming that Omichi was intentionally trying to bully his students. In other words, out of pride, she thought she had the knowledge that she knew what Omichi was thinking, and she assumed that because of this, she was justified in standing up and yelling at him.

Whats really interesting though, is Houtarou. Here’s the relevant snippet from the novel and an incredibly well represented scene from the anime showing his thoughts:

Now how does this tie into the context of their relationship? I have two possibilities:

• The unlikely (but somewhat intriguing) possibility: Houtarou is self-conscious about the fact that he tricked her about the Silk Spider Society previously, and is worried that she has potentially found out. He tries to rationalize the situation by telling Chitanda through a roundabout way that he had his reasons for doing it. Seeing this, he believed that this really was the case, whether due to confirmation bias or because he actually saw it in Chitanda’s face. This is wildly unlikely, and I just included it for speculation sake (this whole article is mainly just speculations anyways).
• The likely (and very intriguing) possibility: Houtarou is cautious that he is thinking of Chitanda differently than he was at the beginning of the series, perhaps maybe even starting to be romantically attracted. Due to the previous situation with the Sekitani Jun mystery, Houtarou is seriously weighing the drawbacks of a rosy colored life, and is not mentally ready for deciding to pursue one, so mentally rejects Chitanda. This is made fairly apparent when we compare it to the incidents of Houtarou’s thoughts about his other two friends. When Mayaka asked Chitanda why she was angry, Houtarou is able to immediately guess why she asked her question. The same goes for likening Satoshi to a grasshopper, which he has no problems doing. Chitanda is the only individual he treats differently. His dilemma could be summed up in the following quote:

Withered Flowers, When examined - Ego depletion

Episode 7 of the anime (or Vol 4, Story 3 - The Ghost, When examined), on the outside seems merely just a trip to the hot springs and a small mystery about a ghost that was actually just the shadow of a yukata, but as typical with this series, things go deeper than the surface.

Houtarou’s physical fatigue is indicative of his mental condition. He is in a state of decision fatigue similar to analysis paralysis, where the benefits and drawbacks to a rosy colored life, and more directly his relationship with Chitanda, are still very cloudy to him. I am amazed how well this is shown in the context of the four characters on the bus ride scene, with Houtarou making the following metaphysical digression:

I am quite certain that the choice of withered flowers for the comparison here is not an accident. We are talking about a rosy coloured life after all, and two consecutive shots in the anime OP makes it pretty clear. Notice the similarities between the head positions of the characters and the flower positions:

The three flowers represent the three friends, so we can interpret what Houtarou is saying not as literally talking about ghosts and withered flowers, but of love and a rosy-coloured life. Houtarou is apparently still convinced that a rosy coloured life only looks good on the outside, in reality the rose is withered. The previous Sekitani Jun mystery likely played a role in him thinking this way.

Given this context, his side remark about romance is quite ironic: “people are unable to grasp the idea of romanticisim even after looking it up in a dictionary”. At this stage, I would say the Chitanda and Houtarou are already close enough that they both should be able to realize they have a thing for each other. Similarly, Mayaka has openly admitted to liking Satoshi since middle school but Satoshi has never returned an answer and has been avoiding the issue. This group of four may be the very ones who can’t grasp romanticism. Chitanda’s later nonchalant mention of mixed baths adds to this further. Or this might just be one of Chitanda’s oddities. It’s getting harder to tell the difference.

Another key feature of this arc is the relationship between siblings, fueled by the relationship between Kaho and Rie. Chitanda and Houtarou’s perspectives differ in this area. Chitanda believes that having a sibling is nice, whereas Houtarou believes it to be a burden, drawing from his relationship with his own sister, which he views as negative. In a way, this is indicative of the antipodal personalities of the two, Chitanda being curious and outbounding whereas Houtarou being an energy conversationalist, just like how Houtarou doesn’t believe in ghosts and thinks a rosy coloured life is just a wilted flower, whereas Chitanda thinks precisely the opposite (and she also believes in ghosts).

At first, we may be quick to dismiss Chitanda’s opinion in favour of Houtarou’s because of the apparent negative air between Kaho and Rie due to Kaho’s possessive nature, and the fact that Houtarou’s opinion should be more trustworthy because he has a sister himself. However, there are a couple reasons why Houtarou’s argument isn’t necessarily foolproof either. Firstly, though he has a sister, he doesn’t actually spend a lot of time with her. She is out travelling a lot, and even if she is home, Houtarou prefers spending time alone anyways. Her sister also always pushes him to do more and more things he dislikes, such as using violence¹ to push him to join a club for selfish reasons, which would contribute to his negativity. Houtarou makes the mistake of assuming that just because his sister is like that, all sibling-sibling relationships should be. Two obvious factors he doesn’t consider are the gender and age gap differences. Tomoe is a female and Houtarou is male, whereas the Kaho and Rie are both female. I speculate based on first hand experience (I have two siblings of opposite gender) and observing relationships between siblings in other families that siblings of the same gender identify with each other more, and are thus more likely to create a tighter relationship. The age gap between Tomoe and Houtarou is also larger than those of Kaho and Rie. The larger the age gap, the more distant the relationship is likely to be (again based on my own speculations). It is therefore expected that Tomoe and Houtarou will have a more distant relationship than the Zenna sisters. Despite having a sibling himself, Houtarou is not justified in assuming its the same situation for others.

I think this is why I find the ending of this arc to be one of the most satisfying moments in the entire series. As Chitanda and Houtarou, walking back from the hot spring, approach two figures in the distance, they turn out to be Kaho who is cheerfully giving Rie a piggyback. Chitanda’s sorrow turns into joy as she runs towards them, and Houtarou silently admits he was wrong. That sibling relationships may not be withered flowers after all. Indirectly, what he is saying is that a rose coloured life may not be as bad as he thought it to be.

The Blind Spot of Houtarou

Young men are sadly degenerate nowadays.

(Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?¹⁰ by Agatha Christie)

This leads us to the movie arc, spanning volume 2 of the novel series and episodes 8-11 of the anime (The order is slightly different in the novels and anime, the previous ghost yukata mystery arc was broadcasted right after the Sekitani Jun mystery, whereas in the novels it happens in volume 4). Going back to our discussion about the curse of knowledge, Houtarou at this stage, is overestimating his abilities, especially in judging at a topic he is not well versed in (a rosy-colored life, for instance), which is what I think, leads to him being manipulated by Irisu.

If we think more about the reason that Houtarou was tricked, we can see that there is one consistent thing that Houtarou is willing to spend energy for. Despite his attitude, Houtarou is actually kind and cares more about his friends than he seems to. We see this in the way he accepts his sister’s letter to join the club for her sake, or how goes through much effort in finding the truth behind Chitanda’s uncle because he sees how hard Chitanda is working. Later, we see it in how he gives flour to help the club’s chance at winning the cooking contest, and how he reprimands Satoshi for his actions toward Mayaka (the Valentines Day incident). These are all done out of his own volition, there may have been pressure involved from his friends, but ultimately, Houtarou is still the one who decides to put in the energy. You could call it the power of friendship.

Irisu exploits this weakness in her pushing him to come up with a satisfying script. In particular, he is won over by the story Irisu tells him about two athletes, one of them the ace of the team whereas the other one was a bench player. The bench player worked hard every day to catch up to the ace player, but then hears the ace say in an interview that she is where she is purely due to luck, which is very demotivating to hear for the bench player. Interestingly enough, this is the exact situation between Houtarou and Satoshi, though Houtarou is unaware of this now, or at least seems to be. Part of the reason Irisu’s story works so well in convincing Houtarou is that she exploits the emotional aspect of causing his friends stress.

However though, because Satoshi is actually jealous of Houtarou’s talent, Houtarou’s name for the movie: “The Blind Spot of 10,000”, is ironic in that Houtarou himself is oblivious to a couple things, each one leading to the next, from the local conflict of this arc to the grand theme of the story:

• (A) Irisu’s pretense. Irisu really just wanted to use Houtarou to finish the script, and all the talk about talent was just to get him on her side. When eventually confronted by Houtarou after he figures this out, she tells him: “It was not spoken from the bottom of my heart. But it is up to you to decide whether that counts as a lie”. Houtarou wanted to think that he was right, which ties back into the deadly sin of pride. If we take pride as being a pointer to a rosy coloured life, we see that Houtarou is starting to embrace it.
• (B) Satoshi’s jealousy. For much of the story up until this point, we haven’t had much insight into Satoshi. We are told that he is a database of useless information, and is described by Houtarou as being dyed a “shocking pink” colour. Consider the meaning of his words in the context of this arc. He has studied hard to become versed in mystery, and is passionate to become a ‘Holmesian’, in other words, he longs for what Houtarou has proved to be good at in the past 5 volumes. Think of the admiration he must have felt each time Houtarou solves a tough mystery, and think of what he must have been thinking when Houtarou carelessly attributes it to luck. In Irisu’s story about the athletes, Satoshi mirrors the role of the benched athlete, and Houtarou is the star player.
• (C) His relationship with Chitanda. This is probably the cause of him unsure of what he thinks, especially in the light of the recent events where he has been ordered around by the women in his life. which have produced drastic stress and inconveniences for him, namely Chitanda, Tomoe and Irisu, as well as once during his middle school days (revealed from a later unadapted novel).

Why was Houtarou so mad at Irisu then? After all it didn’t really matter what she thought of him, or even that she tricked him. In fact, the entire movie is none of his business in the first place. I think Houtarou is angry simply because of his expectations. Irisu created the illusion of responsibility for Houtarou. He genuinely believed that he was expected to finish the movie, similarly to the Sekitani Jun arc where he believed he had to meet Chitanda’s expectations. Irisu cites that she heard of Houtarou from three individuals: Chitanda, someone outside the school (presumably Houtarou’s sister Tomoe¹¹), and Toogaito Shouji, the Wall Newspaper Club president (whom Houtarou blackmailed in one of the earlier points of the story). That’s a fairly high bar of expectations to clear, and when Houtarou realizes that (1) Irisu didn’t actually mean what she said about his talent, (2) All Irisu wanted was results, Houtarou just happened to be the easiest path to those, (3) He wasted energy for no benefit to himself, and (4) He had been played because of his willingness to help out, it is understandable he would get angry. In fact, incidents like these are the root of his motto and why he follows it, which we are told about in a story from a later novel not adapted into the anime.

Did Irisu have ill intentions then? I don’t believe so. At least according to the anime she didn’t. In a later episode (specifically episode 22, the last one), she clears up the matter after the doll festival:

Note that there is no comparable line in the novels, so this is likely something which Takemoto (the anime director) has added that perhaps was not intended to be elicited by the Yonezawa.

Finally: After a long detour

Isn’t this a small world? All I did was resolve an issue between two villages in the northern region of Kamiyama City, or to use its colloquial name, Jinde. Oreki-san, I do not think that it is an insignificant act, but I cannot think of it as something major.

(Chitanda on the issue of an alternate route for the doll procession) Vol. 4, Story 7, Chp 5

What Chitanda meant by “big picture”

As the ending of the anime is not the end of the story (it was just the most reasonable place to stop given the novel material available at the time), it is quite a cliffhanger and as a result quite disappointing, even for me who had read the novels and knew the story well past that point. I, like many others, would love to see the story adapted fully. Unfortunately, there is not enough source material as of now, and to top it off most of the Hyouka crew at Kyoani sadly died in the arson attack in 2019.

Of course, the ending is still meaningful in it’s own right, even without considering further novels if viewed as a coming of age story where the characters mature over time. Some may even say it’s the best, or the only reasonable ending given how the personalities of the characters change over the previous arcs.

First of all the hidden implications of romance are obvious. From Chitanda:

From Oreki:

This is in fact, a mutual, indirect marriage proposal. From two characters who each previously explicitly state (and demonstrate) that they lack the ability to think towards the future. In an earlier episode, Chitanda says that anyone, given the information, can get good grades, but she wants to see the “big picture”. It’s applying the knowledge to do something useful for the world that she struggles with, as evident by her unexpectedly childish behaviour for a top student. And yet, by the end of the show, she does manage to show mature thinking, showing that she understands her place as the only child of the Chitanda residence. I think that this is the reason Takemoto chose to use the doll procession as the mystery for this episode. It highlights Chitanda’s role in her family that she has (correctly) chosen to fulfill. The doll festival mystery is also the first mystery in which Chitanda has already figured out the answer, and only asks Oreki for verification (they each write it on their hands, then show each other).

As for Oreki, he compared himself to his sister back in episode 5, after she told him that ten years down the line, she wouldn’t regret travelling, even with the difficulties that it brings (it was said that she got mugged). It seems that Oreki has never before considered if he would have any regrets or not.

Little birds can remember + Aster flowers

The above shot is from the very last scene of the anime. I hypothesize that the specific flower used in Hyouka is most likely some species (of many) under the genus Aster. Here’s an image of the same type of flowers (most likely) where they are blooming, used in the OP. I already included the image while talking about something else back here, however I will include it again should you want to conserve some energy by not having to scroll up (reference to Oreki intended):

In hanakotoba, the Aster represents remembrance (well, specifically the Aster tataricus, but we’ll generalize the statement to all Asters). Rather than just general remembrance, it seems that the specific meaning is “I won’t forget you.” You can see why an Aster is a reasonable guess for the flower here. Not only does it look similar to the animated one, it’s symbolism is directly correlated to the very words on the screen that show up beside them: “Little birds can remember.” (which, by the way, is once again a reference to another Agatha Christie novel).

Another interesting note is that there are four flowers in the end scene compared to three from the scene in the OP that has been playing for the past couple episodes. Since the flowers in the OP represent Chitanda, Mayaka, and Satoshi (see Withered Flowers, When Examined), we can assume the extra flower used in the ending scene represents Houtarou.

In the scene from the OP, the flowers are in bloom but seem to be growing in between cracks on the sidewalk. While maybe not noticeable at first, they appear to be having some difficulties, the main one in the middle even has it’s roots exposed. Comparing these to the ones in the ending shot, we see that they are much more nourished. There is an abundance of grass around them, showing that the soil is abounding with nutrients. I’ve said earlier that I see Hyouka as primarily a coming of age story. The ending scene wraps it up brilliantly, showing four new sprouts of not-so-withered flowers getting ready to bloom, resolved in their future now that their problems have been (at least somewhat) ameliorated.