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“ | I won! I did it! I TOOK DOWN THE PEOPLE WHO KILLED SATOSHI! | „ |
~ Shion Sonozaki as she "succeeds" in "killing" Rika. |
Shion Sonozaki is a major character on the Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni series. She is the twin sister of the Sonozaki family's heir, Mion Sonozaki, as well as the love interest of Satoshi Houjou. She acts as the antagonist of Watanagashi-hen and the villainous protagonist of Meakashi-hen.
She is voiced by Satsuki Yukino in Japanese. In English, Megan Hollingshead in 2007 and Michelle Rojas in 2020, all of whom also voiced her sister Mion.
Biography[]
Backstory[]
Shion and Mion are twin daughters of Akane Sonozaki. Since having twins as heirs of a family was considered taboo, the older twin, Mion was arranged to become the sole heir while the younger twin, Shion, would be killed. However, Oryou Sonozaki, the head of the Sonozaki family (and Shion and Mion's grandmother), did not kill Shion, but instead banished her by sending her away to St. Lucia Academy.
It is revealed in Meakashi-hen that Shion is actually the older twin, and was therefore born with the name "Mion". One day, in the twins' childhood, Shion (current Mion) wished to eat sashimi and begged Mion (current Shion) to let her go to the family meetings in her stead. Mion (current Shion) obliged, and the two switched places. However, both of them were unaware that this was the day where Mion (current Shion) was supposed to get her demon tattoo to obtain the role of the heir of the Sonozaki Clan. Though she tried desperately to get her family to believe that she was Mion, she failed, and the Sonozaki family unknowingly gave Shion (current Mion) the tattoo, causing Shion to become Mion while Mion became Shion.
Higurashi no Naku Koro ni[]
During two of the eight main arcs in the series, she is portrayed as a villain, killing off most of the other characters, excluding Rena Ryuuguu and Kuraudo Ooishi.
Meakashi-hen[]
Shion acts as the main protagonist of the answer arc of Watanagashi-hen, Meakashi-hen.
She is first seen escaping St. Lucia Academy, thanks to the help of her bodyguard, Tatsuyoshi Kasai. Since she had to hide from her family, Shion lived in a separate apartment and called her sister Mion from Hinamizawa. Starting from the next day, she disguised herself as Mion to work in Hinamizawa so that her family won't notice. She asks her uncle, Yoshirou to let her work in the restaurant Angel Mort, and Yoshirou agrees.
One day, Shion was going back home from shopping until one of her shopping bags get ripped from motorcycles. Angered by this, Shion kicks the motorcycles, until she nearly gets in trouble by their owners, the gangsters. However, she is saved by a young boy named Satoshi Houjou, whom she started to fall in love with.
Soon, Shion supports Satoshi in baseball games, until he leaves the team to focus on his part-time job and take care of his younger sister, Satoko Houjou. Later, Shion meets one of Mion's friends, Rena Ryuuguu, and during their conversation, she learns from Rena that Satoshi is exhausting himself as he is taking care of Satoko, and may have been cursed by Oyashiro. This causes Shion to despise Satoko and Oyashiro.
The next day, Shion went to school and horribly bullied Satoko as she was furious on how she is always clinging to her brother, but was eventually stopped by Satoshi, Rika, and Rena. Satoshi was furious on how the Sonozaki family was always criticizing his family. However, on the eve of the Cotton Drifting Festival, Satoshi calls Shion and apologizes for the incident and leaves Satoko to her care, since he went to kill his abusive aunt, Tamae Houjou.
The next morning, Shion hangs out with Satoshi until he is investigated by the police for Tamae's death. In order to help Satoshi's alibi, Shion reveals her identity to the police, and the two are taken in. Unfortunately, because the police told Shion's identity to the Sonozaki family, she was forced to go to the main house.
Shion is led by Mion to the underground torture room, where she is punished by her grandmother Oryou for defending someone from the "traitorous" Houjou family. Shion is furious on how Oryou is angry just because she was in love with someone from the Houjou family, and reveals to her that she has no interest in family meetings, nor the rules of her family.
Mion then comes in, showing her cold side, and silences Shion. She tells Shion that while she understands Shion's determination, she has gone too far and that no one can cover it up for her anymore, so the only way to handle this was showing her distinguishment. Because Shion was still a member of one of the families from the Three Great Families, she had to erase her judgement she brought to her family.
Shion tells Mion that she did not agree to the fact that she had to accept her role as a member of the Sonozaki family, nor a resident of Hinamizawa, but Mion coldly interrupts her and tells her to listen. She reveals that she and the family brought in all of the people who helped Shion during her stay in Okinomiya (Kasai and Yoshirou) because they will be punished for going against the family. She then commands Shion to apologize to Oryou to end this discussion. When Shion refuses, Mion warns her that if Shion does not distinguish herself, Satoshi will be punished as well. This causes Shion to finally apologize to Oryou, and Shion is brought to stand in front of the nail ripper, a device for tearing off fingernails.
Mion explains that each fingernail will distinguish all the misdeeds Shion has perpetrated, and commands Shion to rip off three fingernails. Shion believes that the three fingernails will save Kasai, Yoshirou, and Satoshi, and decides to take her punishment. However, she is unable to go through the punishment on her own, so Mion calls Kasai's colleagues to do the nail-ripping for Shion.
However, Shion gets very depressed when she learns from Kuraudo Oishi that Satoshi has gone missing. She goes to the library to investigate Satoshi's disappearance and Oyashiro's curse, where she meets Miyo Takano, who was also investigating Oyashiro's curse. The two talk about the curse, as well as the cotton drifting festival.
One day, Mion visits Shion's department, where she apologizes to Shion for her behavior during her punishment, but Shion tells her not to worry about it, since Mion was simply acting as the next Sonozaki head. The two sisters were having a calm conversation until Mion spreads out how she wonders where Satoshi went, causing Shion to snap at her and choke her. However, she stopped choking Mion when she looked at her fingernails, which had the same exact wounds as hers. Mion reveals that since she felt bad that only her sister was punished, she decided to rip of her fingernails as well. She reveals that she yelled at Oryou to leave Shion and Satoshi alone, to which Oryou responded that she will forgive Shion if she shows her distinguishment. After Shion ripped her nails, she was able to spend time freely with Satoshi. Mion also reveals that she is unaware of the reason Satoshi disappeared. Shion apologized to Mion for attacking her and decided to believe her.
One day, Shion went shopping again until she bumps into the same motorcycles she knocked over last year, and once again kicks them away. This caused her to again get in trouble by the gangsters. However, this time, she is saved by Keiichi Maebara, whom she believes is a replacement of Satoshi. She learns that her sister is in love with Keiichi, but that she was rejected by him, since he gave the doll to Rena instead of her. Shion started to get jealous of Mion and Keiichi as she compared their relationship to hers and Satoshi's, but tried to hold it in.
Shion narrates a segment from Watanagashi-hen, when she was walking with Keiichi (who thought the girl he was walking with was Mion) until they got caught by Mion. Shion teases both Keiichi and Mion before she leaves them. Before that, she gets a pat on the head by Keiichi, but tried to assure that it wasn't warm at all, since she did not want Keiichi to replace Satoshi. Just then, Shion hears extra footsteps following her, and she believes that those footsteps are Satoshi's.
During the festival, Shion meets Miyo, and Jirou Tomitake, who are attempting to sneak inside the tool shrine. She wonders if she might find out if Satoshi was spirited away if she follows them. She decided to take Keiichi with them. However, inside the tool shrine, Shion hears massive footsteps coming from an unseen person. She initially believed those footsteps were Satoshi's, but as the footsteps got louder, she knew they weren't Satoshi's.
After exiting the tool shrine and parting with Miyo, Keiichi, and Jirou, Shion spends her night at the Sonozaki house, where she decided to sleep with her family since she was drunk. During her sleep, she woke up to go to the bathroom, until she eavesdrops on Mion and Oryou's conversation. Shion learns from them that Miyo and Jirou are victims of Oyashiro's curse, causing Shion to fear. She was about to escape until she was caught by Mion.
Mion makes a short phone call before she shows her cold side to Shion again. She tells Shion that Jirou scratched his neck to death, and that Miyo seemingly was burned in an oil drum. Shion asks why they died that way, and Mion responds that it is because they angered Oyashiro. Shion, believing Miyo and Jirou's deaths, and Satoshi's disappearance were caused by the Sonozaki family as she saw Mion's cold behavior, stunned Mion with her taser. She quietly went to Oryou's room and unknowingly killed her with the taser.
After stunning them both, Shion brings Mion and Oryou down to the underground torture room, where she locks Mion inside a cell and tapes Oryou in a chair. Mion tries to order Shion to release her using her cold side, only for Shion to bluff her off. She then asks Mion what Oyashiro's curse really is, to which Mion responds that it has nothing to do with wrongdoings and is simply dealing with superficial problems, while others unknown are dealing with "bottoms." When Shion asks why Jirou and Miyo were killed for sneaking into the tool shrine, Mion gets surprised. This surprises Shion as well, as she thought Mion already knew this. Mion tells Shion that what Jirou and Miyo did was inevitable, which causes Shion to ask why both of them died when the rule was that one dies and one disappears. Mion, though unsure, says that four people snuck into the tool shrine and that the remaining two will be spirited away by the demon. Shion gets afraid, as she knew that those remaining two people are her and Keiichi.
Shion then visits her grandmother and tries to wake her up, but soon realizes that she killed her. She is angered that Oryou did not say a word to anyone, not even to Satoshi, and that she died without suffering. She then starts whipping her with a spiked whip and decides to drop her dead body down a secret well.
Mion tells Shion that if she drops Oryou down the well, she will die, but Shion reveals that she already killed her. When Mion asks Shion why she is doing this, Shion responds that it is not just because she is avenging Satoshi, it is also to get revenge on Oryou for "lying". Though she was also mad at Mion, Shion decided not to torture her as long as she cooperated.
The next morning, Shion poses as Mion when gets a phone call from Kiichirou Kimiyoshi, who tells her that they have a village meeting and that Oryou should join. Shion decides to join the meeting in her stead since she already killed Oryou. Before she went to the meeting, she disguised herself again as Mion and asked Keiichi if he saw Jirou, Shion, and Miyo last night. Keiichi says that he hasn't and is confused why "Mion" would ask this again, causing Shion to realize that Mion lied when she said she didn't know that Jirou, Miyo, Shion, and Keiichi snuck inside the tool shrine. Shion leaves Keiichi and goes to the village meeting, where she reveals that there are four people who snuck inside the tool shrine, and that two (Miyo, Jirou) have been cursed and the other two (Shion, Keiichi) haven't. After the meeting, Shion asks Kiichirou to come to her house under the pretext of talking to Oryou about something.
During their talk, Shion is relieved when Kiichirou cared about her as he said that she will not be cursed by the demon as long as she is redeeming for her actions. However, when he calls the Houjou family "cursed brats", Shion gets confused, because she thought the families forgave Satoshi after she distinguished herself. Kiichirou reveals that the third fingernail was not for Satoshi, and that it was in fact, for herself. Shion snaps at Kiichirou and stuns him with the taser. She then takes him down to the underground torture room and chains his neck. She questions whether if Satoshi is alive or dead, to which Kiichirou responds that he finds it hard to believe that Satoshi is alive, since he was thrown down a well. Shion quickly went to the well to find Satoshi's "spirit" there, where she begs Satoshi to let her join him. However, Satoshi only tells Shion to live before he vanishes.
Shion goes back to Mion's cell and tells her that she found Satoshi in the well. She asks Mion if she would have saved Satoshi, and Mion obliged. However, Shion snaps again at Mion when she gets flashbacks of Mion's cold behavior during her punishment.
At school, Shion confronts the Furude family head, Rika Furude, and asks her what she knows about the curse, but Rika doesn't seem to think seriously about breaking the law. Angered, Shion yells at Rika that she has to pay as the head of the Furude family because she and Kiichirou let the intruders in. Later that day, Shion wonders if Kiichirou was dead. She started getting miserable for the continuous losses of her loved ones, before she got angry at Satoko when she thought of Satoshi. She believed that Satoshi would not be miserable if Satoko was just dead, before she encountered Rika, who came to get some soy sauce.
In truth, Rika was trying to put a syringe on Shion in order to cure her Hinamizawa Syndrome L5. She stuns Shion with her pepper spray and tries to inject the syringe on her, but Shion knocked her over. She then stole the syringe from Rika and injected it to her instead, and suggested that they have more "fun" down to the underground torture room. However, Rika refused to be killed by a psychopath like Shion, and instead killed herself by stabbing herself in the neck with a knife.
After her triumph over the Three Great Families, Shion thought she would've been able to save Satoshi if she was Mion. That was when she remembered that she and her sister switched during their childhood. Shion, now declaring herself as Mion, and angry that her sister let Satoshi die and stole her identity, commanded her sister to call herself Shion and warned her that she will kill her soon.
Shion gets a call from Satoko, who was looking for Rika. Shion tricks Satoko into coming to dinner with Rika and brings her to the underground torture room. She then tricks Keiichi by calling him about Rika and Satoko's "disappearance".
Back in the torture room, Shion confirms that Kiichirou died before she continuously stabs Satoko, ignoring Mion's pleas to spare her. She tells Satoko that she was the one who made Satoshi miserable and the reason he disappeared, but Satoko fights back, saying she tried to improve herself and that she will not cling to her brother anymore. Realizing Satoko is too strong than she thought, Shion repeatedly stabbed her before finally killing her completely. She then remembers the promise she made with Satoshi to take care of Satoko and regrets it, before she erased her regrets and called herself a demon.
The next day, Keiichi and Rena encounter Shion at the Sonozaki House. Shion tells the false history of the Sonozaki family and asks Keiichi to have time alone, brings him to the torture room, knocks him down and ties him to a desk. Shion explains how she plans to torture him, but Keiichi doesn't realize the twins have changed and asks her to him let go. Shion realizes that Keiichi is a really good man and understands why Mion fell in love with him, before she knocks Keiichi down with her taser.
Shion releases Mion from her cell and switches clothes with her, but once they get to the cell, she reveals that she is killing Mion to make the police believe that she is innocent. This causes Mion to tell the truth about everything: the Sonozaki family was not actually responsible for Satoshi's disappearance, neither did they cause Oyashiro's curse, but acted as they did. Oryou truly forgave Shion after she tore off her fingernails and allowed her and Satoshi to spend time together. This thus meant Shion killed three innocent family heads for nothing. However, Shion refused to accept the truth and yelled at Mion to go meet Satoshi in Heaven and apologize to him, before she killed her by dropping her down the well.
Soon, Shion and Keiichi were "rescued" by the police. Back in her apartment, Shion starts hallucinating a ghost of Mion, causing her to leave the apartment. She visits Keiichi's house where she stabs him before she runs back to her apartment, until she slipped and fell onto the roof of the elevator. This causes her head to bleed and almost kills her, which gives her what's known as Terminal Lucidity and manages to get her sanity back in her last moments, as she regretted killing many people and breaking Satoshi's promise, believing all of this would have been prevented if she wasn't born. Shion apologized to Satoshi and everyone she's killed before she killed herself by rolling off the roof and crashing to the ground. At the end of the credits of the game, she gets a vision of herself having fun with Satoko.
In the anime, Shion's death scene is altered. She accidentally slips off the building, sends her apology to Satoshi and everyone she's killed and promises them that she will not make the same mistake, before she crashes to the ground and dies.
Personality[]
Shion is often shown to be Mion's polar opposite. While Mion is tomboyish, assertive, and bashful, Shion is more feminine, brazen and rebellious. (This is mainly due to their different upbringings) Also, unlike Mion, who becomes serious and strict during family meetings, Shion does not seem to care about family meetings at all, as she reveals she has no interest about the rules of her family and disagrees with their archaic, barbaric nature of dealing with things, as the Sonozakis are a family of yakuza who torture and murder those who offend them like Rina Mamiya in two of the arcs. Although she was taken out of the main house due to an error when she and her sister switched places as young children, she's always has a great relationship with Mion and it's mentioned that they share the same tastes.
In spite of their contradicting personalities, Mion and Shion switch places very often, which can easily cause confusion in Watanagashi-hen and Meakashi-hen. Also, both seem to also differ in the acts of Hinamizawa syndrome.
Whereas Mion is the only character in the original arcs to never succumb to the paranoia or vicious anger that it causes (the 2020 arc Watadamashi-hen shows that Mion did succumb to it to the point that she committed murder), Shion is one of the most memorable victims. She was in love with Satoshi before his disappearance and seems to develop a crush on Keiichi as well, so much so that she can't bring herself to murder him at first and lets him escape, before losing all notion of sanity in the end due to the Hinamizawa syndrome as her mind has turned into a gibbering mess.
Like most Higurashi characters, she has a very contradicting personality when under the effects of Hinamizawa syndrome, in fact, she may have arguably been one of the worse case scenarios in this instance. In her case, she develops rather severe Paranoid Schizophrenia, before full on Psychosis. With this, she is shown to be the one of the series' most vituperative and violent character. One of her most intense moments took place in Meakashi-hen (which shows the events of Watanagashi-hen from Shion's point of view).
In this chapter (which takes place between the 4th and 5th Watanagashi), she falls in love with Satoshi Hojo, a boy with a troubled and dysfunctional home life, and forms a love/hate relationship for Satoshi's abused little sister, Satoko. In this chapter, at one point she is forced to remove 3 of her fingernails using a special torture device due to her family's hatred for the Hojos and is put under the impression that this will free Satoshi from any curse the family places on him.
When Satoshi kills his aunt and later goes missing, Shion believes her family lied to her, however Mion convinces her that her family is innocent regarding that. A year later, after Mion coldly tells her that Tomitake and Takano became victims of the curse for offending Oyashiro-sama, an offense that Shion also partook in for entering the ritual storage shed, she becomes convinced that the Sonozakis are after her life and were responsible for Satoshi's disappearance, because he also was a victim of the curse. This causes her to go on a warpath where she accidentally kills her Grandmother, Oryou Sonozaki, with a taser, as she planned to forcefully interrogate her about Satoshi's whereabouts, she proceeds to beat her corpse with a whip out of frustration for having died too early. She then hangs her grandfather whom she loved dearly but told her that Satoshi deserved to die and that Shion ripping her fingernails out meant nothing for him, imprisons Mion, beats and nearly kills Rika (who escapes death from Shion by stabbing herself in the neck repeatedly) all until she finally victimizes Satoko (whom she blames for bringing Satoshi to death because she's the one who caused his conflicts with his aunt and subsequently his murder and disappearance, something both Satoko and Satoshi himself actually agree with to the point that Satoshi actually wanted to hurt Satoko at one point). It is after she violently kills Satoko, where she realizes too late that she had forgotten her last promise to Satoshi, to look after Satoko should anything happen to him. With this, Shion officially sunk below the Moral Event Horizon and has a mental breakdown where reveals that none of this was for Satoshi's sake, rather, she let the "demon" (Hinamizawa Syndrome) take a hold of her mind for the sake of losing her emotions and forget the pain of losing her loved one, and not only kills her sister but returns to Keiichi to stab him in the stomach (which does not kill him).
Shion then attempts to climb to the 8th floor of the hospital where she is staying, however, she slips and falls two stories below into a roof where she busts her head open which clears her mind of Hinamizawa Syndrome in her last breathing moments. Before dying, Shion sees Satoshi's face in the moonlight and apologizes to him for failing to protect his sister like she had promised him. She apologizes to Satoko and Mion as well as everyone else for what she did and promises to never make that mistake again, then rolls over the edge of the roof and commits suicide, imagining a happy life where she and Satoko are best friends as Shion falls to her death. In the anime, Shion dies after accidentally slipping, whereas in the visual novel, she kills herself.
In later arcs, Shion becomes Satoko's loving older sister and is very protective of her. She also becomes close friends with the other main characters, to the point that she's willing to sacrifice her life so that Mion, Rena and the others can escape from the Yamainu and survive.
Appearance[]
As she is Mion's twin sister, Shion looks very similar to Mion. She has green long hair and teal eyes. Shion half-ties her hair with a yellow ribbon to differ herself from her sister. During her free days, Shion wears a white shirt with yellow jewels and a black dress. She also wears white shoes. During her school days, Shion wears a white shirt with a blue-striped tie and buttons on the shirt. She also wears a blue-black dress. While working at Angel Mort, she wears a blue-red scarf with a yellow bell and blue-white-red clothes. She wears blue-white shoes.
Shion's original school uniform is a white shirt with a red tie and a gray coat outside it. The coat has yellow buttons and an album of the school. Shion also wears a blue skirt. In Matsuri, Shion's usual outfit is different than the original version of the game and the anime. In this version, she wears a brown-white shirt with a brown-blue skirt.
Weapons[]
Shion uses a lot of weapons in the game, the one you see her use the most is a taser that she keeps in her back pocket for self-defense. Among her others are a knife, a whip and a boulder. She also intended to use her family's torture devices like the tool they used to remove Shion's own fingernails (which later became a Ritual Tool Devil known as Nail Ripper in Ayakashisenshi-hen) but in the end, out of these, she only uses the ones that restrain people and nothing else. In Matsuribayashi-hen, Shion wields an AK-47 assault rifle at one point, and is shown to be professionally trained in its use.
Family[]
- Mion Sonozaki (twin sister)
- Akane Sonozaki (mother)
- Unnamed father
- Oryou Sonozaki (grandmother)
Quotes[]
“ | Mion and I are identical twins. Everything about us is exactly the same. The only difference being that I was shifted off to a school hundreds of miles away, and Mion stayed home to be raised as the next heir to the Sonozaki family. From the day I was born, I've been seen as a curse placed on my family... Having twins as heirs is seen as a recipe for disaster later down on the road. So the generations then now, it's been my family's castanet to strangle the youngest of the newborns for their first bath. | „ |
~ Shion's narration. |
“ | Mion: Were you listening? Shion: Um, no... I couldn't hear a word you were saying... (Mion grasps Shion) Mion: What you heard is true. Both Mr. Tomitake and Mrs. Takano are now victims of Oyashiro's curse. This is most unfortunate, isn't it? Shion: Come on, Sis... What are you-- Mion: Tomitake died by digging out with his bare hands until he bled to death. And it seems that Mrs. Takano was stuffed into a barrel and then lit on fire..way back deep in the mountains. Shion: But..why? Why did they die that way? Mion: Do you really not get it, Shion? I'm surprised, the reason is so obvious. Shion: Huh?! What do you mean? What reason?! Mion: Oyashiro's curse! (gets stunned by Shion's taser) Shion: Satoshi, I think I finally understand. It's just like I thought.. The Sonozaki family is behind all of this! And it's time I make them pay for what they did to you! BUT UNLIKE YOU, I'M GONNA COME OUT OF THIS ALIVE! |
„ |
~ Shion's moments before she stuns Mion, rising to power. |
“ | Not a word to anyone... Not even an apology to Satoshi... And she didn't even had to suffer... IT'S NOT FAIR! | „ |
~ Shion after she realizes Oryou is dead. |
“ | Who is that? You're following me like Rena said? Are you Oyashiro? HA! Only an idiot would believe that! | „ |
~ Shion refusing to believe Oyashiro's existence. |
“ | LIARRRRRR! It's your fault! You could've saved him and you didn't! YOU COULD'VE SAVED HIM! YOU COULD'VE SAVED HIS LIFE! Why?! WHHHHHHHHYYYY?! | „ |
~ Shion believing Mion is lying when she tells her that she would have saved Satoshi, due to Mion's behavior during Shion's punishment. |
Gallery[]
External Links[]
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Villains | ||
Higurashi: When They Cry Satoko's Affiliates Tokyo Yamainu Others Umineko: When the Seagulls Cry Chiester Sisters Imperial Guard Corps Demons Eiserne Jungfrau Seven Stakes of Purgatory Ushiromiya Family Others Higanbana No Saku Yoru Ni (unofficial) Yokai |