Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my previous post.)

As found by Rob on Yahoo Auctions. The front cover’s sign says “those who rush are lost” and “think carefully”; the back cover says that by the author’s choice “no explanatory text is included”, and there are “tricks” for “those who are not satisfied with conventional games”.

The game’s instructions (see auction above) mainly emphasize we are trying to solve the puzzles from the sages, and how sometimes “you won’t even know where you are”. It also explains the game uses katakana with no spaces and that

For detailed information, please try the game and figure it out for yourself.

From last time I was stuck on a particular code:

ナリノメノ ルゲサニミケシ ヒノユシノ

The old man’s hint said something about exchanging and symmetry. This is meant to indicate some of the characters swap places. Somehow (“recognizing jumbled phrases likely to appear in a Man’yoshu poem, and searching for them”), Matt. T. managed to work out this was poem 8.1500 which I’ll talk about in a moment; this was enough for me to pull up the starting characters of the result:

ナツノノノ シゲミニサケル ヒメユリノ

All the even-positioned characters swap places, in the manner shown…

…which is both elegant and hard to figure out. You don’t technically need to do this step, as long as you realize the initial 17 characters have been jumbled somehow. Remember from the first puzzle, you need to give the completion of the poem. It was written by Lady Ōtomo of Sakanoue (695–750).

From Pierson’s version of the Man’yōshū.

I checked multiple translations, and I prefer this one:

As the fields in summer,
Awash with blooming
Scarlet lilies, is
Love unknown and unrequited,
A bitter thing, indeed

To give the answer I needed sage number 3, which is one of the sages with a marked forehead. This one was just to the southwest of the start. I still don’t know what the logic is; I just got lucky.

This is the same text as the previous sage, except the code is now…

ウナハノノ サシトハナクニ アトヒルニ

…and the old man’s clue is something about the puzzle being by ブロック, by “block”.

I don’t think the game means this kind of block, but I still like doing image-searches for vocabulary. Source.

You may notice that all our clues have been in the format 5-7-5; waka poetry in general follows the pattern 5-7-5-7-7, so the idea behind each puzzle has been to identify the 5-7-5 part in order to figure out the missing 14 characters at the end of each poem. Going long back historically, the term waka was actually a more general term for poem, but 5-7-5-7-7 predominated enough to become synonymous with the form. I mention this in case the solution has to do with the exact numerical aspect somehow, like perhaps arranging the characters in a grid of some sort…

…although it could be just whatever operation being done stays within the “block” of each section. I tried struggling a bit with simply rearranging ウナハノノ (u, na, ha, no, no) and while “hana” is promising (the word for flower), and I got “hana no” in one poem…

…I did not get a full hit. The problem is that this may be entirely the wrong method, so if someone who is happy to peek at the walkthrough wants to check, I’ll take a hint that either I’m on the right or entirely wrong track.