Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my previous posts; they are needed for context to understand this one.)

Kazuma Satou made the point in my comments that even for people who are proficient in Japanese (I am not) this game can be rough, as the poems are in ancient Japanese. With the puzzle I left off on last time I ran into the issue directly.

ウナハノノ サシトハナクニ アトヒルニ

The old man’s hint was about “it is by block” and in the context of the previous puzzle, it seemed to indicate this was another anagram, except each of the three segments would be self-contained.

I focused on the first part, which had u, na, ha, no, and no. (Not only did it seem simple, but when searching for poetry, it’s easier to search for the first line.) My first suspicion, rolling with the idea Matt T. used last time on looking for common poetry words, was the word “hana”, or flower, which is the sort of thing that goes in poetry everywhere. I knew from binge-reading ancient poetry over the last two days that “no hana no” or “hana no no” were both possible, but the “u” was rather tricky, I ended up putting it at the beginning as an exclamation of sorts. While both regular Google and the Internet Archive were struggling, Google Books gave me some hits, and I finally hit victory with a book by Frederick Victor Dickins from 1908.

This is the right poem, as all the syllables for the other anagrams work correctly. I came across so many flower poems with the same first line but a miss on everything else. (Keep in mind also: while figuring this out I had no idea if I was using the right method of solving, and tried some weird theories involving the gojūon arrangement — more on that later. There’s at least some valid comparison with my discussion of second-order puzzles with no confirmation in the middle if you’re on the right track; once I hit upon “no hana no” it felt close enough I had at least partial confirmation I was doing something right.)

This incidentally isn’t even using text I expected (u no hana no), but rather all as one word. Modern Japanese dictionaries do not think it is a word.

However, we’re looking at very old poetry. According to a dictionary on ancient Japanese texts, unohanano refers to the Deutzia scabra plant (Japanese snow flower) when it blooms.

Source. CC BY-NC 4.0.

I still needed to find the next sage for delivery; again, I had to use brute force and I have no idea how the visual relates to which sage is the next one in sequence.

I put the pictures for sage 3 and sage 4 (this one) next to each other as image files in a directory, then rapidly went back and forth between them. The image did not change at all.

First the puzzle, then the old man’s clue to go with it:

You might notice the English letters tossed in there. Indeed, the ciphertext this time appears to have no Japanese in it.

AA CA ED QBA GB
   JA ID FA BD QDC IA QCB
      AC IC FA CB BB

The hint says to refer to the 50-symbol chart, and also asks “what is Q?”

The chart in question is the chart that hiragana or katakana characters can be arranged on, where the vowels go a, i, u, e, o in order on one side, and the consonants go the other direction. I took the chart from Wikipedia, and guessed that the letters were coordinates; for example, GB would be row G (or 7), column B (or 2). I then used this to plot all of them on the Katakana chart. There are three with a “Q” that I’ve marked in a different color.

(I actually did with the previous puzzle too! I was thinking maybe the chart was a “block”, but my answer didn’t go anywhere.)

Getting in mind my last search, I broke things up and typed a-sa-ne-ka-mi-wa-re and got a hit:

There are some slight differences having to do with Japanese phonetics; all I needed anyway was the poem and the last two lines. Just like before, they were enough to satisfy the next sage.

Thus the code is…

65 93 51 51 54
   25 33 74 45 55 +64 24
      35 23 65 55 51

…and the hint is that it’s like what we’ve seen except it is broken or twisted. (Also it gives as a hint, “what is the +”?) I have no idea what this means and I haven’t started yet, but it seems like the sort of thing to kick over to you, the readers.

We’re fairly close to the end; there are six puzzles and we’re on sage number 5. (There are seven sages, but you only need to solve six, at least according to the walkthrough, I assume because the seventh is there to take delivery of the last puzzle.)