Kuraudo Ooishi

Kuraudo Ooishi is an aging detective with the Okinomiya Police Station, appearing across Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Kai as he spends five years trying to prove that the Sonozaki family orchestrates the deaths recurring around the Watanagashi Festival in Hinamizawa. He usually surfaces soon after the first murder of an arc, needling that story's protagonist — often Keiichi Maebara — with pointed questions that only deepen their paranoia.

Ooishi grew up in Okinomiya; his real father died when the factory he worked at was bombed during the war. Afterward, assigned to police the postwar black market, he found an unlikely father figure in the manager overseeing the local dam construction project. When the manager was lynched and dismembered by his own workers after a drunken confrontation, Ooishi came to regard it as the first death of the curse — and pinned the blame on the Sonozaki family, who led the opposition to the dam.

That conviction makes him one of the village's most distrusted outsiders, with Sonozaki Mion chief among those certain of her family's innocence — even as villagers whisper that Ooishi himself could be the culprit, nicknaming him "Oyashiro-sama's messenger" because he crossed paths with each victim shortly before their death.

Beneath a heavyset, chain-smoking exterior and an easygoing manner lies a harder edge: he proves capable of real intimidation and violence when the case demands it, and isn't above pressuring people close to the investigation, including Keiichi, for answers. In versions of the story where he retires, he takes his elderly mother back to her home city, and later Mamoru Akasaka joins him in writing a book on the Hinamizawa incidents, hoping the truth won't be forgotten.