CHAPTER THREE SURUGA MONKEY
001
The name Suruga Kanbaru belongs to a celebrity known the entire school over, which of course means that I too heard it my fair share of times. My classmates Tsubasa Hanekawa and Hitagi Senjogahara may be no less celebrated, but that’s strictly among third-years. Yes, despite being a year below me, Tsubasa Hanekawa, and Hitagi Senjogahara and thus a second-year, Suruga Kanbaru’s renown is so extraordinary that it reaches the ears of a senior like me who’s fairly estranged from those kinds of rumors. That’s not normally supposed to happen. You can act like a grandee and chortle that she’s sure impressive for someone so young, but in her case, the statement would be uncomfortably close to the truth.
Maybe you’d get a better sense of who Suruga Kanbaru is if I said “star” rather than “celebrity.” While Tsubasa Hanekawa and Hitagi Senjogahara are seen (despite the latter’s true nature) as so-called model students, diligent pupils with good grades and excellent conduct, that’s not the image here at all─though, being a “star,” it’s not as if she’s known as a rough-and-tumble ringleader of a gang of bad girls. In contrast to Tsubasa Hanekawa and Hitagi Senjogahara and their primarily academic dominance, her mastery is in the realm of sports. Suruga Kanbaru is our school’s ace basketball player. After she joined the club in her first year, she was on the main roster in no time at all, but if that were it, you could reason that an unknown, perennial first-round knockout of a girls’ basketball team was a joke anyway. But it would be strange to treat her as anything but a star when she ended up building a monstrous legend by leading the unknown, perennial first-round knockout of a girls’ basketball team, which was a joke anyway, to the national tournament. There’s no better way to put it than “ended up building” because you almost wanted to ask what she thought she was doing and scold her, the legend was so abrupt. Our girls’ basketball team blew up and was elevated into an honest-to-goodness crack squad that boys’ teams from neighboring high schools requested, for real and not in a haw-haw way, to play against, for practice─all thanks to one girl.
She isn’t unusually tall or anything.
She’s built like the average high school girl, too.
If anything, she’s a little on the small and slender side.
The term “dainty” would suit her well.
Just once, a year ago, for some reason or other, I had a chance to take a peek at a game Suruga Kanbaru was playing in─and she was so quick and agile that she didn’t just pass by the other team’s defenders but threaded them, and like in the sports manga that once swept Japan, scored with a clean dunk─one dunk after dunk, dozens of them, as if it were the most pleasant activity, with comfort, with ease, with the refreshing smile of an athletic girl never leaving her face. When girls’ basketball teams make most of their shots using both hands, how many high schoolers can expect to witness a dunk of all things? From my position in the crowd, more than being overwhelmed by her, I felt awful for the players on the opposing team as they visibly lost their will to play, overwhelmed by her, and couldn’t watch anymore, it was so painful, and had to leave. I remember it like it was yesterday.
In any case, while my high school is an academically oriented prep school, it’s still a high school, full of sensitive mid-teen youths, so flashy sports heroes getting showered with more attention than evident model students who merely excel at their studies is a natural outcome─and Suruga Kanbaru doing this or that in response to whatever, every detail of her behavior that hardly seems to matter and hardly does, turns into gossip and courses through the school. I’d have enough for a book if I collected all of it. Even if I’m not interested and actively try to avoid it, information about Suruga Kanbaru reaches me anyway. If you go to our school, regardless of your year, whether she is ahead or behind you, anyone who cares to can find out, on a given day, what she ordered at the cafeteria. It’s easy, you just ask someone nearby.
But rumors are rumors.
Half-serious.
They aren’t necessarily true.
In fact, a lot of the rumors that make it all the way to me lack credibility and are difficult to take at face value─or rather, it’s not rare for two perfectly opposed rumors to be making their rounds at the same time. She’s irritable, no, she’s gentle; she cares about her friends, no, she’s cold; she’s modest, no, she’s arrogant; she goes from one wild romance to the next, no, she’s never dated a boy before─anyone who actually satisfied those conditions would be a broken person. Someone like me who has seen her but never spoken to her, who probably has never come within fifteen feet of her, has to leave it to the imagination on those points. But as a practical matter, there’s altogether no need for me to exercise my imagination, altogether none─we’re in different years, after all, and there’s no way a sports star and ace basketball player (since club activities are only for first- and second-years at my school, I feel I can at least go ahead and trust the rumor that she’s been made captain) is going to have anything to do with a washout third-year like me.
We don’t have the first thing to do with each other.
Naturally, she must have no idea who I am.
There ought to be no reason for her to know.
That’s how I saw it.
That was my assumption.
I learned that I was mistaken as May was drawing to a close, when we’d be changing to our summer uniforms come June. By then, my hair had grown out to where it nearly hid the two small holes gouged at the bottom of my neck, and I felt relieved that wearing a band-aid for a couple of weeks should do it… Ten or so days had passed since Hitagi Senjogahara and I started seeing each other, as they say, following a chance encounter.
002
“Ah…Mister Ah-ah-ah-gi.”
“It’s Araragi.”
“I’m sorry. A slip of the tongue.”
As I biked down a slope getting home from school on a Friday, ahead of me I saw a little girl with pigtails carrying a backpack, namely Mayoi Hachikuji, so I hit my brakes, came to a stop to her left, and called out to her, at which she blinked and acted surprised and mispronounced my name like always.
While a small part of me was touched that my name could still be mangled in a new way, I, ever conscientious, corrected her.
“Don’t be turning me into some sidekick who takes his name from his cluelessness.”
“I think it sounded quite cute.”
“I sounded like a total loser.”
“Hmm. Well, I think that might be surprisingly fitting.” The fifth grader could let some mean words slip out of her mouth. “In any case, I’m glad to see that you’re doing well, Mister Araragi. I’m delighted that we’re able to meet like this again. How have you been? Has anything in particular happened since then?”
“Huh? Oh, no, not really. That kind of thing isn’t common. I’ve been living in peace. Peace, or maybe quiet. Oh, but I do have my skills test coming up soon, and there hasn’t been much peace or quiet in my life when it comes to that.”
About two weeks earlier─May fourteenth, Mother’s Day.
I met her, Mayoi Hachikuji, in a park that day, and found myself getting wrapped up in a bit of a case as a result… Well, what happened wasn’t concrete enough to be called a case, nor general enough to highlight or spotlight, but at any rate, I was involved in an experience that wasn’t quite normal.
When I say it wasn’t normal, I mean it wasn’t normal.
But we were able to solve it in the end thanks to the help of an unpleasant dude, namely Oshino, and Senjogahara─and everything was fine, but if what happened on May fourteenth was fate and not a fluke, then spending every day of the following two weeks in peace and quiet must have also been fate and not a fluke.
As far as I could tell, Hachikuji was doing okay too─which seemed to mean that the Mother’s Day incident had come to an amicable end. This was rare since the experience wasn’t a normal one. In that regard, for me─and Hanekawa─and Senjogahara─what came after our not-quite-normal experiences, their aftermath, was actually tougher to deal with─or much crueler. More miserable, even.
In that regard, I envied her.
“Oh, is something the matter? How indecent of you, Mister Araragi, to stare at me with such passionate eyes.”
“…What passionate eyes?” And indecent? This was some low passion.
“Stare at me with such eyes a second more and you’ll make me go hic.”
“What’s wrong with your diaphragm?”
Eek, maybe.
Well, considering her circumstances, it wouldn’t be right simply to feel envious of her…because in a way it’s Hachikuji who has it the toughest and cruelest, neither me nor Hanekawa nor Senjogahara. I’m sure many people would be inclined to take that view.
As I mused, two high school students passed to the left of my bike. Both of them were girls. They were wearing uniforms from a different school than mine. The pair looked at Hachikuji and me with clear suspicion, and unsubtly hushing their voices, whispered as they passed by, in an extremely grating display… I suppose high school senior Koyomi Araragi engaging in earnest conversation with fifth grader Mayoi Hachikuji appeared very dodgy to ordinary sensibilities.
Fine.
The cold gaze of society didn’t bother me.
I hadn’t accosted Hachikuji without the necessary resolve. Why, all that really mattered was that she and I understood the truth. Shallow prejudice was powerless against the friendship that she and I had forged.
“Oh dear, Mister Araragi, it seems those two figured out that you’re a pedophile. My deepest condolences.”
“Don’t you be saying that!”
“There’s no need to be embarrassed. Being fond of little girls isn’t, in and of itself, against the law. Your preferences and predilections are your own. It’s just that you mustn’t practice your abnormal philosophy.”
“You know, even if I did like little girls, I’d hate you!”
We hadn’t forged any friendship.
I seemed to be surrounded by people like her.
I glanced behind me.
We were alone now.
For the time being.
“…You’re a scarily promising kid, you know that? But Hachikuji, what’re you doing here wandering around at this hour? Did you get lost on your way somewhere again?”
“Isn’t that quite the rude way to put it, Mister Araragi. I’ve never been lost since the day I was born.”
“That’s an impressive memory you got there.”
“You’re making me blush with your compliments.”
“Oh, not at all. By the way, who are you again?”
“I’ve been forgotten!”
It was a pretty neat riposte.
She had good taste.
“…Really, though, even if it’s a joke, it’s depressing to be forgotten by someone, Hachikuji.”
“I forget all the stupid, inconvenient people.”
“Hey, I’m not so stupid that you can call me that! And I said stuff, not people!”
“I forget all the stupid, inconvenient...stuff.”
“Good, good, that’s…not right! It’s not right at all! You shouldn’t go around calling people ‘stuff’!”
“But you said to, yourself.”
“Be quiet. No playing gotcha.”
“You’re very self-centered, aren’t you, Mister Araragi? Very well, then. I’ll be considerate and put it another way.”
“Let’s hear it…”
“………”
It was a fun conversation.
To be honest, I did have some reservations about myself, this high schooler named Koyomi Araragi who chatted with a fifth grader like we were peers, but it did feel pretty similar to talking to my sisters, who were in middle school, so… Plus, maybe it was the difference between elementary and middle school girls, but Hachikuji wasn’t strangely touchy or oddly cynical, and our conversation had a better flow to it than when I talked to my little sisters.
“Haa…”
With a sigh, I got off my bicycle.
Pushing its handlebars, I began walking forward.
Talking with Hachikuji was fun, but standing around and running on for too long could have an adverse effect on my later plans. Not that I was particularly pressed for time, but I still decided to push along my bike as we spoke. Better to walk and talk than stand and talk. Hachikuji must have been wandering around without a specific destination because she strolled alongside my bike without a word or gesture from me. I bet she just had nothing to do.
There was another reason that I chose to get going─I glanced behind again, but it looked like I didn’t need to worry on that account for the time being.
“Where are you headed, Mister Araragi?”
“Mm. Home, for now.”
“For now? So will you be going out after that?”
“Yeah, I guess─remember what I just told you about the skills test being soon?”
“Your skills, which is to say your very worth, will be facing a moment of truth?”
“Is that so. The moment of truth of whether you’ll not graduate.”
“………”
It meant the same thing, but the nuance was so different.
Such a tricky affair, this language thing.
“Mister Araragi, you are, after all, a convenient person mentally.”
“I’d honestly be happier if you just said I was stupid.”
“But not better off left unsaid, I see!”
“Oh, um, don’t worry. I don’t have the best grades either, so we’re in the same boat, the same boat, okay?”
“……”
I was being comforted by an elementary schooler.
In the same boat as an elementary schooler.
Not only that, when it came to herself, she wasn’t stupid but merely didn’t have “the best grades.” Mayoi Hachikuji was slyly deceptive.
“Well, it actually hits close to home for me,” I said. “I’m seriously going to be in a bad spot if I bungle this skills test.”
“Will you be expelled?”
“No matter how preppy of a prep school it is, I’m not going to be expelled over a low test score. I mean, any prep school where I would sounds like a setup to a joke. So the worst that can happen is that I’ll have to repeat a grade, but… But I do want to avoid that.”
If I could.
No, not if I could. I had to.
“Hm. In that case, Mister Araragi, are you really in a position to be going out again today? You should hurry and lock yourself in at home and study for your test.”
“Surprisingly solid advice, Hachikuji.”
“‘Solid advice’? That’s two words too many, sir!”
What a born entertainer.
“Well, there’s no need for you to worry, Hachikuji, if anything you’ve hit the nail on the head. I don’t need to be told. You see, I may be going out, but it’s not to play or to shop. I’m going out to study.”
“Hrm?” Hachikuji tilted her head like a grownup. “So you’re saying you’re going to study at the library or something? Hmm. I personally think that the best environment for studying is a familiar one where you can relax, like your own room… Oh, or will you be going to a cram school or something?”
“If I had to say, cram school would be closer to the mark,” I answered. “You remember Senjogahara, don’t you? Well, she gets some of the top grades in our whole year, and she promised to coach me at her place today.”
Hachikuji folded her arms and faced down.
Wait, had she forgotten? Not because it was inconvenient, but possibly out of fear?
“Her full name is Hitagi Senjogahara,” I tried to remind her. “You know, the lady with the ponytail who was with me the other day, who helped─”
“Oh, that tsundere?”
“………”
She did remember.
It appeared as though Senjogahara was being granted the “t──e” title all around town… Was she okay with that? I needed to ask her how that made her feel, just so I’d know how to react, on my part.
“She was an endlessly tolerant women, I recall. She carried me on her back the entire time as she showed me the way.”
“Those are some really embellished memories, you know?!”
Senjogahara was functioning like a trauma for Hachikuji. Considering their respective circumstances, that almost made sense…
“Hmm,” murmured Hachikuji, her arms still crossed. “Oh, but…if I’m not mistaken, you and Miss Senjogahara are─well, um, how to put it.”
Hachikuji seemed to be choosing her words with care. I had a good idea what her question was, but I got the impression that she was reluctant to phrase it in a bald way and was searching for a different expression. While I wouldn’t call it curiosity, I was somewhat interested in the selection process her fifth-grade vocabulary would undergo, so I stood there and watched, offering her no lifeline.
Finally, she said, “You’ve entered into a lovers’ contract, correct?”
“You couldn’t have done worse!”
To no one’s surprise, I found myself yelling at her.
“Excuse me? Did I say something odd, Mister Araragi?”
“On the surface, you didn’t use any funny words, but few people would fail to smell something rotten from their nuance…”
“If the word ‘contract’ is the problem…then what about ‘transaction’? A lovers’ transaction.”
“You did manage to make it worse! Just speak like a normal person, I don’t care!”
“Hmph. All right, as you wish. I’ll speak like a normal person. Normal comes easy to me when I feel like it. Here I go, are you ready? If I’m not mistaken, you are Miss Senjogahara’s gentleman caller.”
“…Um, I guess.”
Now she was coming at me with an awfully musty locution.
That was her idea of normal?
“So this claim that she’ll be coaching you is surely no more than a pretext, and you’ll end up trading caresses?”
“………”
Another musty expression.
Something was definitely off about her vocabulary.
“Mister Araragi, if I may, visiting your lover’s home right before a skills test that will ascertain if you can repeat a grade is nothing short of suicidal.”
“It’ll ascertain if I can graduate.” She seemed to think that I was a pretty big idiot. You poor thing, I pitied myself. “And don’t be calling it ‘suicidal,’ either.”
“All right, then. It seems like nothing short of suicide.”
I was being bullied by an elementary school kid. You poor thing, I pitied myself. “Watch it,” I warned her, “or I’ll bust you up, sooner or later…”
“Bust me up? Are you talking about my chest? What exactly are you seeking from my elementary-school body?”
I bonked Hachikuji on the head.
In return, Hachikuji kicked my shin.
Draw declared, out of mutual respect.
“Well anyway, Hachikuji, no need to worry on that point… Senjogahara is ridiculously strict about these things.”
“She’s strict about studying? How Spartan. Ah, now that you say so, she didn’t seem the type to suffer fools gladly.”
“Yep. She said as much herself.”
That’s why she found children insufferable.
Including Hachikuji.
Maybe she found me insufferable, too.
Though, of course, I wasn’t only talking about studying when I described Senjogahara as “strict”… Well, let’s just agree that she’s a model student.
“So she’s like Gunnery Sergeant Heartful,” Hachikuji said.
“Um, I believe Miss Senjogahara’s home is near that park─”
“No, I think I already told you, but she moved away a while ago─I’ve already been there once, a little before I met you, and it’s pretty far. If I go home, switch bikes, and head over… Ugh, now that I’m looking at the time, I kind of need to hurry.”
“No, I don’t have my back against the wall or anything yet.”
I may have been heading to Senjogahara’s, but it was still to study, and the honest truth was that I couldn’t quite get in the mood…though who knew what acid-tongued abuse Senjogahara would unleash if I told her that.
Oh boy.
Hitagi Senjogahara.
“Hey, Hachikuji…are you─”
Just then.
Mid-sentence, I heard a sound from behind me.
A sound.
The sound of footsteps.
A sharp and lively rhythm, less a series of strides than leaps, outright jumps, tup, tup, tup, tup, tup, tup─such footsteps.
There was no need to glance behind me to confirm.
Yeah, I guessed not…
In terms of not being able to enjoy some peace and quiet, I was burdened with another dire threat on top of the skills test…
Just when I thought I’d shaken it.
Tup, tup, tup, tup, tup, tup.
The footsteps got closer and closer.
There was no need to confirm, but still─
I couldn’t help it.
Tupp!
Just as I completed my reluctant, recalcitrant turn─she leapt.
She, Suruga Kanbaru, was leaping through the air.
Across more than just several feet, as though performing a long jump, airborne with an ideal form and trajectory that seemed to ignore the law of universal gravitation─and passing me to my right still airborne, almost at eye level─
She landed.
Her fluttering hair settled when she did.
A school uniform.
This time, needless to say, it was my school’s.
By the way, leaping in her uniform meant that her skirt, modified to be shorter as they are these days, had flown up as well, but since she wore bike shorts that reached to her knees─the pleasure wasn’t mine.
Her skirt, too, fell back into place just a moment later.
Suddenly, I noticed a smell like burning rubber.
The source seemed to be intense friction between the asphalt and the soles of her unmistakably expensive sneakers… How exceptionally athletic was she, anyway?
Then our basketball ace, Suruga Kanbaru─turned around.
Though not thoroughly adult, her expression was cool and commanding in a way most third-years couldn’t pull off, and her handsome eyes─looked straight at me.
She placed her hand on her chest as if she were about to make a pledge.
“Hello there, my senior Araragi. What a coincidence.”
“I’ve never heard of such a contrived coincidence!”
She’d obviously sprinted in my direction.
When I looked around, Hachikuji was clean gone. Despite being blunt and brusque toward me, Mayoi Hachikuji was a surprisingly bashful kid, and she’d exercised a snap judgment and fleet-footedness to go with it. Of course, just about anyone would flee if a strange woman came dashing at such an unholy speed (it must have looked like Kanbaru was heading straight for her from where she stood).
Still, she really wasn’t much of a friend, was she…
Fine, fine.
When I looked back at Kanbaru, she was nodding over and over again like she was utterly enchanted and profoundly moved for some reason.
“…What’s the matter?”
“No, I was just pondering your words, to engrave them deep in my heart. ‘I’ve never heard of such a contrived coincidence’… The perfect line for the occasion, the kind that everyone hopes to come up with but fails to. That’s what I call a razor wit.”
“………”
“Yes, you’re right,” Kanbaru said. “I did come chasing after you.”
“…Um, yeah. I know.”
“Ah, so you did know. Anything a fledgling like me tries to pull is transparent to someone of your caliber, I take it. This is awkward, and I could not feel more embarrassed, but I am duly impressed.”
“………”
What are you supposed to say to that?
God knows what kind of expression was stuck on my face at that moment, but Suruga Kanbaru paid no mind and brandished her vivid smile at me.
As I walked down the hallway, the very same Suruga Kanbaru approached me with resonant footsteps and began talking to me like it was nothing. So much so that I ended up replying normally, but this was the star second-year, a celebrity known the school over, someone whom even I, a third-year estranged from such gossip, knew of─but never dreamed of having anything to do with in any conceivable way─so I was quite surprised.
But what really surprised me was her personality. Well, I don’t know what to call it, but I do know it’s bizarre… Suruga Kanbaru possessed a disposition, a character I’d never encountered in my whole life.
And.
Ever since, meaning from three days ago to this exact day and moment─I’d been followed around by her like this. No matter when, no matter where, no matter who might be watching, tup, tup, tup, tup, tup, tup, Kanbaru was dashing towards me.
“Putting break periods aside,” I asked her, “didn’t you have practice after school? Should you even be here?”
“A-ha. So astute, as I’ve come to expect. You’re like the hero of a detective story who never misses the slightest discrepancy. You’d give Philip Marlowe a run for his money, a barefoot run.”
“A national-tier basketball player shouldn’t be here at this hour, it’s just odd, so enough with the flattery.”
If that was all it took to send the hero of a detective story running to his mommy, then I didn’t want to read that series.
Kanbaru was beaming. “Such modest words of self-admonition, you never fail to value humility as an asset that’s second only to your life… I’m prone to overestimating myself and ought to learn from you, starting right now. Ha ha, they say that one bad apple spoils the whole barrel, but I can feel myself growing as a person just from being with you. Now I know what ‘emulating’ is all about.”
There was no malice in her smile.
…In my life so far, I’d taken “a good person” to mean someone like Hanekawa, but I wondered if the ultimate specimens were actually more like Kanbaru.
In other words, they were even worse than Hanekawa.
Even more of a pain than our class president.
“But see, my hand is like this right now,” Kanbaru said, sticking out her left arm.
Her left arm, wrapped tight in a white bandage. Over every inch, from all five of her fingertips to her wrist. The long sleeves of her school uniform hid the rest of her arm, but the bandage probably extended up to around her elbow. I’d heard that a little while ago, she’d suffered a mishap during a solo workout and given herself a nasty sprain, or something─well, I’d heard that as a rumor, right before Kanbaru talked to me.
Rumors are rumors.
Suruga Kanbaru with her athletic prowess and flexibility spraining herself, solo workout or not, was hard to take even with a grain of salt─but since her arm was bandaged, I supposed it was the truth. Everyone makes mistakes, to err is human, even monkeys fall from trees.
“Since I can’t play, I’d only get in the team’s way at the gym. That’s why I’m refraining from going to practices now.”
“I’m disappointed to know that you think I’m carrying the whole team on my back. My team isn’t so feckless that their morale would drop just because I’m not around,” Kanbaru said in a tougher tone. “Basketball is a harsh sport. You can’t count on any single person to win the game. Sure, the position and role I play means that I stand out, but it’s only thanks to everyone else. The praise that gets showered on me ought to be shared by the whole team.”
“…Uh, I guess you’re right.”
What was the word for someone like her?
Decent? Virtuous?
What was it.
It seemed that, not just now but in general, Kanbaru was incredibly sensitive to people insulting her teammates (not that I was trying to). When she was a first-year, she flipped a table when the school newspaper was interviewing her because they said something rude about one of her elder comrades─or so one rumor went (if you’re curious, the rumor ended up being false, but something similar did happen).
Heheh, a laugh escaped Kanbaru’s lips. “I know. You were putting my aptitude as a captain to the test, weren’t you?”
“………”
Turn that gaze away from me.
“My senior, in recording your words for future generations, the writer better bold and underline them so their impression is imparted to the readers. The weight you invest in each word is overwhelming. ‘It’s not what you say, but who says it’─they often mean that in a negative sense, but you’re the one person who gives it a positive spin. Please, relax. I don’t intend to abandon my responsibilities as captain; I’m not so self-absorbed as to be that negligent. I’m aware that I have to live up to being our ace and made sure to issue workout routines. If anything, they’re focusing on practice with greater ease thanks to my absence. When the devil’s away, the mice will play.”
“The devil, huh? Well, I’m relieved to hear it anyway.”
“Sport or not, it’s just a club activity for students. Moreover, ours is a prep school. At the end of the day, an extracurricular is a way for us teens to have some memories, so fun, free, and friendly does it. Even so, most of my betters wouldn’t bother to have anything to do with me, but not only are you looking out for my relationships, you’re even thinking of my teammates. I feel bad for making you so concerned. Such depth of character expands my own horizons─to think that you’d even play the villain for the basketball team’s sake. Only someone who truly cares about his juniors could go that far. I’ve never met a person like you before, sir.”
“I’ve never met a person like you before, either…”
She was breaking new ground…
A natural-born killer with kindness…
“Is that so,” she said. “There’s no greater honor than to hear that from you. Heheh, what is this feeling, inspiration? It’s as though getting praised by someone as gracious as you has opened up a whole new well of courage in me. I feel like I can do anything now. From this day on, whenever I feel down, I’m going to come to you. A few words from my mentor will make me pick myself back up again, I know it.”
Her expression almost looked unguarded─but it wasn’t, due to an undeniable strength that resided at its core. Only someone with absolute confidence in herself could wear such a smile.
We belonged to completely different worlds.
We belonged to completely different categories.
Well, that went without saying─not even counting our personalities, the athletic girl Kanbaru, the school star, and Koyomi Araragi belonging to different worlds, different categories, was self-evident, so the question was why someone like Suruga Kanbaru had chosen to talk to me.
Not just chosen. Why she continued to.
Why she dashed toward me─and continued to do so.
It couldn’t be that she was, in her own words, coming to me because she felt down and needed to cheer herself back up. I didn’t have that kind of supernatural power. If I did, I’d be using it liberally on myself.
I’d lost count of how many times I’d asked the question over the last three days, but I asked again. “So, Kanbaru. What do you want from me?”
“Ah, yes…” She’d been making quick, eloquent replies thus far, but now for the first time seemed to be searching for the right words. But it only took a second before her cheeks were lit by a smile and she opened her mouth. “You must have read the international section of today’s paper, yes? I wanted to hear your thoughts on the unfolding political situation in Russia.”
“Current events?!”
What a topic to ask about, too. I barely knew anything about Japanese politics, but we were crossing the sea and talking about Russia?
“Oh, would India be more to your taste?” she offered. “But as you can guess, sadly I’m something of a jock, an outdoors type, who’s weak on IT-related topics. I have a better feel for the problems facing Russia.”
“I didn’t read the paper this morning,” I gave an excuse so blatant I couldn’t possibly play it down myself. Actually, I do read it, but can’t make enough of anything to partake in a discussion…
Yet Kanbaru merely said “Oh,” and her eyes took on a tender cast. “Well, you are a busy man. I can see how you might not have the time to read the paper in the morning. I apologize, I should have thought of it before blabbering so inconsiderately. We can put the topic off until tomorrow in that case, if that’s all right with you.”
“How generous of you. I didn’t expect to be forgiven so easily. There is simply no way someone with your gravitas didn’t find my remark superficial, but you let it go without so much as hinting at your displeasure. Now that’s what it means to be a diplomat. I never thought that I could come to like you even more.”
“Well, thanks…”
“……”
Regardless, she seemed pretty smart.
Being both smart and athletic wasn’t playing by the rules at all… It wasn’t like Hanekawa and Senjogahara were bad at sports, but they couldn’t begin to compare to this second-year. Sure, Senjogahara may have been the star of the track team in middle school, but the gap in her résumé after starting high school wasn’t negligible─more so if you added in her special circumstances.
Well, of course, I didn’t really think that Kanbaru wanted to debate me on the political situation in Russia─that was clearly a pretext. No matter how many times I asked her what she wanted from me, she was this way and wouldn’t give a straight reply.
She had to have some objective, but I didn’t have the first clue.
Why in the world was she following me around, and so suddenly? She, the star of the entire school, and I, a third-year washout, hadn’t a single thing in common.
I ought to be a total stranger to her.
“By the way, did anything odd happen to you today?” she asked.
“Hunh? Not really… Everything’s normal.” Aside from her. Well, I was starting to get used to her, too. “I have a headache thanks to the skills test we have coming up, I guess?”
“Oh, the skills test. Hm, yes. It’s been giving me a headache as well. It’s quite a pain, as someone involved in an extracurricular. Our school prohibits any practices for a week before the test, so your only choice is to train solo.”
“Huh.”
So that’s how it worked. I had trouble understanding her logic that if the school banned it, she had to work out on her own, instead of just taking a break. But hers was a different world.
“But Kanbaru, isn’t that a good thing, at least from your perspective? Your sprained left hand should heal by then.”
“Hm? Oh…true.” She looked down at her hand. “Impressive, you simply see things in a different way. Always trying to figure out how to make everyone around you happy. You’re a real master of positive thinking.”
“Hey, I could think positively for a hundred years and never get to your level…”
What kind of upbringing turned out people like her?
It baffled me.
“I know it’s a cliché,” she conceded, “but it is a student’s job to study. As annoying as they are, skills tests are skills tests, and I’m not going to take mine lightly.”
“Good thing it wasn’t your right hand.”
“Well, I’m actually a southpaw,” Kanbaru said. “Being left-handed means you have to deal with a lot of day-to-day inconveniences, but the one place it can be an advantage is the world of competitive sports. I treasure my birthright.”
“Huh, really?”
“Mm. That’s common knowledge for anyone in competitive sports. In Japan, parents still tend to correct their children’s left-handedness, so only one out of ten athletes, at most, is a southpaw. What do you think that ratio means in the sport of basketball? It’s a five-on-five game, so on average there’s only one on the court. And that would be me. It’s one of the reasons I was able to become our ace.”
“Huh…” I felt convinced, but of what I wasn’t sure.
“Still, when something like this happens, be it the result of my own carelessness, all I’m left with is a bunch of inconveniences.”
“A southpaw, eh… I don’t really understand any of that because I don’t play sports, but being left-handed just seems cool.”
That was my honest take.
Well, it was more of a preconception, even a prejudice, but somehow every little thing lefties did seemed more stylish to me.
“You say that, but aren’t you left-handed too? Heheh, I noticed immediately because you have your watch on your right wrist. Lefties are quick to pick up on fellow lefties.”
“……”
I wore my watch on my right wrist just because I felt like it, but now I didn’t dare tell her… Was I going to have to write and use chopsticks with my left hand in her presence going forward? Lefties seemed stylish to me, but not to the point where I’d reverse-correct myself…
“So,” I said, “taking the test will be quite a challenge for you. With your good hand in that shape, the Japanese exam will suck bad.”
“True, but since this is a skills test, we won’t have to write essays in any subject, and a few oddly shaped characters here and there shouldn’t be an issue. I’m sure the teachers will take my situation into account, too. Pardon me, it sounds like I’ve caused you undue concern. I do have to say, though, you really do look out for your juniors. To be able to worry about someone like me because you feel so relaxed. That’s no simple feat.”
“…Uh, I don’t know about relaxed.” Far from it. Putting aside whether I’d worry about my juniors if I were relaxed, I was anything but at the moment. “In fact, I’m about to go to a study session today.”
“Um, I guess a simple way to put it would be that my grades until now haven’t been the best…plus I had a pretty bad attendance record during my first and second years of high school, so…”
Why was I having to explain to her?
Star or not, she was a year below me, my junior.
“In short, this skills test is my big chance to make a comeback,” I found myself putting a good face on it. I felt small.
“Hmm. I see.” Kanbaru nodded. “I don’t really understand because I’m not the type to hustle when it comes to exam prep, but now that you mention it, my classmates do gather at someone’s house before a test…I think?”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much what I’m doing.”
“Okay. So you’re about to head to a friend’s house. But,” Kanbaru said a little uncertainly, “unlike with sports, I don’t see how working together can help…”
“Don’t worry. I said it was a study session, but it’s a one-on-one where someone’s going to be teaching me, that’s all. It’s like I’m going to be tutored. There’s someone in my class with ridiculously good grades who’s going to be helping me out.”
“Huh… Ohh.” As if she’d just remembered, Kanbaru added, “You’re talking about my senior Senjogahara.”
“…What? You know her?”
“Who else could it be if it’s someone with good grades in your class? I’ve heard rumors about her.”
“Huh… Well, yeah.”
Senjogahara was famous, after all. Maybe it wasn’t surprising that a second-year knew about her.
Hm?
But wait. As far as being famous for good grades went, the first person to come to mind should have been the even more famous Hanekawa, who’d never once ceded her spot at the top of our year. At the very least, it didn’t make sense to be saying it couldn’t be anyone else. Also, if someone mentioned a study session, wouldn’t you normally assume that it was a same-sex affair and bring up a boy’s name, not a girl’s?
“I shouldn’t get in your way, then,” Kanbaru said. “I think I’ll get going for today.”
“Okay.”
It was very Suruga Kanbaru to stick in the “for today” even as she made a show of not overstaying her welcome.
She squatted and stretched her legs.
Warm-ups.
She took her time stretching her Achilles tendon, and then─
No sooner than she said so, she dashed back the way she came, her footsteps ringing tup, tup, tup, tup, tup, tup. She had strong legs─not only was she fast, she was abnormally quick to hit her top speed. While I doubt her hundred or two hundred meter times are that outstanding, she must be a good match even for members of the track team at ultra-short distances like thirty or fifty feet. That’s where Suruga Kanbaru, an athlete specializing in basketball, a sport where you run in every direction within a limited play field, shines…and then, before I knew it, she was out of sight. Her short skirt flew up from her vigorous motions, but that surely didn’t bother Kanbaru, who wore bike shorts long enough to extend below her skirt.
…Still, I thought, she ought to wear a tracksuit when she runs. That way she’d spare onlookers like me from getting our vile hopes up.
Sheesh, though.
It felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders.
This encounter had been relatively brief, but…if she didn’t hurry up and reveal why she was following me around, I couldn’t rest easy, since this situation might drag on. Sure, it wasn’t causing me any actual damage or harm, so leaving her be was technically an option, but that personality of Kanbaru’s did more than a little to tire out people like me. No, was there anyone out there who wouldn’t get tired talking to her? If there was─
Yeah. Maybe Senjogahara was the only person on that list.
“Mister Rararagi.”
“…You’re asymptotically closer to the right pronunciation compared to the last thing you called me, but Hachikuji, don’t sing my name like you’re a cartoon dog. My name is Araragi.”
“I’m sorry. A slip of the tongue.”
“No, you’re doing it on purpose…”
“It was a srip.”
“Or maybe not?!”
“It was a trip.”
“What were you seeing?!”
Hachikuji was suddenly back by my side.
She must have returned after realizing that Kanbaru had left. I couldn’t be sure, as this was Hachikuji I was dealing with, but given how promptly she’d come back, maybe she felt her fair share of guilt for running off and leaving me on my own. Perhaps this time, she really had mistaken my name on purpose, to hide her embarrassment.
“What was with that person?” she asked.
“You couldn’t tell by watching us?”
“Hmm. Since she referred to you as her senior, if I may don my thinking hat, is she your junior at school?”
“…That’s some impressive thinking hat.”
If I were Kanbaru, this was where I’d whip out Marlowe or some other classic detective to praise Hachikuji to high heaven, but no─for a moment I thought I might try to borrow a page, but my heart was refusing to let me…
“Even so, Mister Araragi. I was all ears, but it was very hard to understand what that person was getting at. To the very end I couldn’t figure out the gist of your conversation. Had she chased after you to chat about nothing in particular?”
“Um… Well, Hachikuji, don’t ask me because I don’t know, either.”
“You don’t? I can’t help but be receptacle.”
“So you turned into a trashcan while you were gone?”
Skeptical, I assumed.
“Stalking? Like what women wear over their lower bodies?”
“That’s a stocking.”
“Are you sure?”
“Do you really not know the word? She’s been following me no matter how much I try to skirt around her.”
“Skirt? Like what women wear over their lower bodies?”
I thought for a bit to see if I could come up with a word Hachikuji might confuse with bike shorts. Unfortunately, my vocabulary wasn’t up to the task, so I gave up and kept the conversation moving.
“I don’t understand why, but for about three days now, she’s been shadowing me blatantly and then popping up and starting a conversation. One-sidedly, so like you said, I can’t figure out what she’s trying to get at… I don’t know if you’d call it chatting, and I honestly have no idea what her goal is.”
Her goal─well, she had to have one.
But I didn’t have the first clue what it was.
She was deflecting my attempts to find out, for sure.
The athletic grounds are about the only place third- and second-year students see each other, which means we almost never meet by coincidence─in other words, Kanbaru was making the most of short breaks during the day to seek me out… I’d figured that out, but not much else.
“Hmm. You know, Mister Araragi, isn’t there an easy answer sitting right there? Doesn’t she just like you?”
“Wha?”
“I believe she said something to that effect.”
“…Oh, I guess? Nah, give me a break. It was just a manner of speaking. I’m not a dating sim protagonist, it’s not like I’m going to wake up one day and suddenly have girls all over me.”
“You’re right. Because if you were a dating sim protagonist, I’d be one of your flagged targets, and that’s absolutely not happening.”
“……”
Did elementary school kids know about dating sims?
Not like I had ever played one, either.
“No, I get the feeling you’d be a pushover…”
If not for her shyness attribute, it’d all happen very quickly… In a game with six heroines, she’d be around the fourth to go down.
Of course, if you took the age issue into account, she’d be a highdifficulty character indeed.
“Kanbaru isn’t,” I objected, “that kind of… Ah, now that you mention it, I guess there are rumors that she goes from one wild romance to the next. Still, she and I had literally nothing to do with each other until now, okay? Unlike them…unlike Kanbaru and others, I’m not a school celebrity or anything.”
But upon further thought, I realized she had at least known my name and what class I was in when she first spoke to me.
Why?
“Maybe she saw you picking an abandoned cat off the street,” Hachikuji said.
“I’ve never done that.”
In fact, I’d never once stumbled upon a so-called abandoned cat. In the first place, would a cat plunked in a cardboard box labeled “please adopt me” just sit in place?
That would be one well-trained cat.
“Hold on, did you just put cats on the same level as garbage?”
“It was only a manner of speaking, as you put it, so stop scrounging for reasons to criticize me. That’s a very vulgar hobby you have, Mister Araragi, finding sport in castigating weak little girls for things they never said.”
“Apologize to catkind. Cats can be scary, you know.”
“In any case, love at first sight does exist. They even say that relationships between people in general are based on first impressions. At least, looking at it that way explains why you’re being followed around, doesn’t it?” Hachikuji was yelping gleefully. She was an elementary schoolgirl in that way. “I’m certain of it, the woman in me is telling me that I’m right. So what will you do, Mister Araragi? She’s only nibbling now, but she might confess her feelings for you soon enough. What will you do, what will you do, what will you do?”
“Listen. I don’t like how people try to see everything in romantic terms. The ‘power of love’ they go on about in old foreign films? Imagine how peaceful the world would be if that did solve everything. No way, no how. Some simple, small-time, realistic goal makes much better sense.
“And anyway,” I said. “I’ve already cleared the highest difficulty character of all.”
003
“I feel like someone said something unpleasant about me,” Hitagi Senjogahara suddenly mumbled.
The comment was so abrupt and unprovoked that, out of shock, the pencil in my hand froze in place on my notebook.
Yet it seemed she was mumbling entirely to herself because she switched topics.
“Still, teaching is so difficult.”
After that, I’d walked back home with Hachikuji talking about all sorts of things, including about Kanbaru, and parted ways when I arrived. The little girl wandered around in one place or another all the time, so I was sure I’d meet her again somewhere. Then, after taking off my backpack, changing my clothes, and stuffing my textbooks, notes, and study-aids into a Boston bag, I switched from the granny bike I rode to school to my mountain bike and headed to Senjogahara’s. My little sisters had already returned and almost got around to interrogating me, but luckily I managed to escape.
As I’d mentioned to Hachikuji, Senjogahara’s place was fairly far from mine, a distance I normally wouldn’t travel by bicycle. But taking the bus actually meant having to walk more, so going by bike felt quicker to me─which was subjective, and since this was only my second time visiting Senjogahara’s, and the first time straight from my place, I couldn’t say for sure.
The Tamikura Apartments─a two-story wooden building.
Room 201.
A hundred-or-so square feet, a small sink.
It was so cramped that two high school students of average build facing each other across a low table with their study materials spread out around them filled up the space. It was what you’d call a single-father household, and Senjogahara what you’d call an only child, and her father what you’d call stuck at work until late at night, so we were, of course, alone.
Koyomi Araragi and Hitagi Senjogahara.
Two healthy teenagers by themselves in a cramped room.
A man and a woman.
Who were officially going out, too.
And yet.
“…Why am I studying right now,” I said.
“Hm? Because you’re stupid?”
“What a mean way to put it!”
She was absolutely right. But.
It couldn’t hurt if there was a little more going on.
We started dating on the same day we got ourselves mixed up with Mayoi Hachikuji, on Mother’s Day, May fourteenth. About two weeks had passed since then, but it would be no exaggeration to say that absolutely nothing sexual had taken place between us in that time.
………
Hold on, we hadn’t even gone on a date yet.
Come to think of it.
We met in the morning at school, talked during break…ate lunch together…then walked home together partway…and said see you tomorrow. That was about it. That was the kind of thing that the cooler kids did regardless of gender if they were friends…
I wouldn’t say that I particularly craved a sexual turn of events, but some development you’d expect between lovers would have been nice.
“In my life so far, Araragi, I’ve never struggled at anything involving the word ‘study,’ so I don’t have the slightest idea what’s giving you so much trouble and what you’re stuck on… I don’t understand what you don’t understand.”
She really knew what to say to get me down.
How wide was the gap between her academic abilities and mine, anyway? Was it a canyon so vast you couldn’t see the other side?
“Are you acting like you don’t get it,” Senjogahara asked, “just to make me laugh?”
“Like I’d go that far… But it’s not like you were born smart, right, Senjogahara? Isn’t it thanks to blood and tears that you maintain your place near the top of the class?”
“Do you think that’s the kind of thing people who work hard worry about?”
“…Okay.”
“Oh, but don’t get me wrong. There are people whose hard work never pays off, who don’t even know how to begin working hard, like you, and I do pity them.”
“Please don’t pity us!”
“I despair for you.”
“G-Gah! Is the rule that whenever I make a quip about it, you get even harsher?! Even begging for mercy is a risky move!”
Bizarre game we were playing.
“No weed actually goes by that name,” she said, “but ‘small fry’ is an actual species of fish…”
“There’s no such fish, either!”
“No weed actually goes by that name, but there are people who do…”
“Only if other people call them that!”
“Anyway, I’m feeling motivated because helping you pass this skills test will let me take another step forward as a person.”
“Don’t be treating my grades like they’re your rite of passage… And there are other things you ought to attend to first if you want to grow as a person.”
“Oh, be quiet. I’ve strangled you to death.”
“In the present perfect tense?! Am I already dead?!”
However.
Despite my protestations to Hachikuji, I had to admit to a motive so cute it would be embarrassing even to call it ulterior, that just maybe something might happen if I was alone with Senjogahara in her home…
I looked up from my notes to glance at her.
She looked unconcerned as always.
She wasn’t going to reveal a special face that she’d never show anyone else just because we were going out… In that sense, she wasn’t a tsundere at all.
Her attitude didn’t change one bit, either.
Hmm.
Or was I expecting too much, as I tended to do? I’d vaguely imagined that conversations grew more special once you started going out, but maybe what you discussed with another person didn’t change all that much whatever your relationship? Were my thoughts of sweet talk between lovers nothing more than an idiotic fantasy?
“………”
In all likelihood.
Considering Senjogahara’s experiences, the events that made Hitagi Senjogahara into Hitagi Senjogahara─she certainly had her notions regarding chastity and all, but apart from that, in all likelihood she was satisfied with the current state of our relationship.
She’d told me she didn’t like silent partnerships.
Since she said so, she probably didn’t.
…No.
Even then…
It was hard to imagine that Senjogahara didn’t feel a thing in this situation. In fact, it had developed in a much more sexual way the last time I’d visited the Tamikura Apartments… It wasn’t like she was too unworldly not to have a clue about what it meant to invite her ostensible boyfriend to her home with no guardian around… And when I looked at it that way, Senjogahara did seem to have put a little bit of work into the outfit she was wearing across the low table from me, but the awfully long skirt sat on my mind. Her stockingless legs were bare, but I could hardly see them thanks to that long skirt of hers. It felt like it was caution she had put into her outfit, not thought.
Phew.
Or maybe it was my role as the man to show some initiative? Of course, I’d never gone out with a girl before, so I hardly even knew what initiative looked like.
“What’s the matter, Araragi? Your hands have stopped.”
“Nothing… I was just thinking about the high challenge rating.”
Showing no interest in making out my mood, Senjogahara just gave me an utterly appalled look. Her eyes seemed accustomed to dispensing condescension.
Then she mumbled, melancholically, “I guess that’s it.”
“Huh? Hold on, Senjogahara, you’re putting your mechanical pencil aside like you’re fed up and giving off this tired air, but is quitting on me actually an option for you?”
“I won’t say that it isn’t,” she declared. “60-40…no, 70-30, maybe?”
“Whichever is the seventy, that’s an awfully realistic ratio…”
It would have been easier on me if she’d said 90-10.
Really, which was the seventy?
“I’m conflicted, you see. Trying and failing would hurt my pride more than not trying and failing.”
If she did, I’d have to ask Hanekawa after all.
At the end of the day, that wasn’t something I wanted to do.
Being tutored by our class president, who bought wholesale the commonsensical notion that you did well in school if you just tried, was out of the question…
“Well, if you’re going to go that far, then I won’t quit on you.”
“You’d really be helping me out.”
“What a frightening philosophy!”
“Don’t worry. If I’m doing this, I might as well die doing it.”
“You don’t have to die! Maybe just tire yourself out! What the hell do you have in mind for me?!”
“…Then again, Araragi. I want to say you’re good at math, at least?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah.”
How did she know?
That made sense. Hanekawa knew my grades better than anyone.
“Huh,” I grunted. “I never saw Hanekawa as the type to go around discussing other people’s grades, though.”
“Oh, maybe I didn’t word it right. I was secretly listening in when you and Hanekawa were talking the other day.”
Hearsay was bad enough, but now we were at eavesdropping.
“You think?” deadpanned Senjogahara.
She was such a handful.
“I do all right in math because it isn’t all about memorization,” I explained. “Aren’t formulas and equations almost like special moves? An Ultra Beam or a Kamehameha or something. If only other subjects had them, too…”
“If things were so convenient, no one would have a hard time of it. But putting aside actually learning about the subjects, there are tried-and-true techniques, if not special moves, when it comes to studying for tests.” Senjogahara picked her mechanical pencil back up. “One of them is trying to guess what’ll be on the test, which you don’t want to make a habit of because it’s like gambling. While I generally don’t recommend it, stopgap measures might be our only choice at this point. If we get down to it, you just need to avoid getting F’s. If we say the cutoff line is half of the average score…”
She scribbled numbers in her notebook.
The expected average score, and a number that was half of it.
I had to say, when she put them out there like that, it did seem attainable─as my perfect score, that is.
“In memorization-heavy subjects, teachers have ‘questions that they have to ask,’ so we need to set our sights on those. In other words, we’re taking a laser-focused approach instead of making wild guesses. You don’t want to get bogged down by questions you can’t answer and miss the chance to score on ones you can. Do you understand what I’m saying so far, Araragi?”
“…Sure, I get it.”
Still, smart kids really did see tests in a completely different way… The teacher’s mindset in preparing them was something I’d never given any thought to. Actually, no, maybe I did back in middle school, when I still got decent grades… But that felt like a forgotten fable.
Back in middle school.
I didn’t miss those days at all.
“So,” Senjogahara said, “let’s start with an easy subject. World history.”
“It is. All you have to do is memorize all the important terms.”
“……”
“But like I said, I’m not going to expect you to do even that much. Still, Araragi. You’ll probably pass this skills test if you start studying right now with my help, but what in the world are you planning on doing after that?”
“After that?”
“After I graduate… This is kind of sudden.”
“You’re at the end of your second month of your last year of high school. You must have given it at least a little bit of thought. I know you said something along the lines of only caring about making it to graduation, but does that mean you’re going to find a job right away? Do you have some sort of concrete plan? A connection or an in at some company?”
“Umm…”
“Are you going to be a temp at first? Or maybe you’ll just be a NEET? I don’t really like any of that terminology because they oversimplify a real issue, but of course, your own views and wishes take precedence. Oh, but I suppose you could always learn a trade at a vocational school to start off?”
She was getting very detailed about this.
Peppering me with all these questions wasn’t going to drag an answer out of me… Couldn’t Senjogahara tell that I was already overwhelmed by the skills test staring me down?
“Your mother? What are you talking about. I’m your girlfriend.”
“……”
The straightforward reply.
Her special move.
For me, at least.
“After I graduate… Hmm. You’re right, I do need to decide soon. Well, how about you, Senjogahara?”
“College. Probably on a recommendation and scholarship.”
“…I see.”
“Was saying ‘probably’ too modest of me?”
“By your standards.”
“Anyway, college.”
“College, huh.”
She said it like it was only natural.
As with what she’d earlier, it was probably going to be a mystery to me for the rest of my life if I didn’t get it now, but I wondered how it felt like for a smart person to be a smart person.
She added, “The tuition issue certainly narrows down my path. Saying ‘fortunately’ might be too self-deprecating, but it’s not like there’s anything in particular I want to do, so I guess I’m letting that path guide me.”
“Well, no matter where you go, you’ll be you, I’m sure.”
“Right. But,” Senjogahara said, “I’d like to walk the same path as you if I can.”
“Er…that’s a little…”
I was honestly happy to hear that, but the laws of physics practically ruled it out…
Right, Senjogahara nodded. “Ignorance is a crime, but stupidity isn’t. Since it’s not a crime, it’s the punishment. If you’d only been more virtuous in your past life like me, poor Araragi, then this wouldn’t have happened. Now I know exactly how the ant felt as it watched the grasshopper freeze to death. Getting me to identify with a bug is no mean feat, mind you.”
“……”
Bear it…
A retort would only cause the knife to dig in deeper…
“Why not just let it go and drop dead?” Senjogahara continued. “Even a grasshopper becomes useful as a carcass when the ant deigns to feed on its nutrients.”
“Next time we meet, it’ll be in court!”
I couldn’t bear it.
I lacked the necessary mental fortitude.
“You say so, Senjogahara, but doing different things after graduation doesn’t have to mean not walking down the same path, yeah?”
“True. You’re absolutely right. But if I have a sudden change of heart in college because I’m going to co-ed mixers all the time, what will I do?”
“Ready to make the most of campus life, are you?!”
“In that case, should we live together after graduation?” she suggested all too casually. “That way, even if we’re doing different things, we might spend even more time together than we do now.”
“Not a bad idea? I don’t like your tone.”
“…Yes, I’d like to. Please, let’s do that.”
“You think?”
With that, she cast her eyes back down on her textbook in the most unassuming manner. She was acting nonchalant, and the timing of her remark had made it sound almost frivolous, but even someone as unobservant as me saw by now that she wasn’t the type to jest at such a moment.
This was Hitagi Senjogahara I was dealing with.
…Anyway, she seemed to be thinking two steps ahead.
Or instead of taking it that way─maybe I should receive it as a sign of Senjogahara’s earnest interest in our relationship. Not many high school couples took going out as seriously as she did.
Going out, though. What did that mean?
Sigh.
It was no good. I’d never gone out with a girl before, so I didn’t just not know how to take the initiative, I had no idea how to react in my situation.
Not even the first clue.
May I ought to have played some dating sims.
They’d have served as reference, at least.
Then again, beating a game was one thing, while you could never “clear” reality.
“You’re sighing a lot, Araragi. Did you know that a small happiness slips away every time you sigh?”
“If that’s true, I’d have to measure my loss in K’s…”
“How many you’ve let away doesn’t concern me at all, but I wish you wouldn’t sigh around me. It makes me sick.”
“You’re horrible.”
“What I meant is lovesick.”
“…Er, as the straight man, I don’t even know how to respond to that one.”
A clever trap for the straight man.
“By the way, Araragi,” Senjogahara said, “I’ve never broken up with a boy before.”
“………”
No, this was an example of why wordings mattered.
She made it sound like she was a smooth gal with many suitors, but wasn’t she simply announcing that she had no prior experience whatsoever with men?
Her expression remained placid. It didn’t shift even a little, not an eyebrow moving. It made me wonder if she had any emotions at all. But─she still had to be thinking about it.
Two years.
Since the time between middle school and high school, when she’d been neither a middle schooler nor a high schooler nor even on break, Hitagi Senjogahara had shunned all contact with other people. If she had forgotten how to interact with human beings, if she’d grown extraordinarily passive or unnecessarily timid─you couldn’t blame her for it. It was like dealing with a cautious stray cat─though Hanekawa fit the bill better as far as cats go.
Maybe neither of us knew how to take the initiative.
“…Hey, Senjogahara?”
“Are you still carrying staplers and stuff?”
“Now that you mention it…not lately.”
“Ah.”
“I must have gotten careless.”
“Careless, huh?”
Well─you could still call that progress.
It wasn’t big enough of a change to make her a tsundere, but if that was her personality─
…Hm, by the way. Speaking of Senjogahara two years ago─
“Correct.”
“You don’t do that anymore?”
“Correct. Because there’s no reason to,” she answered pretty much instantly. “I have no desire to go back to that time in my life.”
“Hmph…”
Apparently, Senjogahara had been a nice, sociable person, kind to everyone, a hard worker, not at all stuck-up, the respected star of the track team in middle school─cheerful and full of energy. It was no more than a rumor, but I found it pretty credible.
That all changed right before high school.
Then, two years later.
What had changed about her was back to normal.
Back─but not everything, of course.
Certainly not if she lacked the desire.
“I don’t see the need or necessity, and above all, the good it would do me at this point, Araragi─there’s a lot more I have to carry with me now. I’m already a third-year, anyway. But why do you ask?”
“Oh, I was just interested in what you were like back when you played sports… And yeah, given the hiatus, I see why you might not bother.”
Just as cats meant Tsubasa Hanekawa, sports were now synonymous with Suruga Kanbaru for me, and I’d asked with her in the back of my mind, but…that’s what you called a brusque response.
You could say Senjogahara was facing forward─but.
Was refusing to look back the same as facing forward?
Senjogahara, I began to think, was still…
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I don’t need to play sports to maintain my figure.”
“…Hey, that’s not why I was asking.”
“Stop assuming that I’m after your body!”
And that phrase “carefree limbs”…
It was a bit much.
“Oh. So it wasn’t my body?” she inquired innocently. “I guess that means you can wait for a while.”
That’s what she wanted to say?
If so, it was so roundabout─and awfully devious, quite unlike her trademark straightforward approach.
Chastity, eh?
But it had to be about more than that.
“Araragi, I know you aren’t a shameless, stingy bastard who pays for an all-you-can-eat buffet only to wonder if you’ve ‘eaten your money’s worth’ and rushes to ‘try a little more so it won’t be a waste’ when it’s going to be the same price anyway.”
“……”
I wasn’t quite sure what her analogy was trying to imply, but it had to be some sort of pickoff move…
She was timid with people.
Prudent in her relationship with me.
Well, I was willing to go along with that.
I still didn’t get what going “out” with her was about, but if that’s what I was doing, then I was going along with all of her.
“…Oh, right,” I remembered─and decided that I needed to tell Senjogahara about Suruga Kanbaru. I’d kept mum not so much because Senjogahara might get worried over nothing, but rather simply to avoid annoying her, but interpreting Suruga Kanbaru’s motives in light of Hachikuji’s eminently grade-school take and the remote possibility that she was right, it didn’t feel all that fair, given my position, to withhold the fact from my (ostensible) girlfriend.
There was something I was curious about, too.
“Hey, Senjogahara.”
“What is it.”
“Do you know Suruga Kanbaru?”
“………”
She replied with silence.
Or I should say, made no reply.
In terms of what was and wasn’t fair, my question itself probably wasn’t fair at all─I mean, who didn’t know about the school star, Suruga Kanbaru? The fact that she was stalking me would circulate as a rumor by the beginning of next week at the latest, if it wasn’t out already. I could rest assured that it would be treated as a false one─but that was precisely why my question took on an odd significance. I was suffering the silence I’d brought about and restraining myself from following up, when─
“Yes,” Senjogahara said, “Suruga Kanbaru. That name takes me back.”
“…Oh.”
So─they were acquainted after all.
I’d thought they might be.
When I mentioned my study session, Kanbaru had immediately named Senjogahara and not Hanekawa, who has the best grades in our year─and that wasn’t all. I’d picked up the same suggestion from various remarks that she’d made. The possibility that Hachikuji raised had eluded me thanks to my vague, no, clear sense that Kanbaru wasn’t after me, but some other goal─
“Is that why you asked me about middle school just now?” added Senjogahara. “Yes, she used to be my junior, in middle school.”
“Well, she still is. You go to the same school, don’t you? Or wait, do you mean that girl was on the track team in middle school?”
“No, she was on the basketball team from the time she was in middle school. ‘That girl’… You sound awfully close with her.”
In an instant, the look in Senjogahara’s eyes turned hostile. Normally free of any emotions at all, they now gleamed with danger. Not waiting even a second to see if I’d offer some sort of explanation, she took the mechanical pencil in her right hand and thrust it forward, the tip homing in on my left eye at an alarming velocity. My first instinct was to get out of its way, but even as she moved her right hand, she climbed over the low table on her knees, indifferent to all the notes she sent flying in the process, and used her left hand to cradle the back of my head, preventing me.
The tip of the mechanical pencil─was so close to my eyeball it seems absurd to say she stopped short of anything. It was so close I couldn’t blink, freezing me in place. In fact, I had to wonder if the left hand cradling my head was a considerate gesture meant to hinder extraneous movements on my part that might spoil her precision, that’s how perfectly orchestrated it was.
…H-Hitagi Senjogahara.
You might not be carrying a stapler now, but you haven’t changed one bit!
“What about that girl, Araragi?”
“……!”
Hold on!
It was almost laughable how committed she felt… And how did that even sound like we were close? I’d referred to a junior as “that girl,” no more. This was my punishment for merely knowing another girl without Senjogahara’s knowledge? What in heaven’s name was she going to do to me if I actually cheated on her?
While I did find myself in a ghastly situation, I was also relieved that I’d decided to tell her early.
Thank goodness─I’d learned about this side of Senjogahara through a case where I had plenty of excuses to give!
“You heal from injuries incredibly fast, right? So a single eyeball can’t be that bad, can it?”
“Stop, no! No, an eyeball would still be bad! There’s nothing here I ought to feel guilty about, I don’t see us as close at all, you’re the only girl for me, Senjogahara!”
“Oh, am I? I like how those words make me feel.”
And then─she pulled back the mechanical pencil. She spun it around a couple of times in her palm, placed it on top of the low table, and rearranged the scattered notes and textbooks. I tried to calm my still-pounding heart as I watched her.
“…You know you’re going to kill someone one of these days.”
“And when I do, I’ll make sure it’s you. You’re going to be my first guy. I wouldn’t choose anyone else. I promise.”
“Don’t spout scary stuff like they’re sweet lines! Listen, I love you, but not enough to be killed by you!”
“I’d rather take a pass on that kind of twisted love!”
“Really? That’s too bad. And I can’t believe you’d say that. If it was by your hands, Araragi─”
“You wouldn’t mind being killed?”
“…Hm? Oh, uh, well, I guess.”
“What a vague answer!”
“Well, um, I suppose I would?”
“Followed by a vague refusal!”
“What’s the big problem? Just accept it for what it is. If I were to kill you, Araragi, I would be the one by your side during your final moments. Isn’t that romantic?”
“No. If I’m going to get killed, you’re my last choice for the killer. No matter who kills me in what way, for me, it’s better than getting killed by you.”
“What? I won’t have that. If someone else ever kills you, Araragi, I’m going to kill whoever did it. Aren’t promises made to be broken?”
“……”
Her love was already pretty twisted.
I did feel loved, nevertheless…
“In any case, we were talking about Kanbaru,” Senjogahara tossed aside our frightening line of discussion and put the conversation back on track with her usual aplomb. “While we played different sports, I was the star of the track team while she was the star of the basketball team. Even though we weren’t in the same year, we did associate─and also.”
“And also?”
“Well, it’s not really worth mentioning now, but in our private lives away from sports, you could say that I caused her a bit of trouble, or maybe that I troubled myself over her… Wait, Araragi.” Senjogahara turned the subject to me. “What we should be talking about right now is why you brought up that kid. If you’re not guilty of anything, you shouldn’t mind explaining.”
“S-Sure.”
“Of course, if you were guilty, I’d have you explain anyway.”
“………”
Senjogahara might actually kill me if I tried keeping secrets from her, so I told her that Suruga Kanbaru had been stalking me for the past three days. A second-year who dashed up to me with a quick and rhythmical tup, tup, tup, tup, tup, tup, who rambled for a while, and who left without hinting at any objective at all─Suruga Kanbaru. She had to have one, but I didn’t know what it was.
As I explained this, I began to think.
Kanbaru was probably choosing moments when Senjogahara wasn’t around and coming up to me then. With the exception of today, when she dashed over my way even though I was with Hachikuji, she was basically lying in wait for me to be alone. In other words, it wasn’t by chance that Senjogahara hadn’t known about the stalking until now.
And there was something else I started to think about.
Wasn’t Senjogahara the one referring to Kanbaru in a familiar way? Calling her “that kid” even if she’d been a year behind in middle school sounded more than a little─no, maybe it was just a manner of speaking, too.
Just as Senjogahara’s emotions didn’t show on her face, they didn’t seep into her voice. No matter what she said, it was almost all in the same flat tone. You shuddered to fathom the strength of will she was exerting to control herself.
But─that kid.
“I see,” Senjogahara finally nodded after hearing most of the story. And yes, she still had the same expression and flat tone. “Um, Araragi?”
“What is it.”
“What’s flooded on top and in blazes on the bottom?”
“…”
Why a riddle all of a sudden?
Wondering when she’d turned into the kind of character who asked riddles, I decided to humor her for the time being. I knew the answer to this one, fortunately.
“A cauldron, right?”
“Bzzt. The correct answer is,” Senjogahara enlightened me in the same monotone, “Suruga Kanbaru’s house.”
“What are you planning on doing to the home of our school’s basketball star?!”
Now I was really scared!
Her eyes were so still, too!
“Jokes aside,” she said.
“Your jokes are no joke, okay? Not when you might follow up on them.”
“Really? But since you insist, Araragi, I’ll keep my jokes non-practical.”
“That’s only normal…”
“Kanbaru found out about my secret a year before you,” Senjogahara told me like it was nothing special─in her usual tone, only a tad irritated. “I’d just become a second-year, so it was right after Kanbaru started at Naoetsu High. Considering its location, I’d already foreseen that a junior who knew me would be coming to our school, so I’d thought about what to do─but with Kanbaru, I guess I let my guard down a little.”
“Huh.”
Hitagi Senjogahara.
The secret she’d borne─
I’d learned it by catching her after she’d tripped on the stairs─by chance, so to speak. But on the flip side, you could say her secret was so precarious that mere chance was sufficient to expose it. In fact, Senjogahara had told me I wasn’t the first to find out─so Kanbaru…
Knowing Kanbaru’s personality.
“Yes, indeed. Though I refused,” Senjogahara replied calmly, as if coupling those phrases were a standard construction, a grammatical staple. “I dealt with her the way I did with you. You tried to get involved anyway, Araragi. Kanbaru never came back after that. That was all our relationship amounted to.”
So that was a year ago.
The refusal─must have been thorough. It must have been immeasurably more intense than in my case since Kanbaru knew about Senjogahara’s past as a middle school track star quite well. Otherwise─Kanbaru, given her nature, wouldn’t have given up without a fight. I recalled that according to Senjogahara, at the May eighth stage, when I learned her secret─the only person who knew about it at that moment apart from me was Harukami, the health teacher.
At that moment.
In other words, Suruga Kanbaru had noticed her secret in the past, but Senjogahara had forced her to forget. One of the poor victims…no, casualties─but had Kanbaru, of all people, really been able to forget about Senjogahara?
“…You were friends, weren’t you?”
“But your…situation has changed compared to a year ago. I mean, we cleared up that secret of yours, so─”
“Didn’t I just tell you, Araragi?” she cut me off. “I don’t intend to go back to any of that.”
“……”
“That’s how I’ve decided to live my life.”
“Oh…”
Well.
If that was her decision about her own life, it didn’t seem like my place to butt in─at least that’s how the logic usually went. And Senjogahara wasn’t so glib as to offer to bury the hatchet with someone she’d rejected so harshly just because her condition had become a thing of the past.
“Still…” I said. “I get your relationship with Kanbaru, but that doesn’t explain why she’s following me around, does it.”
“She must have found out that we’re going out. We started dating two weeks ago, and the stalking started three days ago, so the timing seems to work out fine.”
“What? You mean she’s curious what kind of guy Hitagi Senjogahara’s boyfriend is…and she’s checking me out?”
“I think it’s something like that. Sorry for the trouble, Araragi. I won’t mouth any excuses. This is on me for not being able to liquidate my relationships.”
“Liquidate…”
What a word to use.
Knowing her, it didn’t even sound figurative.
“Not to worry,” she assured. “I’ll take responsibility for─”
“Don’t! Don’t take responsibility! God knows what you mean by that! This is nothing, it’s my problem so I’ll take care of it!”
“Why so shy? Don’t be so standoffish.”
Hrrm.
In any case, or even so, it didn’t make sense to me.
“You shooed Kanbaru away in no mild fashion a year ago, right? And it’s been that way since? Would she still care if you got a boyfriend?”
“If it were an everyday case of an estranged senior finding a boyfriend, then sure─but this is different, isn’t it? Araragi. You did something she couldn’t, so actually I’m not surprised. The way she sees it, you succeeded where she failed.”
“Ah…I get it.”
She learned Hitagi Senjogahara’s secret…but was turned away, rejected, harshly and mercilessly. A little reasoning was all it took to arrive at the assumption that I, as the boyfriend, couldn’t possibly not know the secret, and seeing me by Senjogahara’s side even as I knew surely must have given Kanbaru some food for thought.
At the same time.
Kanbaru probably didn’t realize that the secret itself had been resolved. Because if her reasoning were that good, she’d have reached out to Senjogahara instead of me, or so I assumed.
“Hitagi Senjogahara was someone Kanbaru looked up to, if I do say so myself,” Senjogahara divulged, averting her gaze from me. “I knew I was in that position, and I did try to act the part. What could I do? I think there was nothing else I could do. So in rejecting her, I was extra careful to make a clean break─yes. But I guess the kid hasn’t forgotten about me after all.”
“…You shouldn’t say that like she’s annoying. She’s not doing it out of malice, right? And anyway, people forgetting you is a pretty depress─”
“She’s annoying,” Senjogahara declared without a shred of hesitation. “The presence or absence of malice isn’t the issue.”
“Come on, don’t be like that… If she looked up to you, and she’s still concerned about you…well, it might be weird to call it ‘making up,’ but don’t you have some room in your heart for her?”
“I don’t. It’s already been a year, it was in middle school that we were friends, and yes, it would be weird to call it ‘making up.’ I told you I’m not going back to any of that. Or are you saying I should walk up to her after all this time and apologize for making her wait so long? That would be the height of idiocy.”
Then, as if to close the door on that conversation, and also as if she’d just come up with something, Senjogahara changed the topic. She was, as always, slick.
“Oh, right. By the way, Araragi, do you have plans to meet Mister Oshino anytime soon?”
“Oshino? Well, I guess you could say I do…”
Maybe not Oshino─but I needed to let Shinobu drink my blood, and it was about time for me to go by that abandoned cram school. It was Friday, so I’d make some time tomorrow, or maybe the day after tomorrow…
“Okay. In that case.”
Senjogahara silently stood up, grabbed an envelope from atop her dresser, came back to me, and held it out. The envelope had a post office mark printed on it.
“Could you give this to Mister Oshino for me?”
“What is this… Ohhh.”
I realized as soon as I’d asked.
Mèmè Oshino─
That frivolous Hawaiian-shirted bastard’s payment for services rendered.
What he required to remove Senjogahara’s secret, the calamity that had befallen her─his remuneration, or simply put, his payment.
A hundred thousand yen, if I remembered correctly.
I checked inside to make sure, and indeed, ten ten-thousand-yen bills were inside. Exactly ten bills, crisp and probably fresh from the bank.
“Wow…you got that together faster than I thought you would. You made it sound like it would take you a while. Weren’t you going to take a part-time job or something?”
“I did,” Senjogahara said nonchalantly. “I got my father to let me help him out with his work. Well, I guess it’d be more accurate to say I forced him, but that’s how I earned the money.”
“Huh.”
Senjogahara’s father worked at some foreign company─and maybe that was the right choice for her? Regular part-time jobs didn’t seem suited to her personality, and our school forbade us from taking them in the first place.
“I was reluctant because getting help from my father somehow felt like cheating, but as someone who grew up in a family mired in debt, attending to money matters is a must. There was a little bit left over, so I’ll buy you lunch some time at the cafeteria. The food at our school is pretty good but reasonably priced, so you know, order anything you want.”
“…Thanks.”
Still, it was the cafeteria.
A weekday lunch break.
Did she not intend to go on a date with me, ever?
“But in that case,” I asked, “why not just go and give it to him yourself?”
“Nope. Because I hate Mister Oshino.”
“Understood…”
She was so direct about her savior.
Of course, it wasn’t like I loved Oshino, either.
“If I had my way,” she said, “I’d never meet him again, and I don’t want to have anything to do with him in the future. Not with someone who acts like he sees through people.”
“Yeah, I think you’re right that you and Oshino are incompatible. He has that frivolous and mocking attitude, and it clashes with your personality,” I said, placing the envelope next to my floor cushion. I slapped the envelope and nodded at Senjogahara. “Okay, I get it. If that’s how it is, I won’t say another word. I’ll take good care of this, and I’ll be sure to give it to Oshino the next time I meet him.”
“I appreciate it.”
“Yup.”
Then I thought─
Compatibility.
Attitude.
Personality.
Wasn’t that second-year Suruga Kanbaru’s out-of-left-field character─the exact flip side of Senjogahara’s? In terms of compatibility, attitude, personality, and everything else.
Senjogahara had been the star of the track team in middle school.
Moreover, she’d been admired. The worshipping gazes that she’d drawn─couldn’t have been Kanbaru’s alone. In that position, Senjogahara had played a certain character─she must have played a character that was the polar opposite of her current verbally abusive, acid-tongued self.
Abuse and flattery.
Acid tongue, soothing tongue.
Polar opposites.
Flip side.
Which meant.
“So, Araragi.” Senjogahara’s eyes were devoid of emotion. “Let’s get back to studying. Are you familiar with Thomas Edison’s famous observation? He said that genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. A great quote, worthy of a genius. But I bet he thought the one percent was more important. Don’t they say that’s about all that separates a human’s genes from a monkey’s?”
004
It was two years for Senjogahara─and two weeks for me.
The start of Golden Week to its finish for Hanekawa.
For Hachikuji, who knows. I can’t say exactly how long.
I’m talking about the periods we were in contact with aberrations─the amounts of time our abnormal experiences lasted. It was over those periods, those spans that our improbable, dreadful experiences, which were anything but normal, lasted.
Take Koyomi Araragi.
My case.
In this day and age, amidst our twenty-first-century civilization, it’s so embarrassing that it makes me want to find a hole and jump in it, but I fell victim to a venerable old vampire─a bloodcurdlingly scary terror, a traditional and legendary vampire, sucked every last drop of blood from my body.
She sucked me dry.
I was afraid of the sun, hated crosses, avoided garlic, and kept my distance from holy water, and in return, gained physical abilities that were tens, hundreds, thousands of times greater than a human’s, but once again in return, I felt an absolute hunger for human blood─like one of those nightwalkers so popular now in manga, anime, and movies. Really, it felt unfair to have become such a true-to-form vampire. These days they were fine walking around in daylight, wore crosses as accessories, ate garlic bread and washed them down with holy water, but still had absurd physical abilities─wasn’t that just mainstream now?
And yet.
A vampire having to suck human blood seems to be the one constant.
They’re bloodsucking demons, after all.
In the end, it was a dude passing by, not a vampire hunter, not a Christian spec ops team, not a vampire who hunted his own kind, but a regular dude passing by, a frivolous Hawaiian-shirted bastard named Mèmè Oshino who saved me from that hell─but that did nothing to erase the fact that I’d lived through those two weeks.
A demon.
A cat.
A crab.
A snail.
Still, I couldn’t allow myself to forget that there was a decisive difference between me and the other three. An especially large one, in particular, between Hitagi Senjogahara’s case and Koyomi Araragi’s.
I don’t mean the length of time, but the depth of our loss.
She didn’t intend to go back to that─she said.
But despite her talk about there being no need or necessity, didn’t she mean that she couldn’t go back to that time in her life even if she wanted to?
I say that because…for two years, she’d refused anything and everything you could call social contact. Hitagi Senjogahara had spent two years associating with no one in her class─and now that those two years were over, nothing had changed.
Aside from me, nothing had changed.
Koyomi Araragi was merely a unique exception for Senjogahara, and she hadn’t changed at all aside from that.
There was no difference between her before and her after.
She just stopped going to the nurse’s office.
She just started participating in P.E. class.
She sat in the corner of the classroom─and read silently. As if reading a book, in our classroom, was a way to build sturdy walls against her classmates─
She ate lunch with me now, and that was it.
A quiet model student prone to illness─that was still the position she occupied in our class. All that our classmates thought was that her condition must have improved somewhat, to whatever degree.
Hanekawa, our class president, innocently welcomed it, however, as a major change─but I couldn’t share her simple optimism at the new picture.
Maybe Senjogahara hadn’t lost anything.
Maybe she’d thrown it away.
But you ended up with the same result.
I absolutely don’t want to sound like I know it all, and I probably won’t learn the truth no matter how I relate to her going forward─and I bet I shouldn’t be second-guessing her.
Interfering, meddling, all that doesn’t seem right.
What if.
If Senjogahara not carrying a stapler around anymore is progress…if that is a change, then might not there be a furthermore?
Not just in relation to me.
About the other stuff, too, if─
“Hello?”
“Yes, thank you for waiting. This is Hanekawa speaking.”
“……”
Sure, that was a very proper way to answer a call, but wasn’t it a bit odd on a cell phone?
Tsubasa Hanekawa.
The class president─a high-end model student.
A woman who seemed like a born class president.
A class president among class presidents elected by the gods themselves─I’d meant it as a joke at first, but after spending two months working alongside her as class vice president, I came to see how seriously fitting the description was. All knowledge ought to be cherished by human beings, but I wish I’d been spared this particular tidbit.
“What’s the matter? It’s not every day that you call me, Araragi.”
“Nothing, really─it’s just, I had a question I wanted to ask you.”
“A question? Sure, that’s fine with me. Oh, is this about what our class will be doing for the culture festival? I think it’d be better if you didn’t give it much thought until after the skills test─you’re in a pretty tight spot, right? I can take care of all the busywork, of course. Or did you want to rethink what we’re doing? That’d be tough since we took a survey. Oh, or is there some problem and do we have no choice? We need to deal with it right away in that case.”
“…You didn’t even give me a chance to nod along.”
Not only was she quick to make assumptions, she was an even quicker talker.
It was hard work to find your opening with her.
Eight at night.
I was on my way back from the Tamikura Apartments, Senjogahara’s home, and was pushing my bike down the asphalt road instead of striding the saddle. It wasn’t because Hachikuji was by my side, nor because Kanbaru had spotted me and dashed up to me, that I was pushing my bike rather than pedaling. I just needed to think a little.
I ended up cramming until eight at night.
Despite naive hopes that maybe I’d get the chance to eat Senjogahara’s cooking for dinner, she didn’t even hint at it. When I casually brought up feeling hungry, unable to bear it any longer, she sent me on my way with nothing more than, “I see. Then let’s call it a day. I’m sure you remember, but there aren’t many streetlights in this area so do be careful on your way home. See you later, alligator.” Hitagi Senjogahara essentially lived alone because her father often worked late into the night, so she had to know how to cook, but…
She had such a high difficulty rating.
In any case.
I needed to think, but this was me we were talking about, someone whose tutor, Senjogahara, didn’t trust to earn an average score, so it wasn’t going to be particularly productive. It was mostly for my own satisfaction. Now, self-satisfaction did for some matters in the world, but not others, and this was the latter.
So.
Pushing my bike with my right hand and walking, I’d called Hanekawa on her cell. It was eight-thirty at night─whether that’s an appropriate hour to call a girl you aren’t that close to is a question I couldn’t answer, but Hanekawa’s reaction suggested that it fell within the boundaries of acceptable behavior. The incarnation of seriousness, a moral paragon, she’d tell me if I were acting out of line.
“Hm? That’s fine. I was only doing some light studying.”
“……”
Saying that without a hint of sarcasm was what made her a class president among class president elected by the gods themselves.
Light…what sort of studying could she mean?
“Well, okay,” I said, “I’ll try to keep it as brief as possible… You went to the same middle school as Senjogahara, right? What was it called again─oh, Kiyokaze Public Middle School?”
“Yup, that’s it.”
“So you must know a girl a year younger than you called Suruga Kanbaru.”
“Well yeah, of course? I mean, is there anyone who doesn’t? Even you know who she is, don’t you? She’s the captain of the basketball team, a school-wide star. I’ve gone with my friends to cheer from the stands at some of her matches.”
“No, listen. I’m not talking about now─I wanted to ask about the middle-school Kanbaru.”
“Hmm? You do? Why?”
“Why not?”
“Huh… Well, it was more or less the same in middle school. She was the star of the basketball team and everyone knew her. It sounds like she was team captain there, too, starting around the second half of her second year. Why do you ask?”
“Oh, um─”
I couldn’t tell her.
I couldn’t say the words.
I couldn’t possibly convince her.
That of all things, that star was, to put it unkindly, stalking me, of all people.
As it was, how much of this I should be babbling about was an issue, but then again we were talking about Hanekawa, so maybe it was okay to share a bit of my predicament. I’d of course fudge certain aspects as needed.
“I heard that she and Senjogahara were friends in middle school─were they?”
“Hmm? No, I think I told you, but it wasn’t like Senjogahara and I had any physical contact to speak of just because we went to the same middle school. She was a celebrity, so frumpy old yours truly just knew about her unilaterally─”
“The Valhalla Duo.”
“Wha?”
“You just reminded me. That’s what they were called, the Valhalla Duo. Senjogahara from the track team and Kanbaru from the basketball team.”
“The Valhalla Duo? What does that word mean again, I feel like I’ve heard it somewhere. And why’d they be called that…”
“Kanbaru’s ‘baru’ and Senjogahara’s ‘hara’ gives you ‘Baruhara.’ And Valhalla, from Norse mythology, is the heavenly hall where Odin, the supreme deity, resides and welcomes the spirits of heroes who died in battle. It’s like holy ground for the war god, so─”
“…Ah, Kanbaru’s name starts with the character for ‘god’ and Senjogahara’s with the ones for ‘battlefield.’”
“Thus the Valhalla Duo.”
“Phew…”
How some people exercised their wits to come up with a mere nickname… If I were to nitpick, it sounded too pretty, so you could only sigh and actually found yourself in a hard spot, but that’s just the career straight man in me griping.
“Since they were called a duo,” Hanekawa noted, “I assume their relationship at least hadn’t been bad or hostile. Senjogahara was on the track team until right before graduation, so they must have hung out as fellow athletes at the minimum.”
“You really do know everything.”
“I don’t know everything. I just know what I know.”
The same exchange as always.
In any case…I had confirmed their background.
And now that I had─what next?
How would I approach the foreground?
“I know I’ve already asked you this before,” I said, “but when Senjogahara was in middle school…she was nothing like she is now, right?”
“True, she wasn’t. Senjogahara seems to be changing a little bit lately, but she’s still not who she used to be.”
“Oh…”
She was changing.
But only when it came to me.
So─she wasn’t who she used to be.
“I guess she must have been popular with her juniors?”
“Yes, both the boys and the girls. And not just her juniors, you know. Her seniors loved her when she still had seniors, and she was well-regarded by students in her year─”
“Loved by everyone─young or old, male or female.”
“Middle school only lasts for three years, so ‘young or old’ would be an overstatement. But if I had to choose one specific group, then she might have been most popular with girls who were her junior. That’s what you were trying to ask, yes?”
“…I’m glad you’re so observant.”
She was a little too observant, though.
She wasn’t Oshino, but it felt like she saw through me.
“But, Araragi, you like Senjogahara as she is now, regardless of who she was in the past, right?”
“………”
I hoped she knew she was acting just like a fifth grader.
By the way, while we hadn’t particularly stated the fact to anyone at all, everyone knew that Senjogahara and I were going out. We weren’t openly mocked or excessively teased about it. Senjogahara was considered a mild-mannered model student by our class, so of course she wasn’t, and for my part I was simply not the type of classmate who attracted that kind of behavior. But even so, the entire situation was common knowledge, a tacit understanding.
Rumors were scary things.
It must have taken the rumor a little bit of time, at least, to hop the wall between third-year and second-year students and reach Kanbaru… Well, when you considered that Senjogahara was a celebrity together with the fact that she weighed on Kanbaru’s mind, it had taken quite a while, but that’s how it is between different years.
“Araragi, I know I’ve told you this over and over, but keep your relationship proper and platonic. Watch out so there won’t be any indecent rumors. Senjogahara seems like a serious girl, though, and I doubt your relationship will turn crass.”
“Serious, huh…”
Come to think of it, Hanekawa still didn’t know the real Senjogahara… Our other classmates were one thing, but deceiving the Amazing Class President Hanekawa, who knew we’d be going out before we actually did─Senjogahara, too, was a formidable player. In that respect, you could say she was showing me a side of herself she showed no one else… Hmm, but that didn’t make me particularly happy. That’s not what being a unique exception is supposed to mean.
But really, that was more or less the state of our relationship. She wouldn’t even cook for me, so how could our relationship ever become sleazy?
……
Oh.
If she was rebuffed─then regardless of how it had been in middle school, Kanbaru knew Senjogahara’s true nature quite well. If she was coming up to talk to me anyway, then she─
“Senjogahara is a tough one, okay?” Hanekawa said suddenly.
When she did─I recalled that she’d said something similar to me in the past, too. This was Hanekawa talking, of course, so it couldn’t be about Hitagi Senjogahara’s challenge rating.
“Not that I’m some kind of expert,” Hanekawa continued, “but she’s created an impregnable force field around herself like in a game.”
“………”
“And you’re someone else with one, Araragi. Everyone has one around them, putting aside how strong it is─call it a sense of privacy─but you and Senjogahara have built fortresses where you’ve holed up. People like that find human interaction annoying in general. Rings a bell, doesn’t it?”
“Are you talking about me? Or about Senjogahara?”
“Both of you.”
“Well, yeah.”
Of course.
But in that case.
“Still, Araragi, not liking to deal with people and not liking people are two different things.”
“‘Annoyances come / In forms none greater than that / Of the visitor’…” recited Hanekawa in a calm and quiet voice, “‘But then of course I speak not / Of yourself, my esteem’d friend’… I don’t care how bad you are at literature, Araragi, you must get what that poem is saying, right? And what I’m trying to say?”
“…I get it.”
I couldn’t reply any other way.
Even so─all I could do was thank her.
“Thanks. Sorry for wasting your time with this nonsense.”
“It isn’t nonsense. It’s normal for you to want to learn more about your special someone.”
Hanekawa actually said that.
She didn’t think twice about saying something so embarrassing.
A class president among class presidents, indeed.
“But,” she added, “I think it’s better not to go digging around your lover’s past too much. Don’t let it turn into fun and games. Stay within limits.”
Having put one last fat point on it, she appended a “Bye, then,” and fell silent.
I was puzzled as to why she said bye but didn’t hang up, until I remembered how she’d taught me over spring break that the etiquette was for the caller to do so.
Oh, what a frighteningly correct girl…
Thinking such thoughts, I told her, “Bye, see you tomorrow at school,” and pressed the button to end the call. I folded my cell phone and put it in my back pocket.
So, now what.
As someone who once stood in the same position and underwent the same kind of experience as Senjogahara, I of course understood her words and deeds to some degree─but I found my sympathies lying with Kanbaru.
If possible─I thought.
If only.
It would be a needless intervention, an overstepping of bounds, an unsolicited favor─Senjogahara had revealed her eccentric philosophy to me whereby generosity was an act of aggression, and this didn’t even smack of generosity.
After all, part of it was my own underhanded calculation. A motive so conceited that I balked at the thought, let alone expressing it.
But I couldn’t help but think─
I wanted Senjogahara to get back what she’d lost.
I wanted Senjogahara to pick up what she’d thrown away.
Why?
Because those were things I could never do─
“Asking Oshino about this wouldn’t do any good… That jolly idiot probably doesn’t give a damn about aftercare and following up. Not that I’m one to talk… Wait, hold on.”
Important but forgotten details often come back in a flash for no reason whatsoever, and that was exactly what had happened. I opened the zipper of the Boston bag hanging off my shoulder and checked inside. I didn’t need to in order to find out, but I was hoping against hope. Sure enough─the envelope I received from Senjogahara wasn’t inside.
“I left it on that cushion next to me… Ugh, what now?”
This was about money, so it was best taken care of at the earliest convenience, but there was no need to feel that rushed, and I could get it from Senjogahara when I saw her at school the next day, but…what to do? Though I doubted it, I couldn’t rule out the possibility that I’d put it in one of my pockets and that it had fallen out without me noticing as I walked talking on the phone with Hanekawa, so maybe I should call Senjogahara and make sure, just in case… No.
I was pushing my bike alongside me as I walked, so I couldn’t have covered that much distance. If I biked my way back to the Tamikura Apartments, I would be there in no time. In that case, the right course of action was to go back immediately to get it. There was the risk that I’d end up having to meet Senjogahara’s father considering how late it was, but the probability seemed negligible given what I’d heard about how hard he worked.
Sure, a phone call would get the job done just the same, but I wanted to see Senjogahara as often as I could.
I could be forgiven for acting at least a little like her boyfriend.
“Okay, then.”
I straddled my bike seat, turned around─
And wondered if it had started to rain.
Not because a drop of water hit my cheek or anything, but because of what I saw right in front of me after turning my bike around─a human figure, right in front of me as if it had been tailing me the whole time, entered my vision.
A human figure.
Dressed in a raincoat from head to toe.
It wore its hood deep.
Black rubber boots…and a pair of rubber gloves.
If it were raining, the outfit would provide perfect protection from the weather…but though I opened my palm, I didn’t feel a single drop after all.
The stars were in the sky.
We were in a rural town some ways from a provincial city─so other than a few shreds of clouds, nothing in the night sky was so boorish as to challenge the starlight.
“…Um.”
Oh…
I knew… I knew what was going on here… I knew it well, very well. It was what had played out during spring break, what I had experienced more than enough of…
Yet I couldn’t wipe the smirk, a completely inappropriate expression for the occasion, off of my face. The sensation was so familiar that I nearly felt a pang of nostalgia, oddly enough. I recalled my experience with Hanekawa during Golden Week as well.
If there was an issue here…it was that unlike during spring break, my body was no longer immortal and that I wasn’t a vampire.
It was no time for me to be keeping my cool…but cool was exactly what I needed to be to discern it and its nature. You could say that over the past few months, I had become a little accustomed, inured─
To dealing with aberrations.
…I hoped it was a physically harmless aberration like the one on Mother’s Day, Hachikuji’s snail…but my instincts told me that I had to flee. No, not my instincts, but the vestigial instincts of a legendary vampire that surely nested somewhere inside my body─
I tried to turn my bicycle back around─but in the heat of the moment, decided to dive off it and tumble to the ground.
It was the correct decision─in exchange, however, I lost my oh-so-precious mountain bike for good. Raincoat leaped in my direction too fast for my eyes to follow and punched, with its left fist, the center of my mountain bike’s handlebars just as I jumped out of the way─crushing and denting my bike and sending it flying like a weightless scrap of paper caught in a raging tornado. By the time it slammed into a telephone pole and fell to the ground, the object formerly known as a mountain bike had lost any traces of its original form.
If I hadn’t dodged─it would have been me.
I bet?
The wind pressure generated by the fist was enough to tear my clothes. My Boston bag’s straps snapped, too, and it fell from my shoulder to thud at my feet.
“…I-It’s on a different level.”
Even my smirk─vanished from my face.
I’d only been on the periphery of its attack, and I couldn’t believe its intimidating presence… It may not have rivaled a legendary vampire but was impressive enough to bear comparison…an aberration that brought bodily terror in its wake.
Forget about Mother’s Day.
This was, without question, spring break.
I’d lost my bike.
Could I still run away, on foot?
At least from what I’d seen of Raincoat’s moves… Well, I didn’t actually see them, but judging by its invisibly quick moves, getting away on foot was impossible.
Plus.
Even if it was to run away, I didn’t want to turn my back on this aberration─nothing felt scarier than turning my back on Raincoat, taking my eyes off of it. My fear was irrevocable, primordial.
So I take back what I just said.
You never become accustomed to such a sensation.
You don’t get inured no matter how many times you undergo such an experience.
You don’t even want to remember.
Raincoat twirled around towards me. Its hooded face made it difficult to read its expression─in fact, rather than an expression, what was there was akin to a deep pit. It was dark─so dark that I couldn’t see a thing.
Like it had been chipped out from this world.
Like it had been left out of this world.
Then, Raincoat stepped towards me.
Its left fist.
It came too fast for my reflexes alone to dodge─but it described a perfectly straight line like the blow that had destroyed my mountain bike, so I was prepared to react at the first sign of motion and was able to evade it again, by an inch─and the left fist that I’d evaded penetrated the concrete-block wall behind me like it was nothing. It was almost like a catapult launch.
While stunned by its hilarious destructive potential, I thought I’d be able to use the time lag to regain my stance as Raincoat pulled its left hand out of the wall, since it was like a monkey with its closed hand stuck inside a jar, but no, of course not, things weren’t going to be that convenient, and Raincoat wasn’t giving me a few seconds. As if a dam were collapsing around a leak, a dozen feet of the concrete-block wall crumbled and fell with a tremendous clatter.
That took me back.
Raincoat seemed to twist its entire body around as its left fist came right at me─this time there was no sign, no initial motion, only a determined attempt to punch me from its current position.
A catapult.
Forget about evading it, I couldn’t even defend against it.
I didn’t even know where it hit me.
A moment later, my world began to spin, then again, three times, four, and as if my thought processes were being scrambled, intense G’s assaulted me every which way, up and down, left and right, and the world began to warp and bend before I was slammed prone against the asphalt.
I learned what it might feel like for my entire body to be grated.
I felt like a block of cheese getting turned to curly shreds.
Yet─it hurt.
My body hurt from head to toe, but my abdomen most of all─I must have been punched in the gut. I tried to stand up in a panic, but my legs trembled and shook so much it was all I could do to go from prone to supine.
Raincoat was awfully far away. It looked that way. I thought it was some optical illusion─but no, it really was far away. That one blow seemed to have sent me flying an incredible distance. It truly was a catapult.
My innards─felt yucky.
The pain I was feeling…I’d felt before.
It wasn’t my bones.
A number of my organs had ruptured.
While they may have been destroyed, the shape of my body was, you could say, fine. Right, bicycles and humans were made different, so even if they took the same punch, one of them didn’t turn into a crumpled piece of paper. Nice one, joints. Viva muscles.
Having said that…
I couldn’t move thanks to the damage I’d taken.
And Raincoat was approaching me─this time at a relaxed pace, slow enough for me to see it clearly and for its figure to be burned into my brain. Perhaps one more shot, and if not, two or three more and it would all be over─in other words, there was no need for it to feel hurried or impatient now.
That did make sense. It was a reasonable decision.
But…what was going on?
This aberration was practically a thrill killer… It was clear by now that, no matter how humanoid in shape, it wasn’t “human” given its power to crush a bicycle and smash through a concrete-block wall─but why was this aberration attacking me?
For every aberration, there was a reason.
They were rational─grounded in reason.
That was the most valuable thing I’d learned from Oshino, and from my time with the gorgeous vampiress─thus, the logical conclusion was that there was a reason for this aberration, too, yet I couldn’t think of anything─
What was the cause?
I thought back to the day’s events.
I thought back to whom I’d seen.
Hitagi Senjogahara.
Tsubasa Hanekawa─
My two little sisters, my homeroom teacher, my classmates whose faces were fuzzy, and…
As I was coming up with names in no particular order─
I remembered Suruga Kanbaru’s at the tail end.
“………!”
Just then─Raincoat turned around.
Its humanoid body turned a perfect 180 degrees.
No sooner than it did, it took off in a dash─
And vanished.
It was so sudden that I found myself at a loss for words.
“Wh…Whaa?”
Why would it do that all of a sudden?
I looked up at the sky as the pain that reigned over my body turned from dull to sharp─and the starlight was still beautiful. It was such a discordant sight given the faint smell of blood wafting in the air from all over my body.
Yes, my organs were definitely wounded. My guts had been vigorously churned. But it shouldn’t be enough to kill me… And I wouldn’t even need to go to the hospital. Though my body may no longer be immortal, I still retain a modicum of regen capabilities. A night’s rest would have me back up and running. So I’d managed to escape with my life barely intact…
But…
Suddenly, and for no particular reason, I recalled the moment before I was hit. Raincoat’s left fist was aimed in my direction─I had a flashback focused on that fist, and that fist alone. Maybe it was when it punched my bike, or maybe when its fist went through the wall, but the friction of the blow must have destroyed the rubber glove, opening up a line of four holes at the base of its fingers─and just like the inside of Raincoat’s hood, they seemed somehow chipped out, left out, hollow, but.
The contents of that gloved fist.
It belonged to some kind of beast─
“Araragi,” I heard a voice call from above me.
A flat voice, so cold it was below freezing.
When I looked toward it, I met an equally cold, emotionless gaze─it was Hitagi Senjogahara.
“Yes, it’s been a while.”
It had been less than an hour.
“I’m here to give you something you forgot.” With those words, she shoved the envelope in her right hand in front of my eyes. She didn’t have to bring it so close, I could see that it was the envelope containing the hundred thousand yen fee she was paying Oshino. “Brazenly forgetting something I handed to you is a capital crime, Araragi,” she scolded me.
“Yeah…sorry.”
“Apologize all you want, I’m not forgiving you. I came here so that I could bully you to my heart’s content, but it looks like you’ve already punished yourself. Quite an admirable show of loyalty, Araragi.”
“Listen, I’m not one of those guys into punishing myself…”
“……”
She was lessening my sentence but not absolving me.
The Senjogahara Court seemed to be tough on crime.
“Joking aside,” she said, “what happened, did you get hit by a car? I see that precious thing you called your bicycle over there, and it looks like it’s been heavily damaged. Or rather, it’s sticking out from a telephone pole. A convoy would have had to run over you for it to end up like that.”
“Umm…”
“You remember its license-plate number, I hope? I’ll go and avenge you. I’ll start by turning the car into scrap metal, and then I’ll put the driver through so much pain he’ll be begging for me to finish him by running him over and over with a bicycle.”
Hitagi Senjogahara never hesitated to say the most alarming things.
I was relieved that she was the same as always. I had to admit, though, it felt both weird and amusing that Senjogahara’s acid tongue was making me feel alive…
“…No, I just tripped and fell. I need to watch where I’m going… I was pedaling my bike while I was on the phone…and slammed into a telephone pole…”
“Did you, now. Okay then, would you like me to destroy that pole at the very least?”
It wasn’t even a misbegotten grudge.
“Please don’t. I’m sure the neighbors around here would be annoyed if you did…”
“Okay, then… But you know, Araragi, you have a very flexible body if you were able to slam into that concrete-block wall hard enough to break it and only come away with a few cuts and scrapes. I’m impressed. Maybe someday you’ll actually be able to make good use of that flexibility. Oh, I could call an ambulance, but…I guess you don’t need one?”
“Nah…”
Had Senjogahara gone through the trouble of bringing that envelope because, like me, she wanted us to meet as often as possible? Maybe she’d meant to take the bus to bring the letter to my house. If so, it still wasn’t enough to make her a real tsundere, but I could almost feel elated…
Also, she’d saved me.
However unexpectedly.
Because Raincoat must have noticed Senjogahara─and vanished as a result.
“If I just rest a little longer,” I said, “I’ll be able to move.”
“Oh. Okay, I’ll reward you with a very special something.”
Stride─
Senjogahara stepped one foot over and across my face-up head. I’d like to reiterate, her outfit that day featured a long skirt. She had stockingless, smooth, slender, bare legs─and now, from where I was lying, the length of her skirt didn’t matter so much.
“Enjoy it until you can move again.”
“……”
To be honest, I could have gotten up already─but I decided to take the opportunity to think some things through. Not that thinking was a productive activity for me…but for the time being.
And about tomorrow.
005
Suruga Kanbaru’s home was about thirty minutes away by bike from the front gates of our school. It was also about thirty minutes away on foot if you dashed the whole way. At first I tried telling Kanbaru to get on the back of my bike so we could ride together, but she demurred. It’s dangerous for two people to ride on one bicycle, and it’s against the law to begin with, she said. Well, I couldn’t argue with that, and perhaps she was reluctant because getting on the back meant holding on to me the whole way. In that case, I thought, I could push my bike and walk alongside her or leave it at school, but Kanbaru told me not to worry about her and to ride. Then what’s she gonna do, I wondered, until she told me, like it was the most natural thing, “Okay, let me show you the way,” and dashed off on her two feet. This was just as true now as when she stalked me, but for Suruga Kanbaru, “dashing” seemed to be a mode of transportation just like “by foot, bike, car, or train.” This seemed unusual to me, even for jocks. Tup, tup, tup, tup, tup, tup, Kanbaru’s sharp and lively rhythm went as she guided my bike─with the white bandage on her left hand. When we arrived at our destination, her breathing completely unperturbed, she had somehow only worked up a small sweat.
It was an impressive Japanese home.
I could practically feel the history coming from it.
I knew that it must have been her home from the nameplate reading “Kanbaru” on the gate, but the premises had an air of solemnity about them that gave me pause nevertheless.
Still, I was going to go inside.
I intruded on the premises with the same indescribable feeling that overcame me when I visited a shrine or a temple on a school field trip, and after we walked down a hallway that faced a traditional courtyard, bamboo-pipe fountain and all, I was shown into Kanbaru’s room beyond a sliding paper-screen door.
…As I looked around, I wondered how she could have allowed in a senior whom she didn’t even know that well.
Her futon hadn’t been folded up; her clothes were strewn across the floor (including her underwear); many books, be it textbooks, novels, or manga, lay open face-down on the floor; a mountain of cardboard boxes that belonged in a warehouse stood in one corner; and worst of all, her trash didn’t sit inside a waste basket but was left carelessly all over the tatami mats, packed into plastic bags from her neighborhood supermarket or just as-is. In fact, the room seemed to lack any container burdened with the quaint notion of holding trash.
It should have felt spacious, at over two hundred square feet.
But there was nowhere to take even a first step.
“I apologize for the mess.”
Suruga Kanbaru said this briskly with an innocent smile on her face, her right hand on her chest. Maybe the words were fitting for the occasion, but I’d always thought of them as a modest disclaimer you uttered upon inviting someone into a room that was at least somewhat tidy.
What’s flooded on top and in blazes on the bottom?
Well said, actually.
Oh god…
There were even some hygiene products…
I reflexively looked down at my feet.
If I didn’t, I might find plenty of things that would be even worse to see. Self-confidence is a good thing, but being shameless is something else, Suruga Kanbaru…
Oh.
That applied to Senjogahara too, didn’t it…
True, there wasn’t a speck of dust to be found in Senjogahara’s room… Still, she’d had a major influence on Kanbaru back in middle school not limited to her personality, and it just seemed to have ruined Kanbaru’s character, if anything.
“There’s no need to be modest,” my hostess urged. “You’re hesitating to enter the room of a girl you don’t know well, which speaks to your delicacy, which I find rather charming, but I don’t think this is the time for that.”
“…Kanbaru.”
“Yes?”
“Sure thing. Whatever you want. I’m in no place to turn down any from you.”
“I just want an hour, no, thirty minutes… Just give me some time to clean this room up. Also, give me a big garbage bag.”
I didn’t see myself as a clean freak…and it wasn’t like my room was particularly tidy, either, but this was just awful…cruel, even. Kanbaru seemed confused, as if she didn’t have a clue as to what I was talking about, but that must have also meant that she had no real reason to refuse. With an “Okay, then,” she went to get me a garbage bag.
Fast forward.
Well, actually.
The disaster that was Kanbaru’s room wasn’t, of course, something that could be rectified in thirty short minutes, not to mention that at the end of the day, this was the room of a girl I didn’t know that well, which meant that while I could grab some things, there were others that I couldn’t touch for ethical and moral reasons. So pretty much all I did was gather up the scattered trash and tidy up her books and magazines (or so I say, but with no bookshelves in Kanbaru’s room, I simply stacked them up according to size). It was a halfhearted attempt, like sweeping a circle in her square room, but even so, once I folded up her futon and stored it in her closet and folded up her clothes and put them in a corner (she didn’t have hangers, let alone a dresser), the sight became bearable, or at least, there was enough space for Kanbaru and I to sit facing each other and talk.
“Incredible, my senior Araragi. So that’s the color of my floor mats. I wonder how many years it’s been since I last glimpsed them.”
“You’re counting in years…”
“I’m grateful.”
“…Once this is settled, let’s take a full day…no, I’ll even stay over to spend multiple days cleaning up this room. Next time I’ll bring a full set of serious cleaning supplies, like liquid cleaner and spot remover, okay?”
“Sorry for making you fuss over me. Basketball is about the only thing I’m good at, and cleaning up or tidying up or finishing up or whatever it’s called isn’t my forte.”
“……”
She was wearing such a broad, self-assured smile that I didn’t know what to say… During those thirty minutes, she’d stood idle and absentminded in the hallway and shown no signs of helping out. I didn’t think she was lazy or slovenly, only really that inept at tidying up her room, but still, though it was none of my business, the sight had been one to hide, at all costs, to be withheld, absolutely, from the eyes of students at our school who considered her a star. She hadn’t invited any of her classmates here, had she? Friends were one thing, but if she invited one of her club juniors, she ran the risk of traumatizing them. Among the many things I’d stuffed into the garbage bag were crushed soda cans, candy wrappers, and empty instant noodle cups… What was an athlete on the national level doing eating and drinking that stuff?
I knew that a quirk or two could actually cause a celebrity to be more likable, but this was going too far no matter how you looked at it. Try as you might, you wouldn’t find such a character adorable…
“Okay, then─”
It was tomorrow.
Saturday.
While most of society has long taken the two-day weekend for granted, Naoetsu High, the private prep school of note that we attend, regularly holds classes even on Saturdays. Even after tomorrow turned to today, not having arrived at any kind of conclusion, I used the break between first and second periods to head to the building for second-years. I was going to be talking to a famous star, so there was no need for me to look up her class. Class 2-2. While the other kids were abuzz that a third-year had visited them (a familiar yet fresh feeling for someone like me who no longer had senior schoolmates), Kanbaru─being Suruga Kanbaru─walked up to me with a majestic gait as I waited in the hallway.
“Hello there, my senior Araragi.”
“I see. In that case,” Kanbaru replied, no questions asked, as if everything had been worked out in advance, “please come with me to my home after school.”
And─
There I was at her home, the Japanese mansion.
There was no need to go all the way there if all we were going to do was talk. We could have done so in an empty classroom, on the roof, on the athletic grounds, or even at a nearby fast food restaurant if we had to do it off campus, and I’d told her as much, but Kanbaru seemed to want to do it at her home for a reason.
If she had a reason, I’d oblige.
I wasn’t going to ask.
“So,” she said, “where should we begin? Of course, as you can tell, I’m not much of a conversationalist so I’m not sure how this is supposed to go, but first things first.” Kanbaru re-crossed her legs and bowed her head. “I’d like to apologize for what happened last night.”
“Yeah…” I’d recovered in a day’s time─though I might have felt some lingering pain in my stomach, which I rubbed for a moment before nodding. “So that was you, after all.”
The raincoat.
Rubber gloves, rubber boots.
Needless to say.
“‘After all,’ huh,” Kanbaru echoed me. “I don’t know how to feel sometimes when I hear you speak. You’re so humble. You saw straight through it, didn’t you? You wouldn’t have come to me otherwise.”
“Not really…I was just guessing. Based on your build, your outline, your silhouette, that kind of thing. I added filters, like people who were aware that I was paying Senjogahara a visit for a study session, and ran a search, so to speak… And if I went to you and I was wrong, I’d just be wrong. It’s not like there would be an issue.”
“Hmm, I see. How astute of you.” Kanbaru sounded genuinely impressed. “I’ve heard that some boys can identify a girl by the shape of her hips. Was that it?”
“I apologize. I hadn’t meant to do that.”
Kanbaru bowed her head again.
To me─she seemed sincere.
But if she hadn’t meant to…then what had she been up to? It was clearly an attempt on my… Or was that not the case, either?
“Well,” I said, “apologies are great, but what I wanted to hear was your reason. Actually─we can put aside the reason.”
Her reason.
It wasn’t that I had no clue.
I wasn’t going out of my way to say it now, but it was the very bit, the hint that pointed to Raincoat being none other than Kanbaru.
But─
“In any case, that power, that abnormal power─”
Abnormal power.
Aberration.
It crumpled my bike like paper.
It demolished a concrete-block wall with a single strike.
“That’s what I want to ask about,” I continued. “What, exactly, did you…”
“Hrmm. I was wondering where to begin, but that would be where, I suppose. Fine… But first, I’d like to ask if you’re the type of person who can accept the absurd.”
“The absurd?”
That must have meant─oh, right. Of course.
Kanbaru didn’t know about my body. About my once-immortal body─while she had dealt me significant damage the night before, I didn’t heal so quickly you could see it taking place, so of course she didn’t know. Thus her preface─but wait, no.
Even if Kanbaru didn’t know about me, she knew about Senjogahara, having learned her absurd secret before me. And─as her boyfriend, I had to know the absurd secret, in Kanbaru’s mind─in other words, maybe she was sounding me out at that very moment.
“Did that not make sense?” she asked me. “My question is whether or not you’re able to believe what you see with your own eyes.”
“I only believe what I see with my own eyes. Which is why I’ve believed everything I’ve seen. Naturally, that goes for Senjogahara, too.”
“…Oh, so you even figured that out.” Without a hint of guilt or shame at my remark, however, Kanbaru continued, “But. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. It’s not like I’ve been following you around recently because I want to learn more about her.”
“Huh? You weren’t?”
I’d been─completely convinced of that.
She was trying to confirm the rumor that Koyomi Araragi and Hitagi Senjogahara were going out─wasn’t she? And then, when she heard that I was going to Senjogahara’s home for a one-on-one study session, she felt certain─didn’t she?
Well, I was probably right about that.
My read wasn’t mistaken, but─was there a separate reason for the stalking?
“You and Senjogahara were called the Valhalla Duo as the basketball star and the track star, I’ve come to understand.”
“Yes, exactly. I’m impressed you know that much, I underestimated you. I thought I’d praised you as much as I could, but it looks like I still fell short. I could never measure your greatness with my own piddling values. The more I get to know you, the further away you feel.”
“…Someone told me, that’s all.”
Despite all her flowery praise, she wasn’t coming across as a sycophant or brownnoser to me, which in a way made her a work of art.
“Isn’t it? I came up with it myself.”
Kanbaru puffed her chest out with pride.
…She’d thought of it herself.
I hadn’t felt so heartsick in a while…
“I thought about it for the longest time before coming up with that one. By the way, I also came up with a personal nickname for myself, ‘Li’l Suruga Can-do,’ but that one didn’t stick, unfortunately.”
“I’m feeling very disappointed, too.”
“Oh, so you sympathize?”
Yes. On account of your poor sensibility.
“You’re such a compassionate senior. Of course, now that I say it out loud, it was a little long to use as a nickname. I can see why it never caught on.”
“If we’re gonna postgame it, that was the least of your errors.”
Including Senjogahara back in those days…
“Anyway, yes,” she said. “Putting aside the Valhalla Duo, perhaps I’ll only annoy you by spelling things out considering how perceptive you are, but in middle school Senjogahara and I were─no, before I go into that, there’s something I want to show you. That’s why I asked you to spare some of your valuable time to trek all the way here.”
“You want to show me something? Oh, I get it. That something was at home, and that’s why we couldn’t talk at school or just anywhere.”
“No, that’s not it. It’d stand out at school, or maybe you could say I was afraid of people seeing it… I’d prefer it if no one else did.”
Saying so─Kanbaru began to unwind the white bandage on her left hand. She undid the clasp holding it wrapped around her arm, and methodically, starting with her fingers─
It came back to me.
The night before.
It had destroyed my bike, smashed through the concrete-block wall, and ruptured my organs─
It had been the doing of a left hand balled into a fist.
“To be honest, I don’t really want people seeing this. After all, I’m a girl.”
She unwound the entire bandage─and rolled up the sleeve of her uniform. What I saw there was Kanbaru’s girlish, slender, soft-looking upper arm, and connected to it from the elbow down─a bony left hand covered in thick, black hair you’d expect to see on a wild beast.
It had peeked through the holes worn through the rubber glove.
The scent─of a beast.
“Well, this is how it is.”
“………”
Could it have been an odd-looking glove or hand puppet─no, clearly not. It was far too long and thin─and anyway, apart from how it looked, I had witnessed something similar though not quite the same for certain over Golden Week─so I knew.
That it was nothing but an aberration.
An aberration.
I called it a wild beast─but I’d be hard-pressed to say what kind. It felt like it could be any animal, but also like no animal in existence. While it looked like everything, it seemed to belong to nothing. But if I had to say, given the five reasonably long fingers and the shape of the nails extending past them, only if I had to say─
Although I don’t think it’s a very appropriate way to describe a girl’s body part.
“A monkey’s paw.”
Those were my words.
An ape─as in the general term to describe any non-human primate.
“Huh.”
For some reason─Kanbaru was looking at me with admiration.
Then, she smacked her knee and said, “I knew it. It is impossible, after all, to measure just how discerning those eyes of yours are. I’m stunned, it’s like they work in a completely different way. You were able to figure out what this is at a single glance. I’m simply amazed. There’s no comparing the knowledge you possess to the resources of a plebeian mind like mine─that must mean there’s no need for me to explain anything else.”
“H-Hey, don’t feel convinced all on your own!”
No way I could let her stop explaining now.
She might as well have hung me out to dry.
“Really? That’s the title of a short story by William Wymark Jacobs─‘The Monkey’s Paw.’ The theme of the monkey’s paw has been used so many times in all kinds of media that it’s been spun off into different patterns─”
“Never heard of it,” I confessed.
Oh, Kanbaru said. “That you would utter the truth without knowing makes me wonder if you enjoy some celestial being’s blessing. Intuiting the essence, no logic required!”
“…Well, my intuition does enjoy a little bit of a reputation.”
“I knew it. And now I’m proud of myself. I’m nowhere on your level, of course, but to the extent that I laid store in you, my intuition was spot-on.”
“Oh, really…”
If you asked me, her sights were misaligned.
Um, I said, looking at Kanbaru’s left hand again. A beast’s hand─a monkey’s paw. “C-Can I touch it?”
“Yup. It’s fine for now.”
“O-Oh…”
With her permission, I brought my hand close to her wrist─and touched it gently.
Timidly, fearfully.
The texture, the flesh…the heat, the pulse.
It was alive.
So this aberration─was a living aberration after all.
…So even Suruga Kanbaru, who had no issue with me seeing her room in that state, did mind showing people this left arm of hers… What she’d said about spraining it while doing solo workouts was nothing more than talk. The bandage wasn’t to protect her injury but a way to hide her arm… And yes, I’d found it a little strange that she didn’t disfavor the left side of her body despite the sprain…but I guess it’s not very convincing of me to say that after the fact.
Then again.
It made sense she wasn’t able to play basketball with that left hand.
Without thinking.
Squeeze─I tightened my hand around her wrist.
“Mm, ahh, no,” she moaned.
“Stop with that weird voice!”
Without thinking, I let go.
“But you were touching me in a weird way,” she objected.
“I wasn’t touching you in any weird way.”
“Okay, but that’s no reason for you to moan in a way that contradicts your character so far…”
When I thought about it, Senjogahara had pulled the same trick a few times. It had to be in a diametrically opposite way from her current self, but if Kanbaru had it down too, then Senjogahara’s repertoire included it since middle school…
“Kanbaru, just in case you’ve forgotten, this is your home and your room, okay? What do you think is going to happen to me if your parents heard you moaning like that?”
“Oh, that’s okay,” she replied jovially. “You don’t need to worry about them, at all.”
“…Fine, then.”
Huh?
Why was she saying that like she didn’t want me to bring up the topic, like she was openly refusing to pursue it any further? While her tone was as upbeat as ever, it really did seem out of character.
So anyway, Kanbaru rushed to get us back on track, opening and closing her left hand. “As you can see, it moves like I want it to right now─but there are also times when it won’t. No, I guess you might say there are times it moves like I don’t want it to─”
“Like you don’t want it to?”
“Want, or hope─hmm, what’s the right word. It’s hard to say. I guess it would be when I’m trying to explain something that I don’t understand very well myself… However. It was me who attacked you last night, it was definitely me─yet I barely remember a thing. It was like a waking dream, or maybe a reverie─it’s not like I don’t remember anything at all, but it felt like I was watching something on television, like I couldn’t step in─”
“A trance,” I interrupted her explanation. “You were in a trance─that’s what it’s called. I know all about it… Aberrations that possess humans come in and have their way with your mind and body.”
That wasn’t the case with me─but it was in Hanekawa’s, the occurrence with Tsubasa Hanekawa’s cat. That’s why she remembered practically nothing about what happened over Golden Week, when she came into contact with an aberration. As a case, this one seemed close─there’d been a similar type of phenomenon where Hanekawa’s body transformed, too─
“You know a lot,” Kanbaru admired. “So that’s what this is called, an aberration─”
“I’m not particularly well-informed, though. It’s just that I’ve had a lot of experiences with them lately for whatever reason, and there’s someone who is well-informed about them─”
Oshino.
This─was right up his alley.
It was Oshino’s domain.
“─that I met.”
“Okay. Well, I’m fortunate you’re so broadminded. We wouldn’t be able to talk if you ran away the moment I showed you this arm. And I would feel hurt. More than a little.”
“Luckily, you see, I’ve gotten used to dealing with the absurd, so don’t worry. The absurd…meaning Senjogahara, too─of course.”
At this rate, I should tell her later about how I got involved with an aberration myself and temporarily turned into a vampire… From an accountability standpoint, maybe I needed to tell her now, but there were still too many unknowns about the aberration that was Kanbaru’s left hand for that.
“Still, I was a little surprised,” I shared. “You made me hiccup, as my fifth-grade friend would say. But since you’ve started with the most surprising part, I’m confident that nothing else you tell me will shock me.”
“Ah. Of course, that’s why I had you look at my arm first. We’ve cleared the biggest hurdle from the get-go. All right, to business, then.”
With a smile Kanbaru went on.
“I’m a lesbian.”
“……”
I fell over in shock.
Like in a Fujiko Fujio comic.
“Oh, I see,” Kanbaru mumbled at my reaction. “Maybe I was a little too blunt, given that you’re a man. Umm…” She cocked her head. “Allow me to correct myself. I’m a sapphist.”
“It’s the same thing!”
I had yelled, in an attempt to keep myself grounded.
Huh? What? So, what did that mean?
Is that why she and Senjogahara were the Valhalla Duo back in middle school? A year apart, were they? Senjogahara calling her “that kid”? Hunh? Is that what she meant the day before when she said she’d never broken up with a boy?
“Oh, it’s not like that. I only had a crush on her, there was nothing the other way around. To me, she was purely perfect, a senior I could look up to. I was content just to bask in her presence.”
“Content just to bask in her presence…”
That really did sound nice. But.
An unrequited crush, she’d gone ahead and told me…
Hachikuji, I thought, the woman in you led you in a completely wrong direction… No, I needed to calm down. I couldn’t reject stuff out of prejudice… Right… Maybe this is how girls were these days. Maybe my worldview was dated. Maybe I needed to be less serious and more liberal.
“Yes, a sapphist.”
Kanbaru looked happy for whatever reason.
Be that as it may…
Whether it was vampires, cats, crabs, or snails, class presidents, always-ill girls, or grade schoolers, cat ears or tsunderes or lost children, or even sapphists, the world was, how should I put it, full of new challenges, or maybe insatiable.
It was a free-for-all.
Did Senjogahara know that about her? Probably not, given the way Kanbaru had said it. But whether she did or not, I doubted it concerned a middle-school Senjogahara very much.
The star of the track team and the star of the basketball team.
The Valhalla Duo.
“She was popular with everyone,” Kanbaru related, “but I’m pretty sure my feelings for her went beyond that. I’m certain of it, in fact. I was even ready to die for her sake. Yes, you could say I wanted her, dead or in love.”
“……”
Uh…what?
I wasn’t sure if that was clever or not.
“Mm,” she hummed. “That came off better than I expected. Pretty inspired of me to play on ‘alive’ and ‘in love,’ if I do say so myself. Wouldn’t you agree?”
It was a bad pun.
Anyway.
I told Kanbaru to go on.
“Go on? I don’t know, it’s not like we’re discussing the past. To speak of continuing, it’s of a piece with the present. I chose Naoetsu High in the first place to chase after her.”
“Yeah… That’s what I assumed after hearing your story. If anything, it all makes better sense.”
I ran the risk of insulting Kanbaru’s teammates all over again depending on how she took it so I kept the words to myself, but a basketball star in middle school should have been able to play in a better environment via an athletic recommendation or something. Yet, for whatever reason, Kanbaru had decided on Naoetsu High, a school that put as good as zero focus on extracurriculars, basketball included. Why? What could have been her motivation?
Her devotion.
Well, even then, it was all too straightforward.
“I was so taken with her that I would’ve licked a candy that came out of her mouth.”
“……”
Was that an image she ought to be putting into words in front of other people?
“My third year,” she lamented, “the whole year after she graduated, was colored gray.”
“Gray, you say.”
“……”
She really liked that term.
Sure, if that’s what she wanted.
“My gray matter’s gray Sapphic existence,” she said.
“That’s not even remotely clever.”
She was trying too hard to insert jokes into our conversation.
This could stay a tad more serious.
“How strict of you,” she complained. “You’re setting too high a bar for me with your tough standards. It’s strange, though. Knowing that you’re doing it for my own good eases me into accepting them.”
“Uhh… What happened to your gray Sapphic existence next?”
“Yes. That year drove home just how important she’d been for me. That year we were apart may have weighed more on me than the two years we were together. That’s why my plan was to tell her how I felt if I got into Naoetsu High and could meet her again. With that goal, I spent all of my time studying for entrance exams.”
So said Kanbaru.
She was as full of confidence as ever, but it seemed like her cheeks were flushed. She must have been embarrassed, plain and simple. Uh oh…it was kind of cute. I was busy being confused and bewildered when she was stalking me, but now for the first time I was starting to feel fond of Suruga Kanbaru, my junior. Gosh, a whole new Sapphic-moé territory was opening up inside of me…
I found myself barely caring about Kanbaru’s beastly left hand…but no, I knew that was where the meat of this story lay…
“Forget about candy. Gum,” she averred. “I was so taken with her that I would have chewed a piece of gum that came from her mouth.”
There had to be a nicer image.
“But,” Kanbaru said, her tone sagging exaggeratedly, “she had changed from the senior I knew.”
“Ah…”
“She had changed completely.”
A crab.
Hitagi Senjogahara had encountered─a crab. She’d lost much, thrown away much, and rid herself of much─and she rejected everything. It must have seemed like Hitagi Senjogahara had transformed into a different person altogether for those who’d known her in middle school, like Hanekawa. And for Kanbaru, who had worshiped Senjogahara─the transformation must have been too thorough to take.
So thorough it made her doubt what she saw with her own eyes.
“I had heard that she became seriously ill after entering high school─and that she had quit running because of how protracted it was. I knew that much coming in. But I never imagined she could have changed─that much. I thought it was all a bunch of nasty rumors.”
Seriously ill, eh…
Well, she wasn’t wrong to look at it that way… Ultimately, Senjogahara had a chronic condition that still dogged her.
“But─I was wrong. Those rumors were so off the mark that they didn’t even scratch the surface. Something far worse had happened to her body. I noticed─and I thought I had to do something. I had to save my senior. How could I not? She was really good to me when I was in middle school, and I’ve never forgotten it. We may have been in different years and on different teams, but she was extremely generous.”
“That generosity…”
That generosity─what had it meant to Senjogahara? But this wasn’t the time to speak or inquire about it, was it?
“And that’s why I tried to save her─I wanted to. But I couldn’t even begin to approach her. She refused.”
“Ah…”
It seemed like too much to expect her to tell me exactly how. She was probably covering for Senjogahara… Kanbaru would never speak a single bad word about her, no matter what.
Yes, it wasn’t hard to guess that she’d had something just as bad, if not worse, done to her… Frankly speaking, I didn’t care to know.
For my sake, and for Kanbaru’s.
For Senjogahara’s sake, too.
Stapler.
“I thought I could do something.” Despite an air of chagrin, of regretting it from the bottom of her heart─Kanbaru was forcing herself to sound calm and collected. “I thought I could do something about whatever she was burdened with. Even if I couldn’t get rid of the cause, even if I couldn’t relieve her symptoms, I could be by her side─and heal her heart.”
“……”
“What a joke that was. I was such a foolish girl. Looking back on it, it’s nothing short of comical.”
Because Senjogahara didn’t want anything like that at all─
So said Kanbaru, with downcast eyes.
“She told me, ‘I don’t think of you as a friend or even as my junior─not now, nor did I ever.’ To my face.”
“Well…”
That did seem like something she would say back then. If there was any weapon she carried deadlier than her stationery, then it was her acid tongue and bitter abuse.
“At first I thought that meant she thought of me as her lover, but it wasn’t the case.”
“That was quite positive of you.”
“Yes. So she was even more blunt the next time. Being friends with a talented junior like me would boost her own reputation, and that was the only reason she was nice to me, the only reason she acted like a caring senior─she said that.”
“…That’s awful.”
Senjogahara’s goal was to hurt her─
Her goal was to make her go away, so─
Yet, only yesterday, Senjogahara had called Kanbaru “that kid” and her junior in middle school, and confirmed that while it was no longer true, they were friends back then. Perhaps I was interpreting her words to hear only what I wanted to hear─but still.
“I was happy that she called me a talented junior, though.”
That was positive of her.
Through and through.
“But─that’s when I learned how powerless I was. I was so conceited to think that I could heal her with my presence. If anything─she didn’t want anyone at all near her.”
There are some people in the world─who aren’t lonely when they’re alone.
It wasn’t hard to pin Senjogahara down as one of them─at the very least, she probably hadn’t ever appreciated herding for its own sake. Even as her middle-school sociable self, she must have thought so quietly─but.
That’s different from wanting to be alone.
Just as not liking to deal with people and not liking people aren’t the same.
“That’s why I never accosted Senjogahara after that day. It was the only thing she wanted from me, after all. Of course, I could never forget her─but if stepping away and not doing a thing, if not being by her side could save her─I could agree to that.”
I didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t simply her gallant attitude that moved me, but her choice of words: the decision wasn’t helpless or inevitable, but one she could agree to. According to Senjogahara, Kanbaru never came back─but that wasn’t it. Kanbaru had stepped away of her own will.
She was so─serious.
About Senjogahara.
Even now.
“I was careful not to run into her. I made sure that my field of activity wouldn’t overlap with hers, whether that meant meeting her by accident in a hallway, catching a glimpse of her at morning assemblies, or crossing paths with her at the cafeteria. I made arrangements, not just so that I wouldn’t have to worry, but so that she wouldn’t have to worry about me, either. Of course, I couldn’t help people talking about me when I did well in basketball games, so I manipulated the rumors myself to make sure they were a mix of fact and fiction.”
“…Which is why the gossip about you is so all over the place, you seem to have a personality disorder.”
I got it now.
“I managed to do that for one year. It wasn’t a gray Sapphic existence, it was a black one. Hard to say whether all of that getting directed into even more enthusiasm for basketball was a good thing or a bad thing… But then, after a year─I learned about you.”
“……”
Considering how much she cared about Senjogahara, you’d think she’d have found out sooner, but maybe it wasn’t simply because we were in different years─wasn’t it because Kanbaru went out of her way to avoid hearing about Senjogahara?
And yet.
She ended up learning about Koyomi Araragi.
“I couldn’t hold back any longer─for the first time in a year, I consciously…visited her. Or tried to. Of course, there’d been a few careless mistakes in the span of a year, but this was my first time intentionally seeing her. And she─was in a classroom that morning, chatting and cooing away with you. There was a happy smile on her face, too, of the kind she never showed me even back in middle school.”
“……”
Which particular pile of abuse was Senjogahara heaping on me then? That’s about the only time a smile comes across her otherwise expressionless face.
“Do you understand?” Kanbaru looked at me straight. “Something I wanted so very much, that I wanted so very much but had to give up on, you did like it was the most natural thing in the world.”
“Kanbaru… No, that─”
“At first, I was jealous,” Kanbaru said, punctuating every word. “I tried not to be,” she went on, her voice holding back a torrent of emotions. “To the end, I was jealous,” she concluded.
“……”
“I wondered why it couldn’t have been me. I was jealous of you, and I was disappointed in her. I wondered if she would have accepted me if I were a man. I wondered if the problem was that I was a woman. She didn’t need friends or juniors but didn’t mind having a lover? In that case…”
In that case─Kanbaru glared at me with an accusatory gaze for the first time.
“In that case, why couldn’t it be me?”
I knew she was my junior, a girl who was younger than me, and that she wasn’t the type to begin putting her hands on me in a frenzy─but her eyes were so irate I was scared she might.
“I was jealous of you and disappointed in her. And─I was appalled at myself. I was going to heal her heart? I was going to step away? It was a lie, all of it. It was all my ego. It meant I didn’t care as long as I was happy. Was I hoping she’d praise me, or what? Ridiculous. You couldn’t be any more hypocritical. But even then─I wanted things to be like before. I wanted her to be kind to me. Even if it was selfish, I wanted to be by her side─which is why.”
Then.
With her right hand─she touched her left.
Touched the beastly left hand.
“Which is why I wished upon this hand.”
006
I’m sure there’s no need to give a synopsis of “The Monkey’s Paw” by William Wymark Jacobs─but not having known about the story before, I thought why, yes, what a well-made ghost or horror story. A textbook tale of dread, tried and true─indeed, once I heard it, I felt as if I’d heard it somewhere before.
It was a classic, in other words.
According to Kanbaru, the monkey’s paw was a pretty well-known item, though it didn’t compare to vampires, and was reused in lots of different media in lots of different ways. Spun off into a bunch of different patterns, splitting from one new version to the next like an evolutionary tree, but with one shared, underlying factor common to them all, the biggest factor that makes the monkey’s paw the Monkey’s Paw─
But not in the way its owner intends, the story goes─
Those two elements.
It was the kind of item you described by appending “the story goes.”
Say that you wished for riches. You might wake up the next day to find that your family has died and that you’ll be receiving their life insurance. Say that you wished for a promotion at work. You might wake up the next day to find that the company has taken a turn for the worse, that the upper management has been fired, and that you’re being promoted at a failing company.
That kind of thing.
It seems the Monkey’s Paw was an item created in India by an old mystic to teach people that they should live according to their fate and that terrible disasters await those who defy it. A reputation that it can grant three wishes for three people, for instance, accompanies its entry into the story.
The first thing I think of when I hear about three wishes being granted is the magic lamp in the Arabian Nights, but how did that story go and end? Similar tales can be found all over the world. Considering how subject humans are to endless, insatiable desires, narratives where some sort of being capable of granting any wish presents itself to people might be a fundamental form of storytelling. The best known of its kind among ghost stories seems to be “The Monkey’s Paw”─
“So─what’s his name again, Mèmè Oshino? Did I hear that right?”
“Yes, but he’s not cute like his name makes him out to be. I already told you this, but he’s some older dude who likes wearing Hawaiian shirts. I don’t want you getting your hopes up or anything. He doesn’t look the part to say the least, so I want you to be prepared for that.”
“No…that’s not what I meant. His name is just so striking, or maybe symbolic… It doesn’t matter, though. Still, ‘Mèmè’ would be hard to turn into a nickname…”
“Huh, yeah… I wonder what people called him when he was a kid. I have to admit, I’m curious… Actually, I can’t even begin to imagine what he was like as a kid.”
Oshino dwelled in an abandoned four-story cram school a little ways away from any residential areas─to put it simply, these were ruins. Ones that children wouldn’t dare each other to enter, that people living in the vicinity might not even register as a building─these ruins existed as scenery. They were so aged that a large earthquake would probably raze the whole thing─well, I say aged, but the cram school went out of business only a few years ago when one of the large chains opened up a branch right in front of the station. The site was like a cadaver meant to teach us what a horrible state buildings ended up in after only a few years of disuse. So while I say Oshino dwelled there, it wasn’t official in any way, and you could call it a grand case of squatting. He’d been living there for the two months since spring break, surrounded by signs that read “Private Property, No Trespassing.” The desks left behind serving as his bed, he roamed around town all day.
Roamed.
Yes, that’s right. It wasn’t as if he stayed put.
So I could come to see him, as I was doing then─but actually finding him there was a matter of chance. He didn’t have a cell phone, or even a PHS, and to be honest, there was a lot of luck involved in meeting him.
It took a little more than an hour to get there on bicycle from Kanbaru’s Japanese estate.
It also took a little more than an hour to dash over, if you were Kanbaru, of course.
The two of us looked up at the abandoned cram school.
“By the way,” she asked me, “you said you were attacked by a vampire, but─was that your first time with an aberration…or whatever you call them?”
“Yeah, probably.”
Maybe I just hadn’t noticed earlier instances.
It was the first case that I was aware of.
“Spring break for you, and then her, and now me… It seems suggestive of something, doesn’t it? Nothing before, and now three in quick succession.”
“Yep.” It was actually five if you counted Hanekawa and Hachikuji, but I decided to be somewhat vague and hide that fact out of respect for their personal privacy. “Once you experience it, you’re more likely to experience it again─apparently. So maybe it’s always going to be like this for me now.”
“That sounds tough.”
“Not really… It’s not all tough. Experiencing an aberration means having an experience that’s out of the norm, and you probably come away from it having noticed and gained new things.”
Although I said that, it sounded like I was papering over it or covering my tracks to avoid telling her how I felt. Just thinking back to my spring break experience told me that I was beating around the bush by saying that it wasn’t all tough. Partly because I felt awkward, my eyes wandered over to Kanbaru’s left hand─and the rewound white bandage. I couldn’t see what it concealed, but once you knew, you could tell nonetheless that there was something slightly off about the length and shape. Even if she did her best to make it hard to notice by wrapping some areas multiple times…
“My senior Araragi, she and you have been in the same class for three years in a row even though our school shuffles homerooms every year. I assumed that you two were at least a little close from before─but from what I’ve heard, you only spoke to her for the first time three weeks ago.”
“I don’t know if I could say it was the absolute first time, but…I wouldn’t have noticed her secret if she hadn’t gone and slipped, and we probably wouldn’t have started dating. And─if I hadn’t known Oshino, I doubt I could have helped her out… So in that sense, it was luck. I guess it was convenient…or that I was inconvenienced? You knew about the Monkey’s Paw, Kanbaru, and I knew a vampire. That’s all.”
Upon learning Senjogahara’s secret a year ago─Kanbaru was able to believe it so readily, I presumed, thanks to knowing the monkey, just as I’d experienced the demon and the cat by that point. Which meant the only difference between us was that I knew Oshino, a way to fight back.
That’s why I couldn’t help but think.
What if Kanbaru had known Oshino─no, not necessarily him, but some sort of spiritual technocrat who could aid Senjogahara─and solved her secret a year ago? Wouldn’t Kanbaru be in my position then─rather than me? Putting aside differences in age and gender for the time being─
Sheer luck.
You could call it a fated meeting─but it was chance.
“I appreciate how considerate you’re being,” Kanbaru thanked me, “but I wish you wouldn’t say that. She isn’t that kind of person. She wouldn’t confuse gratitude for love. That was just what got the ball rolling.” Kanbaru’s words were tinted with a pale desolation. “And that’s exactly why it’s so frustrating. When she rebuffed me, I stepped away. Meanwhile, you chased after her. If anything made a difference, it wasn’t vampires versus monkeys, nor knowing this Oshino, it was that.”
“……”
I’m sure of it, she muttered.
Talking to her like this made me realize how surprisingly introspective she was…the complete opposite of what you’d expect from her image of an athletic girl full of vim and vigor. But if she was remorseful, I felt like I was, too.
What was it?
This emotion akin to remorse as I chatted with Kanbaru, as if there were pins being pricked into my heart─I knew there was no need but found myself constantly trying to paper over things.
And that made me feel even more remorseful.
“Yes…but,” Kanbaru said, “I am honestly glad that her problem was already gone. It might be strange for me to be thanking you, but that’s what I’d like to do, from the bottom of my heart.”
“Well, like I told you, it wasn’t me, the credit should go to Oshino─actually, no, it wasn’t him either. Senjoghara got saved thanks to Senjogahara. She simply went and saved herself all on our own.”
That’s how it was.
Oshino and I had barely done a thing.
There were no two ways about it, that was it─
“Ah…maybe you’re right. But can I ask you one more thing?”
“What is it?”
“I get why she fell for you. It puts my jealousy and disappointment to shame… Yes, I think I get it. But what is it about her that made you fall for her? You said she was just another classmate for over two years, a classmate you’d never even spoken to.”
It was hard to answer when she put it so bluntly. Part of me was embarrassed, but the bigger issue was being asked for a specific reason… It was just that in that park on that day, on Mother’s Day─
Oh, of course.
It made sense.
That was the source of my remorse.
“…Why do you ask, Kanbaru?”
“Well. What I’m trying to say is that if it’s just her body you’re after, I think I could take her place.”
“………”
An incredible proposal.
With her right hand and her bandaged left, Kanbaru grabbed her own breasts and squished them together and up. She was still wearing her school uniform, and enhanced by the immodest mismatch, her enticing pose exuded an almost unnatural allure.
“I think I’m pretty cute.”
If she did say so herself.
“I think I’d look a little more feminine if I grew my hair out, and I’m not indifferent to skin care. Plus, thanks to having always played sports, my body is nice and toned, with just the right kind of waistline. I’ve been told I have the kind of figure that men savor.”
“Bring over whoever told you that, so I can kill him.”
“It was the basketball team advisor.”
“This world is done for!”
So what do you think, Kanbaru asked for a second time.
She didn’t seem to be joking or half-joking or jocular, but absolutely serious, and she bore down on me to give her one of two answers: yes or no.
“I’m ready to do this, you know. All you have to do is ask, any time and any place, and I’ll be the bottom for your top.”
“Hm? Oh, I see. You don’t have any grounding in BL. That’s surprising.”
“I don’t want to talk about BL with a younger girl!”
“Hm? BL just stands for ‘Boys’ Love.’”
“I know that! It’s not like I got that wrong!”
Yes, I’d noticed.
When I cleaned her room, there’d been so many books scattered around with those kinds of covers!
I’d pretended I hadn’t seen anything!
“Oh, so you weren’t confused. I was sure you were, judging by your reaction. Then what exactly are you so mad about? I didn’t mean to offend you with anything I said. Could it mean you’re a bottom?”
“Not another word about this!”
“I’m more of a sub, so I don’t think I can top.”
“Wha… Um, you lost me.”
Were we entering forbidden territory here?
I felt like our conversation was treading on thin ice.
“And anyway, Kanbaru, why would a boy and a girl have to do BL anything? There’s zero need for that.”
“But you see, I want to preserve my maidenhood for her─”
“I don’t need to hear it!”
The thin ice had cracked. This conversation was underwater!
Hitagi Senjogahara and Suruga Kanbaru, are the two of you conspiring to smash into dust every illusion I have about women?! I’m sure of it now, the crisis management part of my brain is telling me outright, it’s unmistakable, you’re old acquaintances, the Valhalla Duo!
Tiptoeing and sneaking off, or running away on fleet feet, my chances at happiness were abandoning me in droves. I could feel it with my whole body and heaved a sigh.
Ahh… They were grinding away at my sanity with all this risqué talk about “going after her body” and “supple, carefree limbs, the kind of figure that men savor”… Though precocious in her own way, talking with Hachikuji the day before was fun because she never sounded weirdly jaded─or so I thought back fondly to my conversation with a grade school kid.
“I’m sorry, but if you’ll allow me to be intrusive,” warned Kanbaru, “I don’t think you’ll be able to make it very far in the adult world if you can’t talk smut with girls younger than you. Be smart and jettison your precious notions about femininity as soon as you can.”
“If there’s anything I don’t want to be scolded about by a girl younger than me, that would be it.”
Not that putting it another way would have made it fine.
“Still,” she insisted, “I don’t want to belabor the point, but expecting me to be chaste thanks to these flimsy illusions of yours presents actual problems that start with saying hello. Don’t blame me, girls are interested in dirty talk, too.”
“Uh huh…”
This whole episode was liable to foment its own set of illusions about women, though… Was I wrong to think that with Senjogahara or her, the context was different?
“All right,” Kanbaru said, “then let’s get back to if you’re a briefs guy or a boxers guy.”
“I don’t think that’s what we were talking about?!”
“Huh? Was it whether or not I wear panties under my bike shorts?”
“Excuse me, but you don’t, Miss Kanbaru?!” I was so shaken I found myself speaking politely. “Th-Then those bike shorts peeking out under your skirt are…!”
“Even if that’s the case, why be shocked? Bike shorts were originally designed as a form of underwear.”
“All the more so then! You mean you’re walking around with your underwear out for the world to see!”
“Hmph. Yes, I suppose you could say that, but just think of it as the chic dispensation of a sporty girl.”
“No! It’s the perverted behavior of an exhibitionist!”
“Oh, now I remember, that’s not what we were talking about, either. It was whether I could serve as a replacement for─”
“Hold on, don’t rewind the conversation and leave such a question hanging! Tell me right now if you’re wearing anything underneath!”
“Can we gloss over such vulgar matters, please? It’s a triviality.”
“It isn’t a triviality, it’s a watershed moment─is my junior a sporty girl or an exhibitionist?!”
Smuttiness aside, we were going on and on about nothing in particular.
“Okay, then,” conceded Kanbaru, “why don’t you look at it this way. I’m both a sporty girl and an exhibitionist. For those who see me as a sporty girl, I am that; for those who see me as an exhibitionist, I am that too.”
“Stop with these word games! That kind of line stops being cool once you get out of middle school! What are you, my little sister?!”
Our conversation about nothing in particular reached a peak.
It could only be about something now.
“…But listen, Kanbaru. Seriously, no matter how hard you try, you’re not going to take Senjogahara’s place.”
“……”
She wasn’t going to take her place.
I was talking about more than what she’d said.
“You’re not Senjogahara, after all. No one can take someone else’s place, and no one can become someone else, either. Senjogahara is Hitagi Senjogahara, and you are Suruga Kanbaru. No matter how much you love her, no matter how much you idolize her, no matter how much more you do.”
“…You’re right.” Kanbaru nodded after a brief pause. “You’re exactly right.”
“Yeah. So let’s stop wasting time chatting, and get going. And also, can you knock it off with that pose already? You’ve turned me into someone who has an extended conversation with a high school girl who’s groping her own breasts. That’s too surreal a picture for me.”
“Guh. I didn’t notice.”
“Notice.” It went for other stuff, too. “The sun will go down if we don’t hurry─it’s bad news if it gets dark, right? For your left hand.”
“Yes. It also means everything’s fine as long as it’s bright out. I’m completely okay for another few hours at least.”
Kanbaru and I walked alongside the chain-link fence that surrounded the building until we found a large hole. Three weeks earlier, Senjogahara had gone through it with me─this time I was with her junior, Kanbaru.
I’d never thought I’d have anything to do with her.
The webs we weave.
Ties that bind.
“Watch your feet.”
“Yes. Thank you kindly.”
I pushed forward through the wall of unkempt grass, trying to make a path for Kanbaru as she followed behind me. Wondering how it was going to be in summertime if it was this way now, I entered the crumbling, or you might say already-crumbled, cram school.
It was still a mess.
The concrete fragments, empty cans, signs, shards of glass, and who knew what else were still a mess, a royal mess. The building was already dim in the late afternoon as it had no power, making it seem even more decayed than otherwise. I thought Oshino could at least tidy up the building if he had so much free time on his hands. Didn’t living in such a place depress him?
I guess it was a little better than Kanbaru’s room…
Senjogahara had scowled at the building’s wretched state and Oshino’s insouciance, but I wouldn’t have to worry with Kanbaru…
“It’s filthy,” she said. “I can’t believe it. If this Oshino person lives here, he ought to clean up.”
“……”
I guess she was tough on others about certain things?
Or maybe it was that she wasn’t self-conscious… I thought her brazen attitude came from her confidence, but perhaps there was another side to it.
Senjogahara was abnormally self-conscious.
Oshino primarily roosted on the fourth floor.
I walked─in the dim light.
The farther we got from the entrance, the deeper the darkness grew─what an oversight on my part. I’d been to the building so many times, I could have at least brought a flashlight. I’d brought the envelope containing a hundred thousand yen that Senjogahara had entrusted to me─in other words, I’d planned on coming here regardless of how my conversation with Kanbaru panned out. I could have spared the idea some thought.
But, well.
It depended on the time and the place, but for the most part, I was fine with darkness…which is why I found myself forgetting such obvious things.
Mementos from my time as a vampire.
“……”
I turned around when we reached the stairs to notice that Kanbaru’s steps were incredibly timid and wobbly. She must not like the dark, I thought. When you considered that she was normally a fearless sportswoman, her gait appeared all the more precarious and uncertain. In her state, walking up stairs would be an ordeal. Whatever was up with her left arm, it’d be a big problem if she hurt her legs, too… I remembered how I’d led Senjogahara by the hand when we came here together…
That was the first time I had held her hand.
Hmm…what to do? Kanbaru must have declined to ride behind me out of such considerations, and come to think of it, I’d learned only yesterday just how strict Senjogahara could be about cheating…
“Hey, my junior Kanbaru.”
“What is it, my senior Araragi?”
“Like this?”
“All right. It’s docking time.”
I pulled her hand toward me by the tip and had her grip the belt that I wore on my school-issued slacks.
“We’re about to climb up some stairs, so don’t trip. I’ll be sure to walk up slowly, so be careful.”
“……”
No matter how strict Senjogahara’s guidelines were, this degree of physical contact couldn’t possibly count as cheating. It was a brilliant idea. It seemed like sophistry, I admit, but I would at least have a proper excuse prepared for Senjogahara.
“Aren’t you kind,” Kanbaru said, tugging on my belt as though she were testing its strength. “You must get told that often. That you’re a good, kind person.”
“Who wants to get told, and often, the kind of thing you tell someone who doesn’t have a personality?”
“Even when it comes to guiding me through the dark, you’re minding both her and me, and I’m grateful from the bottom of my heart. I’m pained by your consideration. I’m envious of your discretion.”
“…Was my thinking that transparent?”
She was a sharp one.
You usually wouldn’t catch on to that.
But since she did, why go and spell it out? I felt so awkward. The jokey way I’d gone about it made it so much worse.
“My senior, there’s something I want to ask you.”
“What is it? Ask whatever you want, as long as it’s not about tops and bottoms.”
“Oh, then I’ll put that bit off until later.”
“It’s on your list of questions?!”
“As are panties and exhibitionism.”
“We already played it out!”
“To be frank, only dirty talk interests me.”
“Judging by everything you’ve said…it seems like you haven’t talked to her about me at all.”
“Hunh? No, I have. That’s how I learned you two were the Valhalla Duo.”
To be exact, I’d heard that from Hanekawa, but I hadn’t understood their relationship until I checked with Senjogahara. I might have guessed, but guesses were all they were going to be. I wouldn’t have thought to ask Hanekawa.
“That’s not what I meant,” Kanbaru said. “About my left hand. About my left hand attacking you…”
“Oh, that. Yeah, I haven’t had the opportunity… I was in no state to last night, and I didn’t know the truth of the matter anyway, or that your left hand was like that. I wasn’t even close to sure you were behind the attack in the first place. It was just speculation. As far as she knows, I ran into a telephone pole on my bicycle.”
“Will that do, with all the collateral damage?”
“Well, I can’t get the police or a hospital involved thanks to my formerly vampiric body. If things go public, it’ll be just as annoying for me. I don’t plan on keeping what happened with you a secret from Senjogahara forever, of course, but…I just thought it was something you should tell her, not me.”
“I should?”
“See, I’m not a kind person or a good person. It’s just that I have my motives─”
My underhanded calculations.
My scheming persistence.
Something I, myself, could never do─
“…Hm? Whoa there.”
Shinobu was there on the landing between the third and fourth floors.
Shinobu Oshino.
A blond girl who looked to be about eight years old, her skin so white it seemed translucent, wearing a helmet and a pair of goggles─she was there on the landing sitting directly on the floor, legs folded, arms around her knees. You might have mistaken her for the spirit of a dead child from Japanese folklore if not for her golden hair.
I yelled in surprise despite myself.
Shinobu glared intensely at me and Kanbaru as we came climbing up the stairs. It was a loaded gaze full of hate and gravity, of unspoken words and unfulfilled desires.
“……”
I ignored her.
I ignored her, averting my eyes, and walked around her, refusing to pay her notice, to proceed to the fourth floor… But why was she sitting on the landing, of all places? Could she have gotten in a fight with Oshino?
“H-Hey, what was with that girl?” asked Kanbaru in a mildly agitated, flighty voice once we were on the fourth floor. Then again, it would have been weirder for her to pay no mind to a girl like Shinobu mysteriously sitting on the floor of some ruins… Well, part of Kanbaru’s body had turned into an aberration. Could she have sensed something from Shinobu?
“She was super freaking cute!”
“You said that with the biggest smile you’ve shown all day!”
“I want to hold her in my arms… No, I want her to hold me in her arms!”
“You fall for anyone, don’t you?!” I’d thought there was only one girl for her. Plus, this was a child she was talking about. “Just keep that stuff to yourself…”
“I don’t want to keep any secrets from you, though.”
“Naked?”
“Don’t react to just that word! Do I have to watch every single phrase I use now? I’ve never met someone who’s harder to talk to!”
She was a real horn dog, or rather, she wasn’t Sapphic only for Senjogahara… Every one of my illusions, and not just ones about women, was being blown to pieces like it was a carpet bombing. Swearing to myself that I’d never allow her to meet Hachikuji, I gloomily conveyed a warning.
“…Well, you should stay away from─that.”
A vampire.
─husk of.
A vampire.
─dregs of.
That was what Shinobu Oshino, the blond girl, was.
When the devil is away─the mice.
“Hm. I see… Too bad,” Kanbaru lamented.
“And now that you’ve said so with the saddest face you’ve shown all day, here we are. Time to find out whether Oshino’s in or not… We can’t just put this off until tomorrow if he isn’t, though. My life’s in real danger.”
“…Sorry.”
“I’m not trying to be mean or anything. Don’t feel bad about it.”
“Well, I don’t feel good about it, either. I think I need to make it up to you somehow. Ah, right, what’s your favorite color?”
“Huh? My favorite color? Are you giving me a present? I don’t know if I have one, but if I had to say, I guess aqua blue?”
“Okay, got it.” Kanbaru nodded. “Then I promise from now on, whenever I meet you, I’ll do my best to be wearing aqua blue underwear.”
“Don’t drag me in to your dirty talk or make it seem like I’m the reason! It’s all on you and your sexual frustration!”
There were three classrooms on the fourth floor. The doors to all of them were broken. If Oshino was in the building, he would be in one of the three, but─
The first room was a miss.
We checked in the second room─and there he was.
“You’re late, Araragi. I’ve been waiting so long that I nearly fell asleep.”
Mèmè Oshino─lay there on a linoleum floor so cracked and ripped you wouldn’t just trip but get deep cuts if you walked across it with bare feet, a piece of cardboard box so discolored it must have been rotting as his only bedding. And without getting up, he greeted us off the bat with those words in his usual all-knowing tone, despite not knowing the first detail about our situation.
His crumpled, psychedelic Hawaiian shirt, his shaggy hair, and his generally filthy appearance. Words like “clean” or “refreshing” existed on a separate plane from the man. You could say it was an appropriate look for the ruins he lived in, but what he could have ever looked like before coming to them was by now beyond my imagination.
Oshino scratched his head like even that was a bother.
Then, and only then─did he notice Kanbaru, who, out of anxiety or alarmed by the very questionable Oshino, was trying to hide behind me and holding tight to my belt with her right hand though we were already here.
“Oh. So you’re brought yet another girl with you today, Araragi. You’re with a new one every time we meet─why, I’m quite glad for you.”
“Shut up. Don’t keep spouting the same lines.”
“You say that, but what am I supposed to do when it’s the same situation? My repertoire is limited. Hm? And another girl with straight bangs, at that. Judging by her uniform, are you two classmates? Does your high school regulate hairstyles? Interesting, that’s a very antiquated system they’ve kept around.”
“No, we don’t have such rules.”
It was just coincidence.
Or rather, though Kanbaru wore hers short, it was probably because she was imitating Senjogahara that they had similar hairstyles. I wasn’t aware of any reason behind Senjogahara’s, but as for Hanekawa, well, as a symbol of seriousness? That had to be it more or less.
“So it’s what you’re into, after all,” asserted Oshino. “Hmph. In that case, I’ll cut little Shinobu’s hair, too, for your next visit. She just lets it grow out, and it’s about time she had a haircut. In exchange, do you think you could bring a girl with a one-length haircut next time? I might be wasting my breath, but I’m putting the request out there.”
“…I saw Shinobu on our way up. What’s she doing there?”
“Oh, she’s sulking because I ate one more than I should of her snack-time Mister Donuts. She’s been like that since yesterday.”
“……”
What kind of a vampire was she?
And what kind of a dude was he?
“I tearfully handed over the Pon de Ring, so she’s one narrow-minded little girl. I think I need to teach her the phrase, ‘quality over quantity.’”
“I don’t care… I couldn’t care any less. Also, Oshino, one correction. She’s not my classmate. Take a close look, her scarf isn’t the same color as Senjogahara’s or Hanekawa’s, right? She’s a year younger than me, and her name is Suruga Kanbaru. Kanbaru as in ‘god’ and ‘plains.’ And Suruga as in…umm.”
Oops.
I knew how to write it, but it was hard to explain…
The barely literate Koyomi Araragi was showing his colors.
“Suruga as in ‘Suruga-toi,’” Kanbaru chimed in helpfully.
Thank goodness…but wait, what exactly was that?
I’d never heard the term before. Was it toi in the sense of “question”? Like some famous quiz? A riddle like with the Sphinx?
Ugh, if he hadn’t known, I would’ve gotten an explanation without having to speak up… I clicked my tongue, but I hated having to wonder, so I asked Kanbaru, “What’s ‘Suruga-toi’?”
“It’s a famous method of torture from the Edo period. They’d hogtie your hands and legs behind you, hang you from the ceiling, put a heavy rock on your back, and spin you around.”
“Don’t use a torture method to explain your name!”
“It’s something that I’d love to undergo sometime in my life.”
“………!”
So she was a sapphist, a BL fan, a sub, a bottom, a pedo, and a masochist?!
How could all of that apply to any one person…
The star of our school didn’t need to spread conflicting rumors about herself. She already had a personality disorder.
I was at a loss for words.
“Anyway, I’m Suruga Kanbaru.”
The exchange seemed to have relaxed her, and finally letting go of my belt, Suruga came out of half-hiding─and in her usual proud, confident, and unhesitating way, stated her name, her right hand in front of her chest.
“I’m Araragi’s junior. Nice to meet you.”
While Suruga was smiling─
Oshino was smirking.
Written out, “smile” and “smirk” look similar, a difference of only two letters, but seeing their expressions up close, I received very dissimilar impressions that were pretty much diametrically opposed. It proved to a painful degree that looking happy wasn’t enough. Yes, Oshino’s was lighthearted too, but so much so that it felt unpleasant. The man was just sculpted to seem fake.
“…Hmph. If you’re his junior, that makes you missy tsundere’s junior as well.”
As he said this, Oshino’s eyes were unfocused and distant as if he were looking at Kanbaru’s back─and me and Senjogahara both being third-years and Kanbaru therefore being Senjogahara’s junior as well didn’t seem to be his entire point.
“Oshino─anyway, I should start by giving this to you. It’s from the very same missy tsundere, Senjogahara.”
“Hm? An envelope? Oh, money. Money, money. Perfect, I was just starting to feel squeezed. This should last me until the rainy season. Once it starts, I won’t die of thirst, but I thought I’d be keeping a stiff upper lip in the meantime.”
It was amid such dire straits that they’d fought over their Mister Donuts… No wonder Shinobu was sulking. Vampire or not, she did come from a noble bloodline. Cohabitating in these ruins with a filthy older guy was like plunging to the lowest depths… Since I was partly to blame, I didn’t know what to think…
Oshino checked the contents of the envelope.
“Yep, exactly a hundred thousand yen. This clears out any balance between me and missy tsundere. You know, she’s made a good impression on me, giving this to you instead of coming to hand it to me herself. She seems versed in the way of the world.”
“Huh? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? It feels like giving it to you in person would be a show of good faith, or good grace─”
“It’s all the same whether you make gestures like that or not. But I don’t intend on having that argument with you, Araragi, it’d be a pointless one at best. So─what’s up with this missy?” Oshino asked casually, jabbing his chin in Kanbaru’s direction as he crammed the envelope (those fresh bills, all for naught) into the pocket of his Hawaiian shirt. “I’m sure you didn’t bring her here just so you could introduce a cute junior to me. Or did you actually do it just to show her off? If that’s the case, I underestimated the kind of man you are, Araragi… Ha hah, but that couldn’t possibly be it. Which means─hm, could it be that bandage? Ah…”
“Mister Oshino. I’m─” Kanbaru began to say something.
007
Mixed among the crushed soda cans, candy wrappers, and empty instant noodle cups I found while cleaning up Suruga Kanbaru’s room was a single item that gave me pause, a long and thin paulownia box. I could feel its age from the color of the thing, and though it was covered in scratches, probably due to how carelessly Kanbaru treated it, the box seemed thick and sturdy. I assumed that it held some sort of curio─maybe a vase. Its presence, or that it might contain some such object, didn’t seem odd given how impressive the Japanese home I stood in was.
But.
The box was empty.
That of course wasn’t enough for me to classify it as trash, so I placed it on top of some cardboard boxes for the time being, but around when we got down to business, Kanbaru made a show of reaching out, grabbing the box, and placing it between the two of us. Then she asked me what I thought had been inside the box. A vase or something, I replied candidly.
“So even you can be wrong sometimes… This might be rude of me, but I’m relieved. Saved. I feel like you’ve given me a glimpse of your humanity.”
“…And what was inside it?”
“………”
A mummified left hand, inside a paulownia box.
According to Kanbaru, she used it for the first time─in elementary school. Her mother had given it to her eight years ago when Kanbaru was still in third grade.
It was apparently the last time she ever saw her mother.
A few days after Kanbaru was given the box, both of her parents died in a traffic accident─the timing was so perfect it was as if her mother had known what was going to happen. Kanbaru said it happened while she was in math class at her elementary school. They’d died instantly in a multiple car pile-up on some far-off highway. Their car caught fire, and the remains were left in an awful state.
Kanbaru was taken in by her grandparents on her father’s side.
She said she’d lived with her parents in an apartment until then, just the three of them─because her mother and father had eloped. Their wedding had brought them no blessings or congratulations. Her father came from a traditional and storied family, while her mother’s world was far removed from any of that…or so Kanbaru told me. I had to wonder if those kinds of things still happened in this day and age, but she said they do all the time.
“My mom suffered because of that. My dad─rebelled against such customs, but it was no use. His family pretty much cut ties with him. In fact, I hadn’t met my grandparents until the day of my parents’ funeral. I didn’t even know their names─and they didn’t know mine, either. That was the first thing they asked me, what my name was.”
“Huh…”
Flooded on top and in blazes on the bottom.
You don’t need to worry about them, at all.
Those kinds of things─happened.
But despite whatever strife had intervened with her mother, Kanbaru was their son’s only daughter─their grandchild. Taking her in was the natural thing to do, and so Kanbaru left the town where she’d lived her entire life, of course transferring schools in the process.
She wasn’t able to fit in.
“The way I spoke was different. I might talk like this now, but when I was still with my parents, we were all the way out on the tip of Kyushu, probably to get as far away as possible from this home. They talk in a thick accent there, and well…I wouldn’t call it bullying, but I was made fun of, and I didn’t have any friends.”
“Um…so it wasn’t the same elementary school as Senjogahara’s?”
“Right. I met her in middle school.”
“Okay.”
It made sense, address-wise.
She probably wasn’t with Hanekawa back then, either.
“When I think back to it, I was throwing everything off balance in my new environment, and I wasn’t completely blameless. It’s obvious to me now, but my parents’ death had hit me hard, and I’d closed off my heart. You can’t expect people to treat you kindly when you’ve closed off your heart. But, and I can only say this because so much time has passed─back then, I was still deeply mired in my parents’ death. Not that I was able to sit back and reminisce about them. I couldn’t even drown myself in my memories of them. That was because my grandfather and grandmother threw away every last one of my father and mother’s possessions. It was like they wanted to raise me as someone who had nothing to do with my parents.”
But just so you know, Kanbaru said.
“My grandmother and grandfather are both people of character─I do respect them, and I’m truly grateful that they’ve looked after me all this time. It’s just that their relationship with my parents is beyond me.”
It made sense.
Too much time had elapsed for it to be mere past strife.
And that was why the only mementos she had left of her parents were whatever memories she retained, along with, yes, that paulownia box her mother had given her.
It may have been sealed tight.
But she hadn’t been told not to open it.
So she did.
The mummified left hand.
But back in those days─the mummified hand only went down to its wrist. There was also a letter from her mother inside the box. Well, it wasn’t so much a letter, given what was written on it─but a simple user’s manual for the left hand.
It stated that it was a tool for making wishes come true.
It would make any wish come true.
It would make three and only three wishes come true.
She’d gone up a school year to become a fourth grader and was either nine or ten years old─whichever she was, whether you believed that kind of fantastic story was a tossup at that age. Just barely yes, or just barely no, one or the other. It’s probably an age group where the split between kids who believe in Santa Claus or not is about fifty-fifty. Or maybe that’s just an illusion that people of my generation and above hold… At least, I don’t think I believed in Santa Claus when I was in fourth grade, but maybe some of the special gadgets in cartoons were credible to me.
Kanbaru─was straddling that line.
In other words, she half-believed and half-doubted it would work, and just as she might try a charm printed in a girls’ magazine, with a casual attitude really, she made a wish upon the mummified hand.
It didn’t matter what the first one was.
It was like one of those charms.
She was just trying it out.
“Though I did know what my second wish would be if the first one worked,” Kanbaru said.
Of course she did.
I knew already─it had to be a wish about her parents, right?
Something about their being alive.
Such was the wish the fourth grader Suruga Kanbaru made─to the mummified thing. She was apparently a notoriously slow runner back then…and that, just as much as her accent, contributed to her being teased. From a high schooler’s perspective, it seemed as ridiculous of a reason to make fun of someone as an accent, but being a slow runner is, in any case, a serious cause of distress for a grade school kid. It just so happened that field day was coming up soon at her school─and she’d made the wish thinking that everyone would look at her in a new way if she could just win the foot race.
“I was fatally unathletic at the time. I’m not talking about having slow reflexes or slow anything, but actually tripping over myself just walking around.”
“Huh… But now.”
A star.
“…Wait, so does that mean─”
“If only it did,” Kanbaru said. But instead. “I had a dream that night. A dream of children being attacked─by a monster wearing a raincoat. A nightmare─where they were tucked into bed and the monster’s left hand attacked them mercilessly.”
“……”
“I’m sure someone with your intuition has already figured out how this story ends. When I woke up the next day and went to school─four students were absent. And all four of them were supposed to run in the same race as me at field day.”
The Monkey’s Paw.
The Monkey’s Paw grants its owner’s wishes, the story goes.
But not in the way its owner intends, the story goes─
“I was terrified. I went to the library in a panic to find out what the mummified thing really was─and I came across Jacobs’ ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ in no time. My shoulders trembled with fear… If I’d made my second wish first, what would have happened, I wondered. As it was, those classmates of mine could easily have died… Fortunately, it wasn’t that serious, but it could have turned out that way.”
Kanbaru returned the thing to its box, sealed it even tighter than before, and stuffed it in the depths of her closet. There would be no second or third wish, of course not─she wanted to pretend none of it ever happened. She wanted to forget it all.
But.
She couldn’t.
No matter how much she tried to forget about it, she found that she couldn’t. Because there was still time until field day─and during practice the next day, they decided to place Kanbaru in another group.
She would be racing against─five other people.
“What do you think I did?”
“……”
“What do you think I should have done?”
Whatever I thought, if she sat and did nothing─well, the consequences were as clear as day. The same thing would happen…and repeat itself over and over again. Normally, the only way out of the situation would be to make another wish upon the paw─to ask it to cancel the first wish. But Kanbaru was afraid to. Now that she’d learned about the paw, she was afraid. It granted wishes, but not in the way its owner intended─and she had no idea how the revocation might come true.
Which is why Kanbaru ran.
She ran, and ran, and ran.
She was slow─
So she worked to become fast.
“My only option was to fulfill my wish on my own. Because if I did, there’d be no reason for the paw to attack my classmates. And fortunately, I started getting the hang of it as soon as I started─there wasn’t any physical issue that made me slow, like being heavy or having a bad leg, so while I didn’t become athletic overnight, I improved when it came to running. I managed to come in first at field day… Thanks to that, I started to make friends with my classmates. It of course took a good bit of time, though.”
Having made her own wish come true─she never stopped working, even after field day. To say that she must have been talented to begin with would perhaps be unkind. Her continued efforts only continued to flower, to the point that she began hearing from middle school track teams not long after entering sixth grade.
Tup, tup, tup, tup, tup, tup.
But Kanbaru couldn’t join a track team. She couldn’t put herself in a place where people might be faster than her─because she didn’t know the reach of her first wish. Maybe it expired the moment she took first place at field day─maybe it would last forever. There was no way to find out. Since there wasn’t, the latter possibility was a source of fear.
She already knew she wasn’t made to be a distance runner─mini-marathons in grade school were one thing, but she couldn’t keep going in middle school and high school. If anyone were even a little bit faster than her, all her efforts would be for naught, end of story.
That was probably why she decided to join the basketball team in middle school─if her field only extended as far as those courts did, no one could catch up to her.
“Forgoing clubs and sports might have been an option, but not only did I need to stay in good shape, just in case, but also athletics were a more or less compulsive refuge for me by then. If I didn’t do something─I felt like I’d be crushed. People call me sporty, but I’m not sure if I’m the real deal. I was just motivated by fear.”
Playing basketball ended up being fun.
She ended up liking it.
Her speed, which had been a compulsive refuge─she could now put to positive use. She’d thought of her legs merely as a means to run away from the paw, but she could apply them constructively─towards an actual goal.
Plus.
Becoming the star of the team─
She ended up getting to know Hitagi Senjogahara.
“She was the star of the track team…and she came to watch me since I had a reputation for being fast. She might have forgotten by now…and even if she does remember, she might not think anything of it, but she was the one who came to me first.”
“Huh…”
That was a bit of a surprise.
Even if it was the middle-school and not the current-day Senjogahara, it was still a surprise.
“She asked me to run a hundred-meter race with her, saying that it didn’t have to be official or anything. It killed me to have to turn her down. This was a charming person who was a year above me. It might not have been love at first sight, but I’d fallen for her by the third day of talking to her. I started wanting to be near her. Being with her was therapeutic.”
Therapeutic.
The word was as far removed from Senjogahara today as Pluto is from the Sun─but it really seemed that meeting her allowed Kanbaru to put out of her mind the mummy she’d received from her mother, the paulownia box stuffed in the closet.
It let her forget.
It let her forget─what she wanted to forget.
But.
“It was still there in the back of my mind, sitting in my subconscious, and more than once after that day, I was seized by a sudden impulse to use the paw. I’d be seized by an urge to rely on it. Like when we faced a really strong team in basketball. Like when I got in an awful fight with a friend. Like when I wanted to get into Naoetsu High where my senior Senjogahara was… Like when she rejected me.”
Each time─she held out.
Each time, she managed to make it happen on her own.
By then, she understood why her mother had given her the box─it was as a sort of wish that Kanbaru would become someone who handled any problem she came across by herself. Unlike the one in “The Monkey’s Paw,” which taught you to accept fate, her mother’s lesson must have been to alter your destiny with your own hands. It had been passed down again and again─her mother had gotten it from her mother, and her mother’s mother had gotten it from her mother, and her mother’s mother’s mother, and so on. The lesson passed down for generations had to be that you fulfilled your own wishes. So it was all thanks to herself that Kanbaru was fast and also smart.
She hadn’t been─born with it.
It was the result of work, of blood, sweat, and tears.
Hence.
She might have been able to solve Senjogahara’s secret, her problem, by wishing upon the paw, but didn’t even then.
Quietly.
She stepped away.
She gave up─on being by Senjogahara’s side.
She gave up─balling her fists, biting her lip.
She didn’t mind dying for Senjogahara’s sake.
Kanbaru smothered her own feelings for Senjogahara’s sake.
Stood by and watched her own heart die.
What she didn’t want to forget.
What she couldn’t forget─she did forget.
“But a year later…I found out about you. I ended up finding out about you and her. I ended up seeing her by your side.”
She couldn’t hold out anymore.
She couldn’t do it.
She couldn’t give up.
She had no recollection of when she’d opened the closet, when she’d taken the paulownia box out of it, when she’d undone the seal, or when she’d wished upon the paw─she hadn’t paused even when the paw that had only gone down to its wrist was extended to the elbow─and when she noticed.
Her left hand─had turned into an aberration.
Her arm had turned into a beast’s paw.
Kanbaru─
“…And so you started stalking me after that. Come to think of it, every time we met, you asked me if anything odd had happened to me.”
So─that’s what she meant.
She wasn’t making small talk.
She wasn’t trying to spy on Senjogahara, either… Unable to play the sport she loved with her arm in that state, Kanbaru must not have wanted to go out in public at all, but she went as far as to bandage it up and hide it─because she was concerned about my safety?
But then, four days after she started stalking me.
The night of the fourth day.
That’s when─it happened.
Kanbaru said she had a dream─
A dream where a monster in a raincoat attacked me.
She already realized everything─
Knew what had happened.
This backstory was quite different from my analysis.
I’d surmised that an aberration was involved, but Kanbaru actually didn’t intend the phenomenon… It was all the paw’s doing.
The Monkey’s Paw grants its owner’s wishes, the story goes.
But not in the way its owner intends, the story goes─
The simplest way to be by Senjogahara’s side was to eliminate her current boyfriend, Koyomi Araragi─thought the paw.
Probably.
And afraid of that, Kanbaru was stalking me─
But her premonition was on the mark.
In truth, if I wasn’t who I was…if Koyomi Araragi wasn’t Koyomi Araragi, the formerly immortal human with an experience of being a vampire, I would have certainly died at that point. I wouldn’t have been able to dodge the first two strikes, and even if I had, the third blow would have been lethal. That was its absurd potential and capacity for destruction. My guess was that those four elementary school kids had been spared thanks to Kanbaru’s body still being a fourth grader’s and also still being unathletic─but now she was on another level. Ironically, the body she’d forged to escape her first wish was making her second wish inflict that much more damage. Only her left arm had attacked me, but the incredible speed that my eyes couldn’t even track─that physical capacity belonged to Suruga Kanbaru. It was an upgraded version of the same.
Capacity─destructive capacity.
A capacity for violence.
And.
It was far from over─nowhere near over, since I had survived. Once the sun set and night came, the monster in the raincoat would attack me, again and again─Kanbaru would keep on having dreams about that fiend assaulting me.
Over and over, until I died.
Until her dream came true.
Until her wish was granted.
Until Kanbaru’s second wish was granted.
She wanted to be by Hitagi Senjogahara’s side.
“‘Annoyances come / In forms none greater than that / Of the visitor / But then of course I speak not / Of yourself, my esteem’d friend’─”
“Huh?” Kanbaru opened her eyes dubiously when I recited the poem. “What was that?”
“Nothing… I was just wondering if the person we’re visiting will welcome us─”
And then.
Without changing our clothes or eating lunch, we went straight to the remote, abandoned cram school where Mèmè Oshino and Shinobu Oshino lived, me riding my bike and Kanbaru dashing on her own two legs.
And that─finally brings us to now.
The present moment.
Kanbaru and I were facing Oshino on the fourth floor. Despite giving him the rundown, he showed nothing resembling a reaction, simply looking up at the fluorescent lights hanging (just hanging, of course, since there was no power) from the not-so-high ceiling. He wiggled the unlit cigarette he’d stuck in his mouth midway during the explanation─but didn’t speak. I’d said everything there was to say, including about Senjogahara, and didn’t have any more cards to play.
A vague awkwardness drifted in the air.
Normally Mèmè Oshino gabbed more than he should as if he were born full-formed from a tongue, but he sometimes sank into these deep silences, which made him really hard to deal with… He was cheerful and happy-go-lucky on the surface, but at times like these, I wondered if he might not be an awfully gloomy guy at heart.
“The bandage,” Oshino said─at last. “Could you undo that bandage for me, missy?”
“Oh, okay─”
Kanbaru glanced at me beseechingly. To put her at ease, I told her, It’s all right. At that, she started to unravel her bandage using her right hand. Whip whip.
Then─the beastly hand appeared.
Without being prompted, she rolled her sleeve up─all the way to her upper arm. She bent her elbow, as if to indicate where the monster’s arm and her human arm connected.
Taking a step forward she asked Oshino, “Like this?”
“What you thought?” I cut in. “And what’s as you thought, Oshino? Damn you, acting as inscrutable as ever─you constantly leave people hanging on your words. Pretending to be omniscient can’t be that fun, now.”
“Don’t prod me like that. You’re feeling spirited, Araragi. Something good happen to you?” Spitting out the cigarette in his mouth without ever having lit it─well, actually, I’ve never seen Oshino smoking one─he directed his trademark flippant and frivolous smirk at me. “Araragi, and you too, missy. To start off with a correction─that isn’t a Monkey’s Paw.”
“Wha?”
Oshino had overturned the premise out of the blue─and I was shocked. Kanbaru looked like she’d been caught off-guard, too.
“There’ve been so many versions since Jacobs that it’s hard to know what’s true without seeing one for yourself─but from what little I know, I’ve never heard of the Monkey’s Paw combining with the owner’s arm. A crab for missy tsundere and a monkey for missy here would be like the old Japanese folktale and downright neat, but the world isn’t so accommodating. You researched it yourself, missy, didn’t you? And found nothing? No story where the Monkey’s Paw merges with the owner. If there is one, that means uneducated old me has a big hole in his knowledge.”
“…I did some research, but I was still in grade school.”
“That’s what I thought. So how did you get it into your head that it’s a Monkey’s Paw? Your mother absolutely must not have said such a thing to you… But I guess the conditions did match by and large.”
“There are a pair of them in how the story goes, Araragi. The Monkey’s Paw is an item with a story attached to it. It grants its owner’s wishes, the story goes. But not in the way its owner intends, the story goes─was that it?”
Heh, Oshino snorted with an unpleasant smile.
It was the smile of someone with an awful personality.
“I suppose it was a convenient interpretation for you, missy─or maybe a comforting one? It doesn’t really matter. What’s for sure, though, is that it’s not a Monkey’s Paw─originally it was mummified, right? And it gained life by melding with you. Then─my guess is that it’s a Rainy Devil.”
“Rei...?” I blurted out when he spoke the name, but without allowing me a question, or even a moment, Oshino pushed on.
“So, Araragi. Have you read Faust?”
“Huh?”
“Thank you for the reaction, I see that you haven’t. In fact, it seems like you haven’t even heard of it. But I’m not the least bit surprised, not anymore. I’ve decided to get accustomed to these reactions of yours. What about you, missy? Have you read Faust?”
“Ah, umm.” Kanbaru sounded surprised to be put on the spot but replied, as if it were a spinal reflex, “No, I’m not very well read, so I haven’t. Of course, I’m familiar with the plot and rough outline of the tale.”
“I see. No, that’s par for the course. Yup, yup. Usually, a high schooler would at least know that much. Uh oh, how embarrassing, Araragi.”
“Don’t make fun of him! He just happened not to know, that’s all! To begin with, he’s not someone you can fit into existing frameworks like ‘reading’!”
Suddenly incensed by Oshino’s words, Kanbaru had raised her voice to scold him. Puzzled by her unlikely reaction, he turned his eyes toward me for an explanation.
I couldn’t bring myself to meet them.
…Kanbaru.
I appreciated that she was getting mad on my behalf… I never imagined someone getting mad on your behalf would be so heartening, but yelling at Oshino there came too close to agreeing that I’m stupid…
“Kanbaru,” I said. “Could you please drop that routine for now? It’s amusing, yeah, but if you pull that every time Oshino makes fun of me, we’re never going to get anywhere …”
“Hm. I see. Profound words, befitting someone like you who faces any person with an open heart. Honestly, I struggle to accept your wisdom, as lacking in virtue and as quick to spite as I am, but if you say so, I’ll restrain myself and persevere.” Kanbaru nodded and bobbed her head in a bow to Oshino. “I’m sorry.”
She was a girl who could say sorry.
Good girl.
“…No, I don’t mind,” Oshino excused her. “And it was amusing. But considering that one of your arms has turned out that way, you’re a spirited missy. Something good happen to you? Well, in any case─Faust. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was the leading author of the Storm and Stress, or Sturm und Drang epoch, and his career-crowning achievement was the drama Faust. It’s about─do you think you could tell him, missy? Whatever you know is fine.”
“Um, sure.”
Kanbaru looked at me hesitantly.
Like when she gave me the outline of Jacobs’ “The Monkey’s Paw,” Suruga Kanbaru’s personality was such that she couldn’t instruct her elders about anything without feeling presumptuous.
“As Mister Oshino said, it’s Goethe’s masterpiece, and…well, to mention a simple characteristic, it’s a story split into two parts. Urfaust and Faust, a Fragment led to Faust, Part One and Faust, Part Two. It’s a massive accomplishment that took him over sixty years to complete. I can only bow to it. Goethe is also famous for The Sorrows of Young Werther and Elective Affinities, but if we were to pick a single work he put his whole body and soul into, the unanimous answer would be Faust. The protagonist, Doctor Faust, sells his soul to a devil, Mephistopheles, in order to gain all knowledge─and that ought to do for an introduction. I won’t go into details because I don’t want to spoil it, but Part One is about his romance with the commoner Gretchen, while Part Two depicts the establishment of an ideal nation. It’s generally read as a sort of philosophy or, I should say, a narrative about the pursuit of knowledge. I’m sure you’re aware, but it even gave rise to the expression ‘Faustian impulse,’ which describes the drive, the intellectual desire to know and experience everything.”
“……”
Why in the world did this jock junior of mine think that her senior who hadn’t heard of Faust knew of any “Faustian impulse”?
Oshino took it from there. “The heart of the story is that he sells his soul to the devil─Doctor Faust tries to fulfill his namesake impulse by having his wish granted that way… Of course, if you want to learn what happens in the end, Araragi, I recommend that you head to your nearest bookstore. But yeah, that’s what it is. Missy’s explanation is what you’d consider common knowledge, so if you know that much, it makes my job easier. I’m impressed that she was able to give such an eloquent speech about it despite not having read the book. If there’s anything I should add, it’s a bit that surprisingly few people know about─you’d find it in any commentary about Goethe, of course, but people these days don’t read the classics. I’m not talking about you, missy, but people think there’s no reason to go through and actually read a famous story when they feel like they already have. So yes, you can’t blame people for not knowing, but the Faust story is based on a real person.”
“What? Really?” Kanbaru sounded surprised.
As her Faust-ignorant senior, I didn’t even know why that should be surprising.
“Johann Faust. It’s said he lived during the Renaissance period… While I say he was real, there are different theories about that, but stories about him ended up turning into folklore. A wandering physician or magician who, yes, sells his soul to the devil Mephistopheles, and in exchange for all kinds of knowledge and experience, promises to act as an enemy of Christians, for twenty-four years he lives according to those ‘Faustian impulses’─and the moment the contract expires, he meets a sad end. Look it up yourself, you can find the details in Doctor Faustus.”
“Huh…I didn’t know.”
Kanbaru sounded impressed by Oshino’s trivia. Putting aside Faust, the story did have to do with folklore, his field of expertise, so this level of erudition was nothing new, but at this rate was she going to start flattering him, too? In fact, I didn’t understand Kanbaru’s standards for that. It wasn’t like she indiscriminately bombarded everyone she met with praise…
“I was convinced Goethe had come up with the whole thing himself,” she said. “But he’d based the thing on local legends.”
“Well, he arranged a lot of the story in his own way, so at the end of the day, it’s the Goethe edition of Doctor Faust. It’s similar to Dazai’s ‘Run, Melos!’ or Akutagawa’s ‘Rashomon.’ The medieval folktale and Akutagawa’s version feel pretty different, don’t they? Same deal. The Faust legend has been turned into stories by lots of other people, too. A famous instance would be the English author Marlowe. Do you know Marlowe? Not Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe. Christopher Marlowe. He’s often spoken of as a forerunner of Shakespeare, but he did write Doctor Faustus.”
“It’s kind of interesting that it was Faust who was the doctor,” Kanbaru noted, a bit of bashfulness sneaking into her voice.
Huh, Oshino tilted his head in puzzlement, and I could tell that the reason for her bashfulness was lost on him.
“But…Oshino,” I attempted to wade into their exchange, afraid that we were getting off track, though I still didn’t know much about Faust. “So what? I don’t mind that you’re as frustratingly longwinded as ever, but I don’t see how it has anything to do with Kanbaru’s current predicament. I think we’ve gotten derailed and are skidding sideways. Yeah, the part where the devil grants wishes in exchange for your soul resembles the Monkey’s Paw, but it’s not like Kanbaru’s arm is the arm of this Mephistopheles from Faust, right? As if it’s not a Monkey’s Paw but the hand of the devil─”
“Well, that’s exactly it, Araragi. You’re on point today.”
Oshino─
“The hand of the devil on missy here, whose name starts with the character for ‘god,’ seems to line up a little too perfectly, but it’s not as bad as a crab-monkey spat or what happened with that lost girl the other day. It’s just a plain old hint this time around. Mephistopheles isn’t particularly terrifying, as far as devils go─he’s more of a vulgar one. Low-ranking, or maybe not part of the rankings at all, just a familiar. That would normally make it extremely difficult to identify its exact category, but a raincoat-wearing devil with a monkey arm narrows it down, of course─and if it merges with its owner, then it’s a Rainy Devil.”
A Rainy Devil.
“It’s not a Monkey’s Paw, it’s a Devil’s Hand. Ha hah, isn’t this much simpler if you think of it that way? I mean, why would an ape grant human wishes without asking for anything in return? It’s said the Monkey’s Paw grants them because an old Indian ascetic imbued it with mystical power, but you don’t need any explanation or reputation if it’s a devil. Of course it’ll grant wishes, it gets a soul in return.”
“A soul─”
“What kind of devil wouldn’t grant three wishes in exchange for a soul?” Oshino puffed a laugh through his nose. He was in full mockery mode. “Anyway, the Monkey’s Paw is a right hand, not a left hand.”
“…Really?”
“It’s an item you hold with your right hand to use, so I assume that it’s a right hand itself. But a Devil’s Hand. It might not be a devil, taxonomically speaking, but I’m still surprised. You might not be shocked by much these days, Araragi, since you already encountered a vampire…but it’s incredible to come across such a devil in Japan. It’s a notable find. Though, of course, there’s no shortage of Japanese yokai that would grant wishes in that manner. I don’t know, what with li’l missy class president, li’l missy tsundere, and our li’l lost girl…this is one strange town. Seriously. How’s it all going to end, with someone summoning the ruler of all hell to this place? …Missy, you said your mother gave you that left hand, yes? Kanbaru must be your father’s surname. Do you know your mother’s maiden name?”
“In fact─um, it’s a bit of an unusual name.” Kanbaru spoke slowly as if she were trying to remember. “I think it was ‘Gaen.’ Ga as in the phrase ‘hell or high water’ and en as in ‘smoke screen.’ Toé Gaen was her full maiden name.”
“…Huh. Oh, all right. And Toé must be written with the characters for ‘far’ and the one for ‘river’ used in Yangtze. The same way you’d write Totomi, the name of the old Japanese province. So that’s where your name comes from. Ha hah, nicely done.”
“Of course, after she got married, she was Toé Kanbaru. Why does that matter, though, Mister Oshino?”
“Why does it matter? Did you just ask me that? Oh, no, it doesn’t matter at all. I was trying to fill some time, it doesn’t have anything to do with your situation. And who cares about that background stuff in this case. So, Araragi, and you too, missy. Now you know everything. Whether that hand is a Monkey’s Paw or a Devil’s Hand might not make a difference to you, but having come here to visit me, what’s your plan going forward?”
“What do you mean─”
“You see, Araragi, I am what you might call an expert in this field. As a semi-passable excuse for an authority, in situations like these, I’m not opposed to helping out.”
“You─” Kanbaru leaned forward. “You’d save me?”
“I’ll do no such thing. I’ll only help out. You’re going to get saved all on your own, missy. You’ve come to the wrong place if you’re seeking salvation, and it wouldn’t be my scene. But considering the situation─Araragi, what should I do?” Oshino asked in a mean-spirited tone─but then fell silent, as if he hadn’t meant it rhetorically and were really waiting on my answer. Why was that? What should he do… Wasn’t it obvious?
“Hey, Oshino…”
“I’m wondering how exactly I should help, Araragi. Should I help missy’s second wish come true? Or should I help annul it? Should I help turn her left arm back to normal? All of the above? That might be a little too greedy─but what I can say is that none of the above is going to be simple.”
“Well…um.”
If I said all of the above─would that come to pass?
But.
“There are two easy ways to solve this phenomenon for the time being,” Oshino said. “The first is for you to be killed one night by the monster in the raincoat─the Rainy Devil. That will turn missy’s arm back to normal and probably grant her wish. The other is to take that beastly left arm that’s turned into an aberration and to lop it off.”
“L-Lop it off?” I started fretting at Oshino’s alarming proposal. “…Can you cut off just the part that belongs to this monkey─or devil? Will her old arm grow back?”
“It’s not a lizard’s tail, so it’s not going to be that convenient. Still, an arm is a small price to pay to solve this whole situation,” he said casually─but it was no joke.
You got what you paid for, with a vengeance…
Plus, it would be bad enough for anyone, but even worse for Kanbaru. If we did that, she’d never be able to play basketball again. Given how the sport had saved her, and how it continued to sustain her, the proposal really didn’t bear voicing even if it came to mind.
“A-Ah,” Kanbaru spoke up. “That, I don’t think I could─”
“You tried to kill another human being, all right? It would only be fair,” Oshino tossed the harsh words at her when she immediately balked at the idea─he was merciless at such moments. He’d acted the same way with Hanekawa and Senjogahara─
“Then again,” he said, “Araragi getting killed is nice and simple as far as solutions go.”
“H-Hey, Oshino, I take your point, but hold on. She tried to kill another human being… That’s me you’re talking about, right? But that’s not what she wished for. She only wanted to be by Senjogahara’s side─”
“Only to be by her side? What a riot,” Oshino continued to me in his harsh tone. “You’re so kind, Araragi. You’re a good, kind person─what a good and kind person. Makes me sick, really. How many more people do you have to hurt with that kindness until you’re satisfied? It was the same with little Shinobu. Only to be by her side? Did you believe those saccharine words just the way they came out of missy’s mouth?”
“…You’re saying that wasn’t it?” I asked Oshino and glanced at Kanbaru. She was silent. “Hey, Kanbaru─”
“For example, Araragi. You don’t find it odd? That story of her first wish when she was in grade school. Why do you think the left hand didn’t just make her faster and roughed people up instead?”
“Well─that’s because the Monkey’s Paw grants its owner’s wishes in an unintended way─”
“But it’s not a Monkey’s Paw,” Oshino declared. “This was in exchange for a soul. The wish ought to be granted exactly as it’s made. The Rainy Devil may be a low-level demon, and it may have a nasty habit of rushing to violence, but a contract is a contract. A deal is a deal. If your wish is to be faster, that’s normally what should happen. How does roughing up her classmates make her any faster? Doesn’t that causality seem off? It’s obvious that beating them up would only get her placed in another group.”
“……” I couldn’t argue with him if he put it that way. “Then why? Why did the monster in the raincoat go to her classmates and─”
“Because she wanted to beat the shit out of them, of course. Unable to fit in at her new school, missy was constantly being teased. She says it wasn’t what you’d call bullying, but that’s what bullied kids say. If you’ve just had your parents die on you and you’re persecuted at school on top of that, wanting revenge isn’t weird at all. If anything, it’d be weird if she didn’t want any.”
“I…” Kanbaru said─then fell silent.
How had she wanted to explain herself?
Why did she decide not to after all?
What did she realize?
Oshino went on. “I’m sure it wasn’t a conscious decision. I do think it was in the realm of the unconscious, okay? If it had been intentional, she’d know. I’m sure the way she saw it, she made a wish to become faster. On the face of it, yes, but not on the flip side. Behind her wish was a dark desire to get back at her classmates─to beat them up. That’s what missy wished for, even if it was unconscious. The devil saw through to that desire. It read what was on the flip side. But deep down, missy must have known that, all right? It might have been unconscious, but those were her honest feelings all the same. But not wanting to accept that, she sought a different interpretation for the phenomenon…and arrived at the Monkey’s Paw. Not the stuff about granting a wish, but defying the owner’s will─that was the axial part, wasn’t it? A psychological excuse that it wasn’t her intention at all to attack her classmates. Well, that kind of thing is important.”
A psychological excuse.
A question of interpretation.
“It’s not just true for the Monkey’s Paw, most cases involving aberrations that grant wishes end horribly for the protagonist─and in that sense, when missy looked them up in grade school, she could easily have found a different one. She just happened to come across Jacobs’ ‘The Monkey’s Paw.’ But what would you say? Have things turned out horribly for missy? Is she miserable because her wish came true? Araragi, would you say missy is truly miserable because those classmates who teased her were made to suffer? Isn’t the normal response to that a quick and tidy ‘serves them right’?”
“Ha hah, Araragi, are you wondering what evidence I have to be so sure? Well, it’s obvious if you actually listen to her story. Clear as day. That arm of hers…how was it in grade school, again?”
“………”
Now that he mentioned it.
The mummified hand that only went down to its wrist at the time─how was it then?
“I heard nothing about bandages─” pointed out Oshino, “and until she went to class the next day and found out those four were absent, she didn’t notice that it had happened, right? If her left hand turned out like that, she surely would have. What does that mean? You see, when her classmates got beaten up that night, her wish came true. The aberration merged with missy’s left hand overnight without her realizing it, and likewise unattached overnight. It unattached with a bit of her soul equivalent to the wish─and grew from the left wrist into a forearm, I bet.”
“…Wait, Oshino, that would mean─”
It made sense.
But his argument suggested...
“Your initial thinking was on the mark, Araragi. You’d actually arrived at the right answer for once. Didn’t I tell you? You’re on point today. There was no need to get tied up into knots, you just had to use your common sense to think it through. You’re such a chump to believe your assailant’s excuses. You’ll never make it onto a jury, Araragi. You stole away her idol for yourself. It’s hardly bizarre if she felt murderously jealous. There’s no way missy’s own intention had no part in this, all of it was exactly her intention. Left hands don’t have any.”
So said Oshino.
008
The Rainy Devil is apparently a very violent devil─there’s nothing it loves more than human malice and hostility, vengeance and chagrin, jealousy and envy, negative emotions in general. It sees into the darkest side of a person, provokes it, draws it out, then makes it real. It listens to people’s wishes out of spite and grants them out of spite. The contract itself─is in the form of three granted wishes in exchange for a human soul. It’s said that once the three wishes are granted─it takes that person’s life and body. In other words, he or she becomes the devil by the end. That was its nature. So if Kanbaru had made a wish to resolve Senjogahara’s secret upon learning about it a year ago, it probably wouldn’t have been granted. The Rainy Devil can only grant violent, negative wishes.
The devil reads the flip side of a wish.
There’s always something─on the back.
She wanted to become faster because she hated her classmates.
She wanted to be by Senjogahara’s side─because she hated Koyomi Araragi.
Yes, it reads the backside.
Yes, it looks at the backside.
It sees into our unconscious desires.
The devil─sees through us.
She may not have regretted stepping away─but resented anyone stepping into that position. If someone could, why not her?
Why couldn’t it be me.
The Rainy Devil.
A devil told of in Europe since long ago.
It’s often depicted as a monkey wearing a raincoat.
In that sense, it might be correct to call that left hand a monkey’s paw─but either way, both the first and the second wishes had been Kanbaru’s own unconscious ones, clear but hidden.
Against the classmates who teased her.
And me.
Her classmates in grade school had gotten off with injuries, while I was nearly killed… Was that due to a difference in how strongly she felt, the volume of her negative emotions? What I’d posited about Kanbaru’s maturation as an athlete must have had something to do with it too, but there was also a greater psychological factor.
Well, anyway, Oshino was right.
Maybe I hadn’t given it enough thought.
If Kanbaru had really wished to the Rainy Devil to be by Senjogahara’s side, it didn’t make sense for her to feel concerned about my safety─given the grade school episode, her violent left hand would try to eliminate Koyomi Araragi, but how could Kanbaru, from her standpoint, know that for sure? Precisely how her left hand would grant the wish, in what unintended manner it would go about it, should have been opaque to her.
But she unconsciously knew what she unconsciously wished for.
She knew that I was in danger.
If the monster in the raincoat didn’t appear before me as soon as the aberration melded with her left hand, that was because Kanbaru was trying to control the impulse, according to Oshino. She was right on the edge, in conflict with it, struggling against it.
“Working hard to become faster is like the ultimate in self-regarding excuses. The paw wasn’t doing anything because she made her own wish come true─what a patently ridiculous idea. Missy herself might’ve believed it, might’ve wanted to believe it, and that was by no means wrong, but the wish the Rainy Devil violently granted was the backside rather than the front. Still, her stance of always having managed on her own had a good effect this time around…and while the aberration merged with her arm, she was able to suppress it. When you look at it that way, aberrations like these are really like items. The owner’s mindset is a factor…but to be realistic about it, in this case it’s just an arm, so the Rainy Devil must be unable to exercise too much of its power, a devil though it may be. It couldn’t draw out of her an unconscious to surpass her consciousness. In other words, her left hand didn’t activate while she was concerned about your wellbeing. All of her stalking since four days ago had exactly the effect she wanted, though it might not have been missy’s intention, since all of this occurred in the unconscious. But─yesterday, was it? She learned that you and li’l missy tsundere would be meeting all alone for a so-called study session. Until then, your dating was only a rumor, it might have been untrue, but that’s when, alas, missy became certain. And─she couldn’t hold back anymore. It’s exactly as you surmised, Araragi.”
Oshino didn’t put it that way, of course.
He thoroughly despised that sort of spoiled weakness.
But─
It was jealousy, from beginning to end─and Kanbaru had been saying as much.
She’d been saying it.
“Mm, that ought to do,” I told Shinobu.
I’d had her suck my blood right up to the limit, locked in an embrace, and now I tapped her tiny back twice. Shinobu gently removed her fangs from the two holes in my neck─and licked clean the few drops of blood that dribbled in the process. Maybe I needed to start wondering if our embrace fell under Senjogahara’s definition of cheating, but since this was the only way the task could be accomplished, I’d have to beg her to let it go. Unlike during spring break, Shinobu’s figure was now so minute and helpless, and hugging her as I did felt like hugging fog or mist, there was so little in my hands.
“…Oops.”
I stood up from my crouched position─and felt a little dizzy. It was natural, of course, but I did feel almost anemic right after having my blood sucked─and this time, especially, I’d given her a lot.
Nearly five times more than the default amount.
Then again, my senses and bodily sensation didn’t feel much different from usual… All of my stats got raised across the board, so it wasn’t easy to discern exactly how I compared to my normal state.
Shinobu was already back to sitting on the floor.
Sitting there…with both of her arms wrapped around her legs as if to confirm her own presence.
“……”
A good and kind person, huh?
I could insist that I wasn’t either of those things all day long, but when it came down to it, the prime victim was still this blond vampire… I supposed I couldn’t blame Oshino for his cutting remark.
Forget me. For Shinobu…
I grabbed her goggled helmet and gave it a good shake right and left. For a while, she ignored it and didn’t react, but it must have gotten legitimately annoying because she swatted my hand away.
Yeah.
Satisfied for the time being, I did as Oshino advocated and left without parting words, turning my back on her and climbing the stairs down to the third floor from the landing. I’d bring her a present next time, maybe donut holes or something, I thought as I bypassed the third floor and headed to the second.
Across from me, in front of a door on the opposite side of the hallway─awaited Mèmè Oshino, his arms crossed, leaning back against a wall, casually dangling one foot in the air.
“Hey. I’ve been waiting, Araragi. Looks like you took longer than expected.”
“Yup. I had a little trouble figuring out the limit. I might have shorted her…but it’s better than letting her go overboard. For me and for Shinobu.”
“Hmm. I guess that’s true, but you don’t need to be so sensitive about little Shinobu. Because her existence is bound by my name, nothing extreme is going to happen. Naming is taming. If anything, I’m more worried about her starving. You’re going to be grappling and fighting it out with a devil in a moment, Araragi, so you can’t afford such concerns, I don’t think? You don’t want to end up being the comic relief. Hitting the ceiling still wouldn’t give you good odds for this match, okay? Even if your opponent is no more than a left arm.”
…Our measure against the Rainy Devil.
An authentic exorcism is a major affair that takes lots of time and effort, and despite the Rainy Devil’s low ranking, it would be no cakewalk even for Oshino. This was coming from him, so I took it with a grain of salt─but I was convinced, at least, that he didn’t intend to partake this time.
Unlike with Senjogahara’s case.
You could call Senjogahara’s crab another kind of aberration that granted a wish─but that was a god, and this was a devil. Even an amateur like myself could tell it wasn’t going to be simple.
Kanbaru, with “god” in her name, and a devil.
But─we didn’t have the time or the effort to spare.
If we didn’t hurry, my life might come to an end that very night. Me getting killed, or Kanbaru’s left arm getting cut off─unfortunately, I wasn’t so unattached to living as to accept the former manner of resolving the story. But cutting off Kanbaru’s left arm was flat out of the question.
“The contract, huh?” I said. “Well, I hope that’s all it takes for the devil to go back to its demonic or spiritual or whatever world.”
“The demonic and the spiritual aren’t different worlds, they refer to ‘here’─but the complicated stuff will start to feel like an argument we’ve already had, so maybe next time. It’s going to work, I’ll guarantee you that much, Araragi. If the contract can’t be fulfilled─it becomes void. I won’t call it a ‘cooling off’ period, but missy’s wish will be properly invalidated too. The poor incompetent devil who didn’t cut it will slink off without a word.”
The devil will slink off.
If it can’t fulfill the contract.
“In other words─if the devil can’t kill me.”
“Hyup.” Oshino chuckled. “Having given little Shinobu as much blood as possible only means so much, though… If you went about it like you had a mere tenth of the power you manifested over spring break, when you were actually a vampire, you’d still be overestimating your capabilities.”
“…That’s a pretty bleak fraction.”
“But you’re facing just the left hand of that Rainy Devil─you’d have no chance against the whole thing, but with the ‘dead weight’ of a human being on top of it, I’d say you have a ten or twelve or fourteen to one chance of winning,” Oshino assured most ambiguously.
The Rainy Devil is a completely different type of aberration from the Monkey’s Paw─the only trait the two have in common is that they grant wishes, and the devil, as you can tell from its association with a raincoat, has a full set of body parts (how you define ‘body’ is relevant here, but let’s leave that aside). Yet I was facing just the left hand─and it had been mummified, too, probably thanks to a reliable seal, according to Oshino.
“Missy’s mother’s lineage seems to have been the issue─could it also have been why they ended up eloping? Well, I don’t mean to expose or nose around a stranger’s family situation with an offhanded guess. A mummified devil is actually quite a feat, though I’ve heard of mummified mermaids and the like. Hm, personally, if it only went down to the wrist when missy got it, what happened to the remaining parts does make me curious.”
Mother…
Hitagi Senjogahara, Mayoi Hachikuji.
Both of their aberrations─involved their mothers.
Suruga Kanbaru was continuing that trend, then.
Apparently, just like her father, her mother had been disowned by her parents after eloping and Kanbaru was completely estranged from that side of her family, so there didn’t seem to be any hope of finding out more…
“By the way,” I asked, “what if this Rainy Devil had all of its body parts? Could it even beat Shinobu at her peak?”
“Not a chance. It’s a low-level fiend at the end of the day, toothless against a real vampire. We aren’t even talking about Mephistopheles here, so it’d take her no more than a couple of seconds. She’d pulverize every one of its assembled limbs, slurp up every fluid in its body, and that would be it. Have you forgotten that our little Shinobu used to be a fearsome, legendary vampire? Of course it’d be no match for her. Given the Rainy Devil’s ranking, I’d say that even li’l missy class president’s lust-besotted cat was easily stronger than it. Oh, but don’t try to have Shinobu help out, okay? That may let us defeat the thing, but we’d have to cut off missy’s arm for real. You, yourself, defeating it─that’s the whole point.”
“The Rainy Devil takes over a person’s body by granting wishes, right? Every time it grants one, you get closer to the devil… The mummified hand must have grown from the wrist to the elbow because it granted Kanbaru’s first wish, but then what, Oshino? If her second wish, her murderous hatred for me, and some third wish were granted, what would happen to her? At that rate, wouldn’t taking over her just mean growing up to her shoulder or so?”
“I can only reply to that question like a bureaucrat: there’s no precedent I can refer to. But considering the ratio, it seems reasonable to presume as you just did that it’ll only go up to the shoulder even if it takes over her. Still, Araragi, that doesn’t change anything. Being usurped up to your shoulder is the same as being usurped whole. It’s like a publicly traded company having thirty percent of its stock acquired.”
“…I guess.”
“Her soul would get extracted either way, and she’d be an empty husk. Oh, I’ll hold on to your bag and any valuables, Araragi. It’ll be hard for you to maneuver carrying all that.”
“Oh, yeah… Thanks. Could you take these, then?”
I pulled my cell phone and house keys out of my back and jacket pockets, tossed them into my backpack, and handed it to Oshino. Okay, he said, slinging it over his shoulder.
“But Araragi─can I ask you just one question?”
“What is it?”
“Why help even someone who tried to kill you? It might have been unconscious, the flip side of her wish─but missy hated you. She saw you as a hated rival in love.” His usual mean jabbing─didn’t seem to be what this was. “To begin with, why did you decide to hear missy out when you learned that it was her in the raincoat? Normally, at that point, there’d be no more need for questions or answers─you ought to have skipped her right then and come straight to me.”
“…Everyone’s going to have someone they hate. That’s part of being alive. I don’t have any interest in being killed, but if Kanbaru was doing this because she pined for Senjogahara─”
For every aberration, there was a reason.
If that was her reason─
If I was right from the start as Oshino said, then nothing had changed. I’d just gone back to the beginning, and Monkey’s Paws and Rainy Devils didn’t have anything to do with it. True, I hadn’t imagined that she saw me as her rival in love, but even then.
Underhanded calculations.
Scheming persistence.
Tsubasa Hanekawa.
The girl with a pair of mismatched wings.
…If I was jealous of anyone, it was her.
I really was─envious, even.
“Oh. Well, if that’s what you’ve decided, Araragi, then sure. It’s fine by me and none of my business. In that case, get in there and help missy out. I should caution you, once you enter, you won’t be able to leave until it’s over. The door absolutely won’t open from inside. Brace yourself because escape is not an option. Think very well back to spring break about situations from which there’s no turning back, and be prepared, understand? …And of course, whatever happens, little Shinobu or I won’t come save you. Don’t forget that I’m an inordinate pacifist and an ill-timed humanitarian. I’m going up to the fourth floor to get some sleep once I see you enter this classroom, so the rest is up to you. No need to say bye to me when you leave, neither you nor missy. Little Shinobu will be asleep by then, too, so just leave on your own.”
“…Sorry for the hassle.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Oshino moved from his spot on the wall to open the door.
I slipped in without hesitation.
I couldn’t leave now.
A classroom located in the back of the second floor─it was laid out the exact same way as the fourth-floor classroom but was the only one in the entire ruins whose windows were sealed. That isn’t to say that there weren’t shards of glass all over the floor here too. Rather, numerous planks of thick wood were nailed over the empty window frames just like people used to do when hurricanes came along. So single-mindedly many boards that it made you wonder why. Once the door shut, not a ray of light shone in─it was already the middle of the night, but not even starlight.
It was pitch black.
But─I could see.
Just having given plenty of blood to Shinobu, I could see through the darkness. In fact, in my current state, I could see better in the dark─and I slowly took in my surroundings.
I found it in no time.
It was there, standing in the not-so-large classroom─
Raincoat.
“…Hey,” I called out to it, but there was no response.
It seemed she was already─in a trance.
The body was Suruga Kanbaru’s─but its left arm, and for now, its soul was the Rainy Devil’s… If you’re wondering about the raincoat, Kanbaru ran off to grab one from the nearest general store while I was having Shinobu drink my blood. You could say the raincoat wasn’t necessary, or at least it was an optional, non-essential item, but it served as per usual a ceremonial purpose to set the mood and scene.
The desks and chairs in the classroom were in the way and had been removed─so now only Kanbaru and I stood there. The Rainy Devil’s left arm and a mock-vampire nonhuman.
Two beings that were not quite. It seemed like an even fight.
No─actually, I couldn’t let it be an even fight.
I had to overwhelm the devil.
Just like the night before, beneath the raincoat’s hood lurked a deep pit, and I couldn’t make out what was in there, let alone any expression─
“………”
The most standard measure against an aberration that grants wishes, like Rainy Devils and Monkey’s Paws, is to wish for something it cannot grant.
A wish that’s too grand.
Or a contradictory wish.
A wish that is completely impossible.
A wish that would put it in a double bind, between a rock and a hard place.
Like a bucket with no bottom, as Oshino put it. That lets you drive off the aberration, see beyond the aberration─or so he said.
But Kanbaru had already made her wish in this case─she wanted to be by Senjogahara’s side. And for that─Koyomi Araragi was in the way. She hated Koyomi Araragi, and she wanted to kill Koyomi Araragi, she ended up wishing unconsciously. The Rainy Devil was trying to answer to that wish as stated.
A wish can’t be canceled.
In which case, the logic needed to be turned on its head.
The very same wish should be made impossible.
Koyomi Araragi should be an entity that no mere Rainy Devil could kill─
“I guess this is a case of being able to argue your way out of anything─a little on the sophistic side if you ask me, like we’re monkeying around with the rules, but hey, if it works… Oops!”
I don’t know what triggered it─but Raincoat suddenly leapt toward me. Suruga Kanbaru’s jumping chops─amplified by the intensity of her hatred. Normally, the speed would have defied my eyes like the night before─but things were different now.
I could see just fine.
And also react─
“Wait, wh-whoa!”
With a centrifugal twist of my torso, I dodged Raincoat’s left fist─a very close call. Completing the spin, I moved away─it was lame, but I needed to regain my footing.
What was going on?
I wanted to say it was even faster than the night before─no, my eyes were still adjusting, that was all. Anyway, if I evaded Raincoat’s left hand’s attacks and waited for my opening, then targeted the “dead weight” that was Kanbaru’s body, caught it, and pinned it down─
“………kk!”
It was already─on me.
Ridiculous, I didn’t expect to overwhelm Raincoat when it came to speed, but mine ought to have been enhanced far beyond last night thanks to Shinobu, and yet, as easily as this─Raincoat brandished its left fist at me. I couldn’t dodge to the left, I needed to get on its right somehow, outside─
The bared, dark and hairy arm grazed my cheek and missed. I felt like the gusts in its wake were ripping my body apart─but kicked at Raincoat’s exposed flank.
…I’m sorry, Kanbaru!
I apologized to her in my heart.
As expected, apart from its left hand Raincoat was fairly normal─its body flew straight in the direction of my kick, lost its balance, and fell on all fours to the linoleum floor.
Indeed, controlling just the left arm posed a disadvantage for Raincoat. It was horribly imbalanced and obvious that the rest of the package couldn’t keep up.
But then, what was up with its speed? Had Raincoat not been serious the night before? Did it get faster in response to my enhanced abilities? But what need was there for an aberration to hold back?
I didn’t get it.
I still didn’t─as Raincoat got up.
Hmm… Even ignoring the fact that the body was Kanbaru’s, I couldn’t bring myself to kick an opponent who was down…
I knew I had to, but I was reluctant, even though I couldn’t afford to be in this case.
A good and kind person.
Ugh, I hated that label.
How nice that your lack of personality was getting smoothed over.
In a beeline, Raincoat’s left fist smashed into my right shoulder this time─that catapult of a fist. It must have aimed for my median line, but I was able to avoid that…not completely, though. I couldn’t fully acquire it─it was too fast. I hurtled back about ten feet… With my sense of equilibrium, I flipped midair and landed on my feet. Raincoat’s left hand had turned my bicycle into a crumpled piece of paper and demolished a concrete wall, but unlike yesterday, my body neither flew an absurd distance nor got wrecked. I suffered some damage, of course, but not to the extent that I couldn’t move. My shoulder was dislocated and probably also fractured, but it was nothing that my vampiric regeneration couldn’t heal right away. The sharp pain went away in an instant, too. If anything felt nostalgic, this was it. Oh, I couldn’t wait for sunrise… Just how badly was I gonna get burnt?
But I didn’t have time to be thinking about that. Because Raincoat followed up where I landed─and follow up, it did. Raincoat knew no doubt. Its left fist now went for my head. The punch caught me right in my face with its eyes that had yet to adjust. I was treated to the sound of my nose snapping. That was in my current state, which meant a normal human head would have been blown to smithereens; the destructive force was that terrifying even to imagine. I pathetically crawled away to get some distance from Raincoat, and as I did, my broken nose healed. I loathed the feeling. It was as if I’d become an amoeba or something. And this was at a tenth─my spring break had been hell.
I was able to dodge the next punch.
But the one after that nicked me.
“……Dammit!”
Why?
Why couldn’t I dodge them altogether?
Though the strikes themselves described efficient straight lines, Raincoat’s overall attacking motion, merely thrusting out its left fist with such brute force I half-expected it to go flying off its shoulder like an anime robot’s rocket-propelled punch, was crude─it didn’t telegraph its movements, but that was all, and I should have been able to track it, so why couldn’t I? Why couldn’t I get out of its way? It was clearly several notches faster than the day before. Not so much its power…I could take one or two, no, a few dozen clean shots and still be in the fight with my current build, so why was just its speed so out of sight?
Something wasn’t like yesterday…
Raincoat…
The bared left arm, the beastly hand.
…Its right arm was bare too, but like whatever lurked under the hood, it had the air of some deep pit that you could and could not see─wait, no. That was what had changed. Raincoat had been wearing rubber gloves the day before─neither of its arms had been exposed. But what of it? Wearing rubber gloves shouldn’t have slowed it down.
And then I realized.
I realized my mistake.
Kanbaru had only bought a raincoat at the general store… She hadn’t gotten rubber gloves or rubber boots─not because we decided that setting the mood didn’t require the whole getup, but simply because we didn’t think of it. I didn’t know how the original Rainy Devil was depicted, but the raincoat had been enough of a hint to tip off Oshino. If just a raincoat did a good enough job of expressing the aberration and its character, then Kanbaru and I weren’t exactly amiss.
But─if Raincoat wasn’t wearing rubber boots, then that meant it was wearing sneakers. One glance was all I needed to confirm the fact. Its feet weren’t bare just because its hands were. Raincoat was still wearing the shoes that Kanbaru had on.
The unmistakably expensive sneakers.
Especially if you were an athlete of Suruga Kanbaru’s caliber.
“…Yikes.”
Openly shackling or binding Kanbaru’s feet or attaching any kind of weight to her body would have been out given our strategy, or objective─but a simple pair of rubber boots was certainly a feasible handicap… Why had we gone and created conditions where Raincoat could make full and unfettered use of its powers? Suruga Kanbaru’s body was supposed to serve as dead weight, to drag not her feet but her left hand down, but instead she was acting as a nimble attachment to that arm!
Urk…
I couldn’t believe how bad I was at closing the deal…
Just evading was no longer an option. Since my body wasn’t going to accumulate any damage, I wouldn’t be chipped to death like in a fighting game as long as I barely managed to avoid half of its attacks, but that wouldn’t complete my assignment of pulling off an overwhelming victory. It didn’t seem like an issue of my eyes adjusting. I needed to face Raincoat’s attacks head-on even if both of us might go down as a result. I lowered my hips and held my hands out like a goalie preparing for a penalty kick─or was a man-to-man basketball defense the more appropriate analogy?
However, another catapult strike, a clear violation of the rules of basketball (what would that violation be called?), shot toward the base of my neck, and I tried to stop it with both of my hands, my right hand meeting Raincoat’s fist, my left hand grabbing its wrist, and the rest of my body wrapping around its left arm─but didn’t make it in time. No, in fact, my right and left hands did make it in time, but I couldn’t stop the catapult. I felt a number of my finger bones breaking, then the left fist striking my collarbone immediately after. My body lurched backwards, but I somehow stood firm on my back foot─I hadn’t stopped the blow but at least reduced its force before it reached my torso.
Before Raincoat could pull back its fist, I used both of my hands, their fingers already healed, to grab its left arm─finally accomplishing my initial goal of halting its movements. At last, I had gotten ahold of Raincoat. All right, and now─
“I’m sorry, Kanbaru!”
Apologizing out loud this time, and pinning the left arm with both of my hands as Raincoat struggled to shake free, I attacked its legs, stomach, and chest with three successive sidekicks. It was an impossible attack for a normal human body to perform given the way we’re built. Unlike Raincoat, who could only attack with its left fist, I could use all four of my limbs and had to make full use of my advantage.
Raincoat’s left arm flailed like mad.
It was vulnerable.
Oshino was right. I probably didn’t stand a chance against a fully formed Rainy Devil as I was, but I could overwhelm it if I denied it its left arm─the fist’s damage, I could heal instantly as long as I didn’t take multiple hits in a row, which meant the bigger threat was Kanbaru’s boosted leg strength, and the bit about her sneakers was indeed unexpected, but having trapped it like this─all I had to do was kick the Rainy Devil into submission. If it wouldn’t cry uncle, then until it was no more. It was nearly like torture, the right equivalent of Suruga-toi, so it didn’t feel great, but we weren’t going to tear off Kanbaru’s left arm, and we certainly weren’t going to end her life, so my only choice was to continue attacking and inflicting pain until the devil left her─
Raincoat’s legs buckled.
My constant low kicks were finally paying off─or so I thought, but it wasn’t the case. The leg that I─no, that it threw off balance came arcing at my jaw along the shortest and quickest possible route. Not its left arm, but its left leg─Kanbaru’s long leg threaded its way past the rest of my body to land a high roundhouse kick right on my temple. The force of the blow was of course nothing compared to the left arm’s, but this was still Kanbaru’s dash burst converted into attack power, plus I had been caught completely off guard.
My brain was rattled and my vision blurred for a moment. Damaging the sensory organs of a (mock) vampire was definitely effective─an important lesson I had learned over spring break.
I had to let go of Raincoat’s left arm.
To defend against the kick that followed.
I held my arms out like a cross and took it, and while inferior to the left-arm catapult─the impact scrambled my thoughts due to its sheer inexplicability.
It could use more than its left arm?
But hadn’t Oshino said “dead weight”?
“…Does this mean what I think it does?”
I could only come up with one possible answer.
If the Rainy Devil’s source of energy was human negativity, then it was feeding off of Suruga Kanbaru’s jealousy toward me─if the left fist was a catapult, then Kanbaru’s body was the aircraft carrier itself. Her heated passions, her inflamed emotions created the high-pressure steam channeled into her muscles. That’s why her body wasn’t dragging the left arm down as dead weight─well, perhaps it did under normal circumstances but wasn’t loath to mount a defense when the Rainy Devil was in a pinch?
No, that was sophistry.
If I was going to say that I forgave Kanbaru, I mustn’t resort to arguments that circumvented the truth─it wasn’t fair to describe it as some spinal reflex, like an electrical current jolting a frog’s leg.
In other words.
Kanbaru’s legs moved of her own will.
Suruga Kanbaru’s will had a part in this.
To lose her Rainy Devil left arm.
To let her second wish go unfulfilled.
To let me live.
She wasn’t giving up─Senjogahara.
“…Scheming persistence.”
I understand how you feel.
So much that it hurts.
So much that I hurt.
Because─I lost, threw something away, too.
Because I’ll never get it back.
For some reason, Raincoat stood still. Having sent its left fist after me so tenaciously in simple straight lines, like a simple magnet being drawn toward an object, now it stood unmoving─almost as if it were puzzling over something.
Or maybe.
As if it were doubtful.
Raincoat’s unhesitant movements─had stopped.
…Suruga Kanbaru.
Hitagi Senjogahara’s junior.
The basketball star.
Right after Oshino had revealed the truth, that her left arm wasn’t a Monkey’s Paw but a Devil’s Hand, that her wishes had been granted as she’d made them, after the awful truth that didn’t need to be exposed had been…she’d cast her eyes down for a few seconds, faced up bravely, and looked at Oshino and me in turn to say so.
“I don’t need this left hand.”
In a flat, plain, unemotional tone─oddly enough, the current-day personality of the senior she admired so.
“Please, just cut it off. I want you to sever it. I beg you. I know it’s a hassle, but I beg you. I can’t cut off my own arm…”
“S-Stop it.”
I hastened to push her outstretched arm back toward her. The hair felt disgusting as it brushed against my hand. It was creepy.
It was scary.
“Stop being ridiculous─I couldn’t ever. What about basketball?” I asked.
“It’s like Mister Oshino just said. I tried to kill another human being. I think it’s only fair.”
“N-No─really, Kanbaru, I don’t mind at all─”
Laughable. Clownish.
How far from the point could I get?
It wasn’t about whether I minded or not.
What’s more, whether I forgave her or not had nothing to do with it, either─the question was whether Suruga Kanbaru could forgive Suruga Kanbaru.
The girl who didn’t want to injure her classmates and so kept running.
Who suppressed and overwhelmed all negative emotions.
She who had sealed them away.
That strength of will─also bound her.
Castigated her.
“A-Anyway,” I said, “there’s no way we’re going to cut it off. Don’t be ridiculous. What are you thinking? You’re an idiot, a real idiot. Way to be simplistic about things. How can you take such an idea seriously?”
“Ah. You’re right, cutting off my arm isn’t something to impose on people. It’s not a favor you can carry out just because someone asked, is it? Okay, I’ll think of a way on my own. I’m sure it can be done with the help of a car or a train.”
“That’s─”
A car or a train?
That amounted to suicide.
It wasn’t suicidal─but plain suicide.
“If she wants to cut it off, there’s a good way, isn’t there,” Oshino interrupted with a reminder. “Why aren’t you telling her, Araragi? How inconsiderate of you when someone’s clearly in distress. You just have to get little Shinobu to cooperate. A heart under her blade─with that prized sword of hers, we’d be able to sever that left arm with no time for missy to feel any pain. Little Shinobu’s blade might not have the edge it once boasted, but cutting off a slender arm would be as easy as pie, or slicing tofu─”
“Shut up, Oshino! Hey, Kanbaru! Stop tormenting yourself about this! You shouldn’t be feeling responsible, not one bit─isn’t that obvious?! This is all because of the Monkey’s Paw…I mean, some aberration called the Rainy Devil─”
“The aberration only granted her wish, didn’t it?”
Oshino wasn’t shutting up.
Eloquently, loquaciously, he weaved his words.
“It only gave her what she wanted, yes? Wasn’t it the same with li’l missy tsundere? It’s not like what happened to you over spring break, Araragi. It’s nothing like little Shinobu’s case─Araragi, you didn’t wish upon an aberration.”
“……”
“Which is why─you don’t understand how she feels. Not her remorse, and not her regrets. Not in the slightest,” he told me. “By the way, in the original ‘The Monkey’s Paw,’ after having a first and a second wish granted, the third wish of the first person to use the paw was to die. I don’t think I need to explain the full significance of that?”
“Oshino─”
What he said was right.
But, Oshino, you’re mistaken.
Facing off against Raincoat─immobile like we were in a standoff, I took my time recollecting.
Because I actually do understand.
So much that it hurts, that my wounded heart hurts.
Hitagi Senjogahara’s feelings.
And Suruga Kanbaru’s, too, okay?
No, maybe I don’t, after all.
But─
We bear the same kind of pain.
We share it.
Who’s to say you won’t use a wish-granting item that presents itself to you? Like with my spring break, though it might not have been wished for. Even the pure and virtuous Hanekawa was bewitched by a cat due to the slightest discord and torsion─
At its base, my relationship with Shinobu was no different from Senjogahara’s relationship with the crab, or Kanbaru’s with the devil.
“I don’t mind, Araragi,” she said.
“Well, I do─how could I not? What are you saying? And what about Senjogahara? I wanted you and her to─”
“I’m done. About her too. I’m done now.” Her words must have literally pained her. “It’s fine. I’ll give up.”
No way.
Make your own wishes come true─that’s why your mother gave you that mummified devil. It couldn’t have been to teach you to give up on your dreams─
So don’t make that face.
Stop looking like a deep pit where your face should be.
You can’t ever give up on anything on the verge of crying like that.
A rainy devil─and a weepy devil.
Its origin is said to be a child who ran away from home after getting in a fight with his parents over nothing one drizzling day. He got lost in the mountains and was killed and eaten by a pack of wild monkeys. Mysteriously, no one from his family or settlement could recall the child’s name─
“…Bastard!”
Unable to take our standoff, mentally─unable to bear the shadow play of thoughts that beleaguered me, I charged Raincoat. Including the night before, it was the very first time I went on the offensive instead of just reacting. You could say that the pressure of maintaining an interceptive posture was getting to be too much.
Staying on our feet wouldn’t do. Even if I trapped its left arm again, a kick would follow without delay. I needed to go at Raincoat with a mind to pin it down like this was judo or wrestling─
I spread my arms out as though to clamp down on Raincoat, but I couldn’t catch it─had it moved left or right, I might have been able to respond, but that’s not what it did. Yet it didn’t back away, either─in that case I would have only needed to take another few steps.
Raincoat had jumped.
It jumped─and with both of its feet stuck to the classroom’s ceiling─stayed up there and dashed. Tup, tup, tup, tup, tup, tup, it defied gravity─and dashed across the ceiling, ignoring the universal law.
Then it came down─and landed on the floor.
And jumped sideways next.
And landed on the rickety blackboard─and jumped again─and landed on the thick planks sealing a window shut─and jumped again─and was back on the ceiling.
Every which way, plus a few more.
Like a pinwheel firework, it went from wall to wall, from wall to ceiling, from ceiling to floor, from floor to wall─jumping on its two legs. Raincoat was jumping around on Suruga Kanbaru’s practiced legs.
Or like a super ball fired at high speed.
A raucous dance of reflected angles.
Bounding, then bounding again.
My eyes couldn’t keep up.
It was accelerating like a body in free fall and going faster and faster, gradually, boldly picking up speed with every jump─the difference between rubber boots and sneakers a quaint detail, it gradually and boldly and unmistakably toyed with my vision.
Simply going from two to three dimensions had such a huge effect─the classroom had been turned into a sealed boundary by Oshino to limit the damage and to ensure a decisive outcome…and also out of a straightforward calculation that a narrow field offered advantages over a wide one in fighting the quick and agile Raincoat─but it was the complete opposite. That was totally backfiring.
Backfiring.
How could we not have foreseen it?
The reason Kanbaru had joined the basketball and not the track team─was that her legs shone most brightly as a weapon that made her faster than anyone else on the narrow field that is a basketball court! Despite her height and build Suruga Kanbaru had the jumping chops to dunk the ball with ease, and what did that mean in a constrained space with a low ceiling?!
It was backfiring, everything was.
I never gave up a good chance to be wrong.
As Raincoat jumped around making a fool of me, my heels seemed nailed to the ground and I couldn’t take a single step. In particular, the vertical movements from the floor to the ceiling, and from the ceiling to the floor, confounded me─it was a design issue in that the human eye was physically capable of handling lateral movement but wasn’t as prepared to shoot up and down. My vision couldn’t keep up with Raincoat’s movements.
Rapidly getting around behind me where I stood─
Raincoat jumped from the ceiling toward me at last. Spinning its body midair, heels over head like in a Sepak Takraw roll spike, it drove the tip of its foot into the crown of my head with the momentum it gained─I felt my skull collapse. As I lurched forward from the force of it, Raincoat, having already landed, met my jaw with a Muay Thai knee. The consecutive blows, the Sepak Takraw-Muay Thai combo, were nearly simultaneous timing-wise, and the impact of being sandwiched by a virtual pincer strike, something that exceeded pain, assaulted me. My brain felt dented along with my head, and I lost consciousness for a brief moment─suddenly comatose.
But I didn’t die.
My wounds healed immediately.
Man, it was hell.
Sañjīva, the Buddhist hell of revival.
Crushed into dust, then mended and restored by a gust of wind, crushed again, mended again, crushed, repeatedly, into dust, crushed for eternity, one of the eight great hells─it was exactly like my spring break.
“Tsk…”
I extended my arm─and Raincoat evaded me. Then it cocked its fist, and I reacted─no, I didn’t, my reflexes did. I’d focused on that left arm for so long that I was overly sensitive to its motion. What I ought to have taken more deeply to heart was Raincoat’s earlier attack, consecutive kicks delivered by choice despite its left arm being free. Or what the abrupt onset of its bewildering high-speed three-dimensional disruptive acceleratory movement, that terrifying footwork, meant. The significance of using not just the Rainy Devil left arm but all four of its limbs to maneuver.
Play with the devil and become the devil.
Forget whatever coming true, selling your soul, bodily possession, and all that─
Wish upon the devil and become the devil.
The left fist was a feint.
Only having mounted linear attacks at first─now Raincoat was finally employing footwork, combos, feints, that is to say, combat techniques.
No, not a feint.
A fake, was more like it. Because the tactic wouldn’t have been accessible to Raincoat without Suruga Kanbaru’s cooperation─
Bracing myself for the left fist fatally exposed my opposite flank, and the tip of Raincoat’s toes connected, thrice this time, and in the same precise location─and as my body folded in a sideways V thanks to an attack that contradicted the theory of relativity and struck the same coordinates simultaneously three times in a row, the sole of Raincoat’s other foot shot through my chest.
Like a catapult.
Overpowered, I fell over backward, but placing my hands on the floor as if to perform a back roll, I spun myself upright and put distance between myself and it─Raincoat immediately closed in.
The kick had struck one of my lungs.
It had probably collapsed.
It hurt to breathe.
Dammit, it wasn’t healing right away─did it mean that Raincoat’s kicks now had more power, more destructive potential than its left fist?
Did Kanbaru’s thoughts surpass the devil?
Jealousy.
Hatred.
All her negative emotions.
“…Because you just,” I said─with my still collapsed lung, “because you just won’t do, Suruga Kanbaru─!”
No one can ever replace someone else, and no one can ever be someone else. Senjogahara is Hitagi Senjogahara, and Kanbaru is Suruga Kanbaru.
And Koyomi Araragi is Koyomi Araragi.
The difference between me and Kanbaru.
Whether or not we knew Oshino.
Whether it was a demon or a monkey.
Random encounters, chance.
It did give rise to feelings of remorse.
I was remorseful, towards both Kanbaru and Senjogahara. But when it came to trading places if I could, I didn’t feel that way─I had no desire to cede my position.
Right.
Maybe my remorse sprang from there too.
I hadn’t considered Kanbaru my equal.
I’d condescended.
Made light of her.
Deigning to mediate between Kanbaru and Senjogahara to bring about their reconciliation, while I rested on an absolutely secure perch with consummate ease─how thoroughly repulsive a deed was that? Such a good, kind person. Such a bad, callous person.
If a wish.
If a wish is something you fulfill on your own, then─
Giving up on your own ought to be fine.
Giving up, provided you don’t forget─ought to be fine.
“…! …! …!”
Relentless attack after attack splashed across my body, each impact so intense it actually remolded me─I wasn’t able to dodge even one in four anymore. My body repaired and regenerated itself, destroyed part after destroyed part, but Raincoat’s assault now outpaced the process.
Before I knew, I was trapped in a corner of the classroom. As if invisible strings were binding me, I couldn’t move back or to either side. Raincoat no longer bothered with any footwork─if this were boxing, you’d say it was fighting on the inside, legs planted, and unopposed at that. No matter how nice the sneakers, the friction from the sustained, impractical acceleration would wear out the rubber soles, I’d vaguely hoped based on nothing, but even my optimistic projection was now bankrupt. Every permutation of fists, elbows, shins, toes, and heels tormented my body all over in quick succession. I wasn’t even allowed a moment to scream out in pain, it was the ultimate combo chain.
Pure pressure.
It wasn’t just my bones breaking; the spots where I got hit were tearing, my skin and muscles were ripping and sundering. Raincoat’s stance was that much more rooted and weighted forward than before and seemed to add to its left fist’s destructive power by the moment.
Still─
“Uni…form.”
My body may have been immortal, but my clothes weren’t.
They’d been torn to shreds by that point.
Ugh. I’d ruined yet another one.
My high-collared jacket, when we were only a few days away from changing into our summer uniforms…
What excuse was I going to offer my sisters this time?
“Guh…kk.”
At this distance…
At least, at this distance, if Raincoat offered me the slightest opportunity, I could render it immobile by hugging Kanbaru’s body…and force it down to the ground with all I was worth and turn around the fight.
I still had a path to victory.
Even now, while I was trapped in a corner in positional terms, I wasn’t actually cornered─attack me as Raincoat might, I had nothing to fear as long as my regenerative healing abilities were kicking in.
It was only painful.
Like Kanbaru’s heart, it was only painful─
Being in pain meant I was alive.
“I hate you.”
I heard a voice.
“I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you.”
It was the voice─of Suruga Kanbaru.
From the deep pit under the raincoat’s hood, as though appealing directly to my psyche, it resonated─and I heard:
“I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you.”
“………”
Hatred─more hatred than any one person could bear.
Malice, hostility.
The negative emotions of a positive junior.
It seemed to swirl─to be brimming in Raincoat.
Its surface tension stretched to the limit.
Along with the strikes, the voice continued.
The voice of hatred continued.
“I can’t stand you I can’t stand you I can’t stand you I can’t stand you I can’t stand you I can’t stand you I can’t stand you I can’t stand you─”
“…Kanbaru, sorry.”
Out loud again.
I apologized to Kanbaru.
“Me, I haven’t the least bit trouble standing you.”
You and I might not match up at all─but, you know?
Can’t we be friends at all?
“…■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■!”
Some sort of piercing shriek came from the deep pit─and Raincoat’s kick penetrated my abdomen. Penetrated. It wasn’t just that my organs ruptured, but rather, perfectly ignoring my joints and muscles, crushing my ribs and spine, it literally and non-figuratively penetrated clean through my belly so that the heel reached the wall behind me. I was skewered.
The damage─far outpaced my healing abilities.
It...
Zlrp, the leg pulled out.
It felt like my entire digestive tract was being tugged out.
The whole mess.
Dragged out─and my body was the deep pit now.
There was nothing inside the pit.
“Kanbaru─”
Uh oh.
With a large hole gouged in my abdomen─I couldn’t stand straight, and twisting my body even a little threatened to jerk apart my upper and lower halves. Which meant that I couldn’t make any more careless movements. I was still conscious, but one more blow in my state─would end it. It was me who’d gotten overwhelmed. How pathetic. At this rate, Kanbaru’s second wish was going to come true. That was the one thing I had to avoid at all costs…
Or maybe it was an option?
It was only her second wish.
If Kanbaru could…hold out and not make a third wish─wasn’t it fine? Her arm would go back to normal, and since a wish was a wish, she’d be by Senjogahara’s side─because putting aside the manner, the wishes came true.
I wasn’t ready to cede.
I wasn’t ready to cede.
I was supposed to have died during spring break, in the first place…so as Oshino said, it was nice and simple as far as solutions go.
Yes, I did feel attached to life.
But it wasn’t like I was in trepidation over the thought of dying.
“Aa─ah, uh,” I moaned.
For no reason I simply moaned.
They were like death throes.
“Suruga, Kanbaru─”
That’s when.
Raincoat’s combos, which had gone on without a break for dozens of minutes already, ceased.
Abruptly they ceased.
It was─the opening I’d been waiting for.
But I couldn’t carry out my plan to pin down Raincoat. There was of course the fact that the damage from the large hole opened in my abdomen seemed inestimably far from healing, and also the fact that my consciousness, which I needed to execute the move, was already fading, but more than that─I, too, had frozen in place.
Probably for the same reason as Raincoat.
I found myself frozen.
“…You seem to be enjoying yourselves.”
The door to the classroom opened.
The door that never would from the inside opened, from the outside.
Allowing someone to enter.
“Looks like you’re having fun without me, Araragi. How unpleasant.”
Her emotionless expression─her flat voice.
Confronted with this awful spectacle, she merely narrowed her eyes somewhat.
She always─appeared without warning.
Wearing a pair of jeans with no belt, a tank top in the same color, and a comfy largish hoodie, her hair tied loosely behind her, as if she’d stepped out of her room without changing, Hitagi Senjogahara stood there in her street clothes.
“S-Senjogahara…”
I couldn’t speak well with the wind hole that had been opened in my abdomen─I had been left without a voice, and it was hard even to call out to her.
Why are you here?
I wanted to ask her.
But I already knew the answer without having to ask. Oshino had called her here, of course─what other answer could there be? But how? He had no possible way to contact her─as if Hitagi Senjogahara would give her cell phone number to Mèmè Oshino, whom she disliked. There shouldn’t have been any opportunity to do so, either.
A cell phone?
Oh, of course.
That asshole─not caring one bit about the sanctity of people’s personal info, he’d gone and messed around with my phone in complete violation of my privacy. Yes, that cell phone in the backpack I’d given Oshino to hold on to before entering this classroom… It wasn’t like I used a password to lock the thing, and no matter how bad Oshino was with gadgetry, given enough time he could surely find the contacts list or call history. Plus, Senjogahara would have given him a crash course on how to use a cell phone that time they met on Mother’s Day─
But why?
For what purpose did Oshino summon Senjogahara here of all places, to this situation of all situations─
In a flash.
Raincoat leapt backwards, and via a few stops each on the ceiling and walls, moved from one corner of the classroom to the other, diagonally across and far away from me.
One more blow and the fight would have been over.
The wish granted.
Was her consciousness as Suruga Kanbaru temporarily suppressing the unconscious she’d provided to Raincoat? Was it thanks to Senjogahara’s entry, and if so, had that been Oshino’s aim? But how would that serve as anything more than a temporary measure? The Rainy Devil fed off of a person’s negative emotions, and until we got rid of them, nothing would change. This wasn’t some old foreign movie, and the power of love wasn’t going to solve everything. Why summon Senjogahara when you could come in yourself, Mèmè Oshino?!
As if she couldn’t care less about Raincoat’s antics, however, Senjogahara glared at me with cold eyes as I hovered near death’s door. They were the eyes of a bird of prey zeroing in on a kill.
“So you lied to me, Araragi.”
“…What?”
“You duped me saying you ran into a telephone pole and also kept this stuff about Kanbaru secret. Didn’t we promise when we started dating? We said we wouldn’t do that. About aberrations at least, we wouldn’t keep any secrets from each other.”
“Ah, well…”
That─was true.
I hadn’t forgotten or anything.
An enormous mass of fear like I’d never felt even while Raincoat was beating me senseless shot through my body like a bolt of lightning. Scary… Damn, she was scary. What was she, Medusa? How did she muster such a gaze…against her boyfriend, no less? And wait, really? She was telling me this now, in this situation, with me in the state I was in? Way to read the room, Senjogahara!
“…But, Araragi, I guess you already did die a thousand times.” With the door still flung open─Senjogahara sprang off her back foot toward the corner where I huddled. “I might let you off the hook this one time...”
Well.
A thousand times was probably an exaggeration.
Raincoat immediately reacted to Senjogahara’s advance─and likewise began dashing toward me. Out of nowhere, Hitagi Senjogahara and Suruga Kanbaru were having a foot race in lieu of the one they never did in middle school. In a straight line, Raincoat was about twice as far from me as Senjogahara, mathematically speaking, but the former track team star had a two-plus-year gap in her resume, while Raincoat was now drawing on Kanbaru’s leg strength─no, was the devil itself. The first one to get to my immobile form was, of course, Kanbaru.
Raincoat took the opportunity to wind up its left fist, ready to deliver me a final blow─but Senjogahara belatedly arrived to stand between it and me.
Watch out.
But I wasn’t even allowed the interval to think that.
A moment before impact─Raincoat was knocked away. Knocked away? Who could possibly do that, the way Raincoat was now? Not me, and Senjogahara even less. Then the sensible view was that, rather than being knocked away, Raincoat had leapt back of its own accord. Even if it did clumsily end up supine in the process.
I was dumbfounded.
That move─what was up with the unnatural move, as if Raincoat feared getting Senjogahara mixed into this, as if it eschewed hurting her above all?
Suruga Kanbaru’s conscious mind must have─no.
That would be far too convenient.
Aberrations are consistent.
They are rational to the bitter end.
It’s just that the rationality doesn’t always make sense to humans.
But in this case─
“Araragi. Knowing you, I bet you thought like an idiot that your death would solve everything,” Senjogahara continued to speak to me─her back still turned to me, her eyes not on me, but also paying Raincoat no mind. My wretched condition, covered in blood and wounds─wasn’t why she wouldn’t look at me, of that I was certain. “Don’t kid yourself. Your feeble self-sacrifice is totally uncalled for. If you died, how would I not do anything in my capacity to kill Kanbaru? I told you that once, didn’t I? Are you trying to turn me into a murderer?”
…She’d seen through me.
Oh boy, what a devoted woman.
I couldn’t even go and die cheerfully.
A wholehearted─twisted love.
“What infuriates me most of all is that you’d have thrown yourself into this even if your body weren’t that way. If you were being so stupid just because you could ride your immortal body through it, then I might as well tell you to do as you please, but you went with the flow like there was no choice and end up looking like this─I don’t know what to say.”
“……”
“But coming from you, I guess I don’t mind unsolicited favors and needless interventions and counterproductive meddling─”
Without gracing me with another glance to the very end, Senjogahara took a steady step toward Raincoat’s collapsed figure. Still on the floor, Raincoat began to crawl backwards as if it were terrified of her.
As if terrified…
As if terrified…why?
Come to think of it─faced with it now, it had been the same way last night. Raincoat had blasted me away then suddenly disappeared. That was because Senjogahara had shown up with the envelope I’d forgotten… But why should her entry usher Raincoat’s retreat? It seemed so unnatural when you thought about it. A human street slasher or thrill killer might─but an aberration wouldn’t care about witnesses. And anyway, Senjogahara couldn’t have presented an obstacle for Raincoat given its mighty left arm.
So then why did it run?
Because the person who came on scene was Senjogahara?
What did that mean?
Was it really the power of love?
Did Suruga Kanbaru’s feelings for Senjogahara outclass the devil, conveniently enough? Could earnest thought brush aside aberrations, the world itself, and open up a circuit to the heavens? No.
No.
That wasn’t it… Right. The thought.
Even after Kanbaru had made her second wish to the Rainy Devil left hand, turning hers into a beast’s─it still took four days for it to activate. That was because she just barely managed to suppress her hateful thoughts toward me. Her stance that you fulfilled wishes on your own suppressed the devil’s violence. The stance that had grown firm roots in her over the seven years since her first wish─Oshino had laughed and called it patently ridiculous, but not in the conventional sense.
She was by no means wrong─he’d said that, too.
Her thought.
The Rainy Devil sees through us to find our darkest emotions─it sees and reads what’s on the back. It sees the flip side of our wishes. You want to run faster because you hate your classmates. You desire to be by Senjogahara’s side─because you hate Koyomi Araragi.
But that was just the flip side.
Just as the front has a back.
The back─has a front.
If the Rainy Devil hurt Hitagi Senjogahara─then whether or not it could kill the target of hatred, Koyomi Araragi, Kanbaru’s obverse wish could no longer be granted… Right, it wasn’t anything moving or sensitive like the power of love but a more sober and primitive matter.
A contract.
A deal.
The Rainy Devil could only grant the flip side of wishes, but that didn’t mean it could neglect the top side. In fact, even when Kanbaru was in grade school─it granted her flipside wish of getting revenge on her classmates, but in the end, her topside wish of wanting to become faster came true as well. It properly came true apart from that whole causality. What was patently ridiculous was that this was exactly what the Rainy Devil intended─it simply interpreted the front as the back, but didn’t pull the latter out of thin air. The reverse couldn’t exist without the obverse. No, going again by what Oshino said, left hands didn’t have intentions. It was all Suruga Kanbaru’s unconscious mind─it established the causality between an obverse and a reverse side that never intersected, as a contradiction.
A contract with the devil.
In exchange for your soul.
A cooling-off period.
A double bind─between a rock and a hard place.
Between the obverse and reverse.
That was why─precisely why the Rainy Devil couldn’t raise its hand against Senjogahara. That was the contract, that was the deal. As long as Senjogahara shielded me─it couldn’t raise a hand even against me, the hated, hated me.
It couldn’t raise that left hand against us.
If one method was for me to overwhelm the devil and make it impossible for the flipside wish to be fulfilled─then there was also another, which was to make it impossible for the topside wish to be fulfilled.
And now, Senjogahara even pledged in front of the devil that she’d kill Kanbaru if I died. Claiming ignorance was not an option. The Rainy Devil’s situation was already locked down.
Like he saw through everything more than any devil.
Oshino, you… Your badness and callousness make me pale in comparison─!
“It’s been a while, Kanbaru. I’m glad you seem to be doing well,” Senjogahara said.
Then, she went over to Raincoat, who tried to slide away on its back─no, to her old acquaintance Suruga Kanbaru─and slowly covered her body with her own, pinning her down.
Even after getting in a wretched state─
I hadn’t been able to.
But finally she did what I could never do.
Taking that beastly left arm.
And the human right arm, and holding them, soothingly.
Senjogahara’s stapler─
Was no longer on her.
“…My senior Senjogahara.”
A mutter from beneath the hood.
The voice resonating, pleading.
What lurked under the hood was no deep pit. What lurked there was no face on the verge of crying. Not on the verge─it was crying. Reflected clearly in my eyes was the teary-eyed, crying, and cry-laughing face of a girl.
I─wracked with sobs, she voiced her thought.
“I love you.”
She voiced her wish.
“Oh. Me, not so much.” Direct, unfiltered, in the same tone as ever. Senjogahara said flatly, “Will you stay by my side anyway?”
Sorry I made you wait so long, she said, most flatly.
…What a fool.
The height of folly!
Jeez─I’d be lucky to call myself a tomato can here.
A master class on how to play the comic relief, if I do say so myself, and I’m pretty used to it. My uselessness was almost exemplary.
A good girl who can say sorry.
I thought I knew very well how greedy a woman Hitagi Senjogahara was. I thought I knew very well how bad at giving up she was.
If it really mattered to her.
Senjogahara would never give it up.
Unsolicited favors, needless interventions.
Counterproductive meddling.
Even so…I don’t know, all of these people around me are really warped─
They have two sides to them.
And the obverse and reverse are one and the same, like in a Möbius strip.
Well, I guess the power of love is one interpretation, then.
It’s pretty depressing to be forgotten by someone, after all.
Thinking such thoughts, waiting for the large hole in my stomach to close up, I just decided to watch, without wisecracking, the Sapphic spectacle unfolding before my eyes. If I were Oshino, I would have put on nihilistic airs as though they suited me, perhaps stuck an unlit cigarette in my mouth, and asked the two of them if something good had happened to them, but unfortunately, I was a minor.
009
The epilogue, or maybe, the punch line of this story.
The next day, I was roused awake as usual by my little sisters Karen and Tsukihi, and rubbing my drowsy eyes, I prepared to head to Senjogahara’s house for an all-day Sunday study session as I’d promised, in high spirits, holding out hope that perhaps this was the day I finally got to eat her home cooking, but just as I straddled my commuter bicycle, the only one left in my possession, and opened the gate and left my home, I encountered a bored-looking girl who was stretching in front of a telephone pole for whatever reason. She was in casual clothes, but the combination of the short pleated skirt and the bike shorts peeking out past them made her look mostly the same as she did in her school uniform─it was the star of Naoetsu High, my junior Suruga Kanbaru.
“Good morning, my senior Araragi.”
“…Good morning, Miss Kanbaru.”
“Hm? Oh, I don’t deserve such a formal greeting. Starting with everyday good manners, you’re pure quality. Have your injuries healed?”
“Yeah… If anything, the sun is the tough part for me now, but it’s not as bad as I thought. That and my healing damage are about even. So, Kanbaru, how do you know where I live?”
“Aw, acting like you have no idea. Are you setting up the scene for me? I used to stalk you. Of course I’d have ferreted out your home address.”
“……”
Her cheerful laughter did nothing to dispel my bewilderment.
“And is there something you need?” I asked her.
“Yes. I received a call from her this morning, and she told me to come get you. Oh, let me carry your bag.” Almost as soon as Kanbaru said this, she plucked my backpack out from my bicycle’s front basket and held it in her left hand. She looked at me with a beaming, innocent smile. “I oiled up your bike chain, too. And if there’s anything else you need, don’t hesitate to ask.”
She’d gone past being friends with Senjogahara and was her gofer.
While I had no interest in having the star of the school at my beck and call, if the pathologically jealous Senjogahara had assigned such a task to Kanbaru, then was their relationship mended, and was the Valhalla Duo back together again, or was I reading too much into it? I probably was reading too much into it.
“How about a massage before we leave? You say you’re fine, but you must be tired. I’m pretty good, I’d have you know.”
“…But what about your team? You have practice on Sundays, too, don’t you? With the exam break looming, you need to hustle.”
“No, I can’t play basketball anymore.”
“Huh?”
“It might seem premature, but I’m retiring.”
Still holding my backpack, Kanbaru showed me her left hand. That left arm of hers─was wrapped tight in a long white bandage up to her elbow. You could tell nonetheless that there was something slightly off about its length and shape.
“It was all so half-baked. The devil left, but in the end my arm didn’t go back to normal. There’s no way I could keep playing basketball. Still, it’s powerful, in its own way, and actually feels quite handy.”
“…Give me my bag back. Now.”
What could I say.
Then that much was only fair, it seemed.