Monogatari Series - Volume 10 - Chapter 1.02

002

“If you can’t be medicine, be poison. Otherwise you’re nothing but water.”

That’s the kind of thing my mother would say to me.

I don’t think she was a very good mother─at least, she didn’t resemble the generally accepted image of a mother at all.

So much so that when I encountered a “mom” on TV or in a book, or in conceptual form, it wasn’t just jarring, it gave me the creeps. She was that sort of person.

Sure, the idea that all mothers are going to be the Virgin Mary is nothing more than some outdated pigeonholing, and I realize in theory that the so-called maternal instinct is nurture, not nature.

Still, I think she was a bird of a different feather.

A mother of a different feather.

“Suruga. Your life will probably be more aggravating than other people’s. It’s going to wear you out and piss you off, but that’s not because you’re better, it’s because you’re weak. All life long you’ll cradle that weakness─I pray you’ll learn to live for that aggravation.”

She loved to blow smoke up your ass with head-scratchers like that─and when she said stuff like that to me, I suppose she was treating me like a grown-up instead of a child. Which is nice and all, but a parent who doesn’t treat her child like a child is a pretty odd proposition.

Kids are supposed to remain kids in their parents’ eyes, for good.

It seems like I was only ever “this little person” in her eyes.

Whenever my friends talk about their parents, I end up feeling that much more keenly how unusual she was.

Being my parent, for me she’d been the norm.

The norm.

But it’s also true that the whole time I was growing up I thought there was something weird about that norm.

I always wondered what my father saw in such a person─though I guess that amounts to nothing but a charming anecdote about how, in my innocence, I believed that a husband and wife must absolutely love each other.

If I was going to wonder, though, my question shouldn’t have been why he fell in love with her, but why she went so far as to elope with him.

It’s really hard to believe that she could be so passionate.

She’d had a bitter time of it.

Or so I’ve heard, at least.

In getting together with the Kanbaru family’s eldest son, she experienced various hardships and rank prejudice, suffered many setbacks, and eloped with him in the end─

A life on the run.

Not a happy love affair, to put it mildly.

Certainly not a blessed union.

A romance against the current of happiness─on that point alone she was indeed my mother, but there remains a gap between us that’s hard to reconcile.

Maybe I just prefer to think so.

I want there to be.

Maybe that’s all it is─but actually, in the first place, the one who’d hate us getting lumped together might be my mother. She probably wouldn’t want to be─not with a person like me who does vaguely know when to quit.

Be that as it may.

For that couple, who met their end together, like the best of friends, in a car accident, there may not have been room for anyone else, even if I was their own child, their only daughter.

That’s how it seems to me.

It always has, but only the more so lately.

When she and my father died, my paternal grandparents took me in─I have no idea if I even have maternal grandparents. This might sound odd, but I have a hard time believing that person was ever “somebody’s child.” Incidentally, my grandparents feel endless hatred for the woman who stole their beloved only son and kicked the bucket in a virtual double suicide; even though they never tried to indoctrinate me into any kind of grudge when I was little or uttered a disparaging word in front of me, the animosity they bear towards her shows no matter how hard they try.

I wish they’d just come out and say it.

I think we might be able to get riled up together.

“As my daughter, you’re already cursed. And it’s not just you, the moment they’re born from people, all babies are. Doesn’t it give you the creeps? People birthed by other people. We live in a heartless world where the beauty and sanctity of propagating life gets rammed down our throats, but don’t you feel it’s a precious curse bestowed on us by God? Or is it just my imagination? No, no, my feeling that you’re dear to me isn’t my will, it must be God’s.”

She said (I think ) some such thing to me, so she must have loved me in her own way, paradoxically.

Come to think of it, I remember my dad telling me: “That girl does God’s living for Him.” It’s sweet in retrospect that he referred to his wife as “that girl,” but I still can’t go along with that opinion.

I can’t swallow it.

How do I put this? Well, if I may: she was like the Devil.

“God or Devil, it’s the same─for all that we prattle on about it, we’re nothing but their playthings. Don’t waste your time thinking about such self-evident nonsense─” that person said.

Said my mother, Toé Kanbaru, née Toé Gaen, to me.

“─And rise and shine, stupid girl. The thrill of a new term begins today!”

“!”

Jolt.

I opened my eyes, shocked out of sleep by that shout─it had only been a dream, of course, but the rebuke echoing in my head was so realistic that I was fully awake in an instant.

It was an early April morning, still chilly, but in a mere instant, my entire body was drenched in sweat.

“…Aaah, aaah, aaah.”

It was the rudest of awakenings.

The rudest awakening in Kanbaru history.

I thought I might die. Araragi-senpai─my dear senior Koyomi Araragi─always grumbled about how his two adorable little sisters roused him from bed every morning, but however they go about it, I doubt they assault him in his sleep with lethal force, so there’s no way he wakes up this terrified.

Ah, that was scary.

Well, today it was a bad dream, but it’s been a long time since I had a “pleasant awakening”…

I thought this, staring at the left arm─my own left arm, bound tightly to one of my room’s posts with duct tape.

“Phew…”

Performing the routine work of stripping away the tape with my right hand as usual, I slowly regained my composure.

My pulse returned to normal.

With my left arm tightly fixed to an immobile post, I couldn’t roll over, so it was difficult to get a good night’s sleep. I have no idea what I’ll get up to in my sleep if I don’t do that, though.

In my sleep. In my unconscious state. I have no idea─what I’ll get up to.

If I used handcuffs or something, I might unlock them while I was unconscious, hence the duct tape. This way, if I were, for instance, to put on a raincoat and go out like a sleepwalker for a midnight stroll, I’d need to tear through the tape and make a wreck of it. Even if I couldn’t prevent the sleepwalking itself, I’d at least know that I’d gone outside.

I’d know that I’d sinned.

I could avoid the sin of ignorance.

It did nothing for my night’s sleep─but it was marginally better than knowing nothing.

Since that May.

Since I attacked Araragi-senpai in a trance, unconscious, asleep─ever since I was possessed by a devil, I saw fit to rely on the ridiculous restraint.

How many rolls of duct tape have I wasted?

Well, not wasted.

Because every time I woke up in the morning and saw the duct tape still intact around my bandaged arm, I breathed a sigh of relief─thinking, Good, looks like another night has gone by without me hurting anyone.

So it wasn’t a waste.

“Haha─recognizing your unconscious destructive urges is a bitter pill to swallow, isn’t it, Suruga? Turns out ignorance isn’t a sin, it’s bliss. Most people live out their lives never facing the fact that humans are basically just talking monkeys, no different from the beasts, but you? You got screwed. Or maybe you screwed up? Not that that’s why I bequeathed you the Monkey’s Paw. Why did I, then? Don’t ask. Questions are for losers.”

I felt like I heard such a voice.

Paying it no heed, I started getting dressed.

The season was still a little cold to be sleeping naked.

I shivered, not because of the night sweat drying on my body.

My mornings began with changing the bandage on my arm, which got sticky from the tape─I thought wearing only that and nothing else, like being naked apart from an apron, was pretty chic.

Or is it just me?