Monogatari Series - Volume 10 - Chapter 1.27

027

“From what I’ve heard, she broke her leg during a middle-school basketball game─and her athletic career was finished, just like that. So she ended up leaving that school…and before she graduated from her new middle school, she slit her wrists.”

She took a box cutter in her right hand and slashed through her left wrist.

Slashed through her left wrist.

Her left.

Karen’s halting words rang in my ears for some time after she uttered them.

It was the first time I’d ever heard her sound like that…and I found my mind wandering to the irrelevant thought that such a dark tone didn’t suit her at all.

When it rains, it pours, I guess, and as if to hammer home the point.

Higasa called me right after Karen hung up─it seems that after our conversation she took it upon herself to conduct her own investigation into Roka Numachi and was bothering to call and inform me of the results.

“Bothering,” huh?

What a cynical way to put it.

When did I become the sort of person who said that about a friend who was looking out for me?

No.

I bet everyone has moments when they become that person─for instance, when you’re confronted by the fact that someone you were talking to up until a little while ago has been dead for three years.

That kind of moment.

“Apparently, it wasn’t just her leg─seems like things had also gotten really bad at home. The girl who told me about it said, ‘Her mother might as well have killed her by her own hand’…” Even though it happened a long time ago, it was only natural to be shocked by the news that someone you crossed swords with back in middle school had died, and I could hear it in Higasa’s quiet, gloomy tone too. “She always seemed to be above it all, so I never imagined… But it seems she had her reasons. Since it was after her family moved far away, I guess no one around here talked about it…”

But suicide? she asked. As if to say─I can’t think of anyone less likely to commit suicide in the whole world. No word seemed more at odds with her swamp-like playing style.

But it was an unshakable fact.

Karen emailed me a newspaper article that Tsukihi had copied at the library. It was a short article from a local paper in a different region of the country, probably even shorter than the article about her breaking her leg, but it was definitely an obituary.

Presented with information from multiple sources, not to mention concrete proof, I was forced to accept the fact.

That Roka Numachi had died.

And three years ago, no less.

She’d ended her own life.

…So who was the girl with the dyed-brown hair I’d seen only a while ago? Another person with the exact same name? A lookalike who assumed her identity?

That couldn’t be.

Memories of appearances tended to be vague, and her vibe had changed along with her hair color, and in fact those things could be researched─but her basketball style, that couldn’t be faked.

They used to call her the Poison Swamp, for crying out loud; the Quagmire Defense was hers and hers alone.

There was no question about it. That girl was Roka Numachi.

The one I knew.

My former archrival─Roka Numachi.

“Okay,” I muttered, still lying on the futon, my face buried in my pillow. “So, in other words, that Numachi was a ghost.”

I accepted the possibility calmly, easily.

Not based on the facile view that if devils exist, ghosts must too, but rather because it explained a bunch of other things if it was true.

First of all, her brown hair.

She said herself that if she hung around our town with such a conspicuous look, people would be talking about it in no time. When I thought about it, there was no way I wouldn’t have turned up some kind of intel on her after five whole days of searching.

And clearing everyone out of the classroom and the gym. That couldn’t be explained away as happenstance─it fit together much more neatly if she’d made it happen. Even without her devil parts, she must have been that kind of supernatural presence.

And no wonder time couldn’t heal the “wound”─the unhappiness─that was Numachi’s injured leg if her time had come to a dead stop three years ago.

Three years ago.

Her hair color was different, but her height and style hadn’t changed at all─at all, not even a tiny bit.

Also, the transplantation of devil parts would go much more smoothly if she herself were an aberration. For them to move to her body like an infection just from hugging, or touching, someone─it had to be because Numachi herself was an aberration.

There was an affinity between them.

And it was only with the perfectness of hindsight that I questioned this now, but any way you slice it, it’s unrealistic for a teenage girl to roam around the country for three whole years even if she’s not in school.

Japan is too full of meddlesome people.

I hear Hanekawa-senpai has been having real trouble on that score since she left Japan to travel the world, and she waited until after graduation. Seems like you have to be a middle-aged man like Mister Oshino for people to finally leave you be.

Maybe the part about an insurance payout for her leg was true, but it wouldn’t be enough to support a vagabond lifestyle for three whole years─however.

If she were a ghost, any concern about expenses vanished in a puff.

A new-fangled item like a cell phone had thrown me off, but on second thought, they’re ubiquitous enough nowadays to be featured in ghost stories…

Even I’ve got the hang of them, after all.

If we’re really going to get down to it, my seniors had told me─about a ghost that haunts this town, that haunts its streets.

Haunting the entire country is a pretty huge difference…but it’s just a difference of scale, and if you look at the cases themselves, they’re pretty similar.

A ghost.

If the Lost Cow is an aberration that makes people lose their way, then was Numachi an aberration that gathers people’s unhappiness?

An aberration that gathers unhappiness─even I could think of a few aberrations that shouldered misery for people.

A misfortune-picker.

A collector.

If her idiosyncrasy, which bordered on the pathological even if we were to mince words, could be attributed to the fact that she was an aberration─then that odd, urban-legend feel of “Lord Devil” started to make sense as well.

Urban legends.

Chinese whispers.

Campfire tales.

If it was a Tale.

But then, why was I able to see her? Going by experience, only people mired in unhappiness were capable of espying Numachi’s unearthly figure.

So why─no, hang on.

I can’t say I wasn’t mired in unhappiness, that day when I went to the burnt field where the cram school once stood─since for me the devil’s arm equaled misery.

From her perspective, I must’ve been like a turkey showing up at the kitchen door along with a baster and a carving knife─or no, not quite. She was operating in this town because she was after my piece of the “devil” in the first place.

She set up shop.

And set her trap, and waited for this turkey to waddle into it. Numachi was a hunter.

I felt like I’d been taken in, cheated, and I guess I really had fallen into a trap, but on the other hand, so what?

I went through hell last year.

One little ghost wasn’t going to rattle me now.

Unbeknownst to me, an acquaintance of mine had died somewhere, that’s all─someone whose funeral I probably wouldn’t have attended even if I’d known about it.

We weren’t friends, and we hadn’t spoken much.

Feeling sad would be, in fact, dishonest.

And it’s not like actually talking with her, or her apparition, left me with a good impression.

Just the opposite, it was often unpleasant─to put it bluntly, our two interactions this month made me clearly dislike her.

So I didn’t have to feel sad.

It should have been fine not to.

Yet─in that case, what the hell was this feeling?

This feeling that I couldn’t sit still, couldn’t stand still, never mind sleep.

“…”

I forced myself to sit up and look for the cell phone I’d tossed away. Then I called a certain number─listed on the business card that Deishu Kaiki had given me.

I made the call because, while he was a swindler, he was also an expert on aberrations, and if he was acquainted with Numachi, he might have more detailed information─but it didn’t go through.

He must have been toiling away as usual, mobilizing assets that lay dormant here and there in Japan’s households, in order to do something about the recession.

Or maybe a high school girl who shamelessly and untowardly called him the very next day after being told to get in touch if she was ever in trouble disgusted him.

Well, I was glad the call didn’t go through.

I found myself breathing a sigh of relief.

Even if Kaiki did have more detailed information, he would only share half of it with me, in keeping with his personal principle. Plus, I felt like maybe I didn’t want the details.

Yes.

I think I could be forgiven.

It wouldn’t be a sin in the first place even if I just forgot about it. If I filed everything concerning Numachi under “I guess it must have been a ghost” and forgot about it─I might not be able to right away, but eventually I’d forget.

If I focused on preparing for exams─since seeing my left hand would no longer force me to recall the past.

This thing we call memory is vague.

Even seemingly unforgettable traumas recede into the past at some point─a little encounter with a ghost at the beginning of my last year of high school? That would be gone before I knew it.

“Okay.”

Fixing my resolve.

I stood up and began to stretch.

Removing the underwear I was still wearing, I loosened up all the muscles in my body, at length and fully.

Then I gathered my hair into a ponytail and changed into some light running clothes.

“Time to run!”