Monogatari Series - Volume 13 - Chapter 1.14

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Nadeko Sengoku’s parents were very average adults. What I mean by “very average adults” is that they were those law-abiding citizens I’m always going on about, no more, no less.

In other words, I felt neither positive nor negative about them─like with almost everyone I meet.

They were people, that’s all.

Yet these average adults and law-abiding citizens weren’t celebrating New Year’s. Which was only natural since their daughter, while not dead, was missing, and had been for months. They were basically in mourning.

My joke about sending a greeting card was not only unfunny (even if Senjogahara had laughed) but also inappropriate.

But as someone who, hearing that word, only starts thinking about “appropriating” and what the prefix “in” would mean in that case, I’ll send anyone a greeting card anytime I damn well please.

The atmosphere was so gloomy that my usual funeral suit (not my term) would have fit right in.

Anyway, I marched straight into the house of mourning. That makes it sound like I took the sort of “rough” approach Senjogahara worried I might, but in fact I was quite gentle.

It was by pressing the button on the intercom and announcing myself as the father of one of their daughter’s (i.e. Nadeko Sengoku’s) classmates, which is to say by lying, that I gained entry to the home.

“Maybe she just ran away, of course, but my daughter has been missing for three days now as well. I’m pretty sure she said something about your daughter right before she disappeared. It’s been tormenting me, so here I am, thoughtlessly barging in. Do you think you might be willing to talk to me about your daughter?”

And so on.

I’m one hell of a performer─or rather, any wariness her parents might have maintained towards their unknown visitor melted away the second I uttered their daughter’s name, so even if I’d been a performer and liar unfit for anything above the level of an elementary school talent show, the outcome might have been the same.

If I may digress for a moment, nothing is more of an imposition, nor more painful, for people caught up in a situation like that than the busybody who comes bearing misinformation, or disinformation.

I understand that sentiment. I do, but that’s as far as it goes.

So, as I sat in the living room listening to their story, I thought to myself, You two are “very average adults”─not to mention, “very average parents.”

I’m not disparaging them, to be clear.

That was just my impression.

I meet a lot of people in my line of work. Among them have been a great many parents whose daughters have gone missing, whose daughters have died, whose daughters’ whereabouts are known but who haven’t been heard from in ages, and as far as I could tell the couple seemed, well, pretty normal.

I suppose that was to be expected.

No point in holding out for anything else.

Because while they might have been worried that she’d been in some accident, or even that she was dead, there was no way they suspected that their daughter had become a god.

It was inexcusable to let them tell their story without telling mine, so I began by describing how adorable, how sweet, and how close with Nadeko Sengoku my daughter had been.

As I said before, my visit was a serious imposition, but such blathering really hit home with Nadeko Sengoku’s parents.

The things I never knew about my own girl, sobbed the mother. I might have been moved to tears by her weeping, if only my story were true.

I’d started talking off the cuff with no preparation or background info, and who knows, maybe I had uttered some truths, inadvertently. Given the possibility, I didn’t feel guilty.

Not that I would have felt guilty without the possibility.

The fact that they believed my cock-and-bull story made it clear that, like so many other parents, the very average Sengokus didn’t know a thing, not one damn thing, about their daughter.

While I seem to recall them talking about how she was shy, quiet, but prone to laughter, I had no interest in such parental cooing. What I wanted to hear about was her dark side, but they didn’t seem to know, or want to know, about any of that.

Her father told me that she’d never had a rebellious phase and always listened to her parents, but a daughter who didn’t go through any against her male parent? It should have set off every alarm bell in his brain. I almost stood up and demanded to know how he could have been so deaf.

Even Senjogahara, with her severe daddy issues, went through a distant phase with her father when she was in middle school.

Well, well, well.

But it was over and done with now, so no use crying over spilt milk. While I may have stumbled across the Sengoku family’s educational philosophy or whatever, it wouldn’t have any bearing at all on my life thereafter, so without commenting on it, I simply said, “Oh really? Yes, our little girl was the same.” I was just going with the flow of the conversation, and few can match Deishu Kaiki when it comes to that.

My cover story made it difficult to ask for a photo of their daughter, so I gave up on that idea, deciding to have Senjogahara send me one later on as I had originally envisioned. Instead I asked, “Would it be all right for me to see your daughter’s bedroom?”

I didn’t come right out with it like that, of course. I started with a little I think my daughter may have lent something or other to Miss Nadeko, and I think it might provide some clue to finding the two of them, does anything come to mind? It was only after dancing around the issue for a half-hour or so that I arrived at the goal. Naturally I didn’t neglect an initial I know this is terribly impolite, but. I don’t think Mr. and Mrs. Sengoku thought I was being impolite in the slightest, however.

Nadeko Sengoku’s parents showed me to her (second-floor) room, which was what you might call tidy. Yet it was a little too clean, artificially so, to call it ordered. Her parents must have continued to clean the room after its occupant went missing. When I noticed this, I asked them, and indeed they were preserving it in the state it had been in before their daughter disappeared.

Well, Nadeko Sengoku wasn’t dead (as far as they were concerned) but only missing, so as parents it was the right thing to do. It wasn’t like they were counting the years of a child who’d passed away.

Kid-friendly manga lined up on the bookshelf, cute stuffed animals─the overall impression was very much that of a middle school girl’s room.

But to me it somehow seemed affected.

Affected, if this is how it looked with her parents cleaning it─honestly, I might even say creepy.

It was as if a cute, childlike sensibility was being forced on the room willy-nilly, which, combined with her father’s remark that Nadeko Sengoku had never had a rebellious phase, gave me plenty to think about.

I couldn’t very well snort that it didn’t matter.

This─did matter.

It might be the key.

The darkness, in Nadeko Sengoku’s heart.

With that in mind, I began scouring her room─it was still bright outside, but the interior was dim because the curtains were drawn. The first thing I did upon entering, therefore, was open them.

Of course, Mr. and Mrs. Sengoku hadn’t gone back down to the living room after showing me to their daughter’s room, so I had to conduct my search under their watchful gaze and couldn’t ransack the place.

I was sweeping a square room in circles, so to speak, or just scratching the surface─and then, on the lowest shelf of the bookshelf, I happened on the spine of something that appeared to be a photo album. A photo album. Excellent, what a windfall. After securing her parents’ permission, I opened it.

The pages were filled with portraits of Nadeko Sengoku. So this is Nadeko Sengoku, eh? A face to put to the name. At long last, my mark had a face.

My first impression of her─though these were only photos─matched my impression of the room.

Childlike, cute, creepy.

Somehow artificial. Like she’d been compelled to be pretty─with something awkward about her smile. As if she were only smiling because a camera lens was pointed at her, and she had no choice.

It was more abject than shy.

She had her bangs down, to avoid meeting anyone’s gaze─or worse, like she was cowering.

What was she so afraid of?

What?

Taking them with me was definitely off the table, so I burned the image into my brain as best I could, to be analyzed in due course.

“She’s alone in all these pictures, isn’t she? I guess she didn’t take any with my daughter,” I observed, casually so it wouldn’t sound like an excuse, before returning the album to the shelf. I was just filling the time in a sense with those words, but after I spoke them I realized that I hadn’t come across a single photo of the whole family.

In other words, there were no photos of Nadeko Sengoku and her parents, only those of Nadeko Sengoku by herself.

Sure, they require someone to take them, so I could understand why there might not be a lot of pictures of the three of them together… But there should have at least been some of her with her mother or her with her father. Even if this was Nadeko Sengoku’s personal album, no, precisely because it was her personal album, there was no need for such a strict line to be drawn.

I had intended to postpone my analysis but ended up thinking about it anyway─what the hell was going on in the mind of a girl who kept in her room a modeling portfolio of an album, devoid of family photos?

I looked over my shoulder, but the Sengokus didn’t seem furtive or defensive in the face of someone who’d seen it.

As if there wasn’t a single thing about it to be ashamed of─in fact, like they were proud, even under the circumstances, that their daughter was so adorable.

Good, law-abiding citizens indeed.

They believed wholeheartedly in their decency.

Even with their daughter missing─they probably thought they’d made no mistakes in life. They were probably proud of that fact.

Why is he staring at us? they seemed to be wondering, a bit suspiciously perhaps, so I covered for myself with a little calculated flattery: “I can really see both of you in your daughter.” Speaking as a professional swindler, it was a bit blatant, but it seemed to do the trick. While their mood didn’t openly improve, they appeared relaxed for parents whose daughter’s room was being scoured.

I continued my search, and just when I was starting to think, I’d better decide what this important item was that my daughter lent her, I reached for a closet that had been fitted to the corner of the room.

Well, I began to reach for it, to be precise─I’d left it until last, but Mrs. Sengoku raised her voice for the first time: “Ahhh, please don’t touch that closet.”

Her steadfast conviction, manifest in her tone, would clearly require a great expenditure of effort to overturn.

I asked the perfectly natural question, “Why not?” and naturally expected an important reason. But all her mother said was that they’d been told not to touch the closet.

Told? By whom? I probably didn’t need to ask but did so anyway, and just as I thought, their daughter had told them.

It’s hard to describe how I felt then, so let me simply state the facts.

In short, their daughter was missing, and even though they might find an important clue, her parents, devoted to keeping her room clean and just the way it was, humored Nadeko Sengoku and never opened the closet.