Monogatari Series - Volume 13 - Chapter 1.37

037

Taking an unexpected tack, taking your interlocutor by surprise, or unawares, and thereby taking them at their most vulnerable, is a basic conversational technique─as practiced by fortune tellers and swindlers, it’s called a “cold reading.” Out of nowhere, you ask something like, “You’re not feeling well today, are you?” If the mark is feeling even slightly unwell (and there isn’t a person alive who can maintain perfect health all the time), they’ll think you’ve hit on the truth and their heart will skip a beat.

Even if the mark is feeling perfectly well, your totally off-base─and let’s be honest, totally ambiguous─question will still make their heart skip a beat. They’ll start wondering why you’d say something so off-base.

Not feeling well? Why would he say that when I’m feeling fine? Am I suffering from some malady that I’m not aware of?

That’s what they end up thinking─and when they do, they become distracted, which is the same as not thinking, and that creates a weakness to be exploited.

But anyone with even a modicum of psychological knowledge will be familiar with this most elementary of techniques, so if the swindler isn’t careful about who he uses it on, his true colors will be exposed for all to see.

What I pulled on Nadeko Sengoku─on Sengoku, though, was no cold reading.

I knew that it was the truth.

I’d had a glimpse behind the curtain.

As proof, Sengoku was neither “startled” by my words, nor did she “think” about them.

She shouted─ “A…urrr…ghaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”

Mightily distorting that adorable face of hers, turning bright red and opening her eyes wide─she gave full throat to her rage.

In that instant, the mound of snakes filling the space between us parted like the Red Sea.

She was in absolute command.

It was truly the deed of a god.

Even the most sympathetic observer, however, could not have called what she did next godlike─Sengoku ran towards me at full speed, throwing her ophidian mane into wild disarray. Not a smidgen of the composure or self-possession befitting a deity was in evidence. In fact, she went sprawling three full times before she made it to where I lay, crushed nearly to death under the weight of the snakes covering my body, losing her balance on the slippery snow that had melted thanks to all the critters.

Nothing in the world could have been more indecent as the contents of her dress were displayed for all the world to see. Sengoku paid that no heed, however, not even bothering to rearrange her disheveled clothing as she sped towards me.

“Aa, a, a, a, aa, aaaaaa, aaaaaaaaaaa, a, aa, aaa, aaaa, aaaa!”

When she finally reached me, her staccato scream of rage was accompanied by a punch to my face. Not a slap, not a chop; a tightly clenched fist.

It hurt, naturally.

But it was the haymaker of an off-balance middle school girl, so a slight turn of the head was all it took to kill its momentum.

Without regard for whether or not she had done any damage, however, Sengoku proceeded to punch me in the face again with her other fist.

She wasn’t in any kind of proper stance, it wasn’t even her dominant hand, nothing.

That sort of punch.

“H-How do you know that, how do you know that, how do you know that, how do you know that! Aaa, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”

What with all the snakes smothering my body, inclining my head was just about the only form of resistance available to me, so it was pretty much an all-you-can-punch buffet.

I couldn’t dampen the full force of each punch, of course, and the damage accumulated bit by bit─but the same went for Sengoku.

When you punch people.

Your fists also get busted up.

In fact, Sengoku was probably taking more damage than I was.

She may have been a god, she may have attained divinity, wielding great power and commanding legions of snakes─but she was still a middle school girl, not exactly battle-hardened.

She was weak in hand-to-hand combat.

I’d had plenty of time, a full month, to carefully take her “measure” while we were engaged in cat’s cradle, so I’m qualified to make that statement─then again, she did have a “mysterious ailment.”

Her busted fists would likely heal up soon─but Sengoku was too enraged, too frenzied, too discombobulated to think about turning her power to healing.

If she’d used her snakes instead of hitting me directly─if she’d sent her poisonous snakes to assault me, she could’ve settled things in the blink of an eye, but it seemed she couldn’t be satisfied unless she was striking me with her own two fists.

“Th-That means!” Sengoku screamed, shaking her blood-drenched fists.

Screamed until her face was crimson.

“Y-You saw them! You saw you saw you saw you saw you saw you saw you saw!”

“Yeah, I saw them.”

It wasn’t cold reading, but nor do I have ESP or any other sort of psychic power, so naturally, I wasn’t saying that like I’d seen through her as Oshino might have.

Unlike his seeing through, there was a trick to how I penetrated her secret.

It wasn’t that I saw through anything, I just plain saw.

“I saw them,” I said, very conscious of the havoc my own teeth had wrought on the inside of my mouth. “I just put in ten yen, and open sesame.”

Money.

Maybe it is everything after all─I laughed to myself.

In nihilistic resignation, and in all sincerity.

“A…aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! B-But I said to never ever open it─even Big Brother Koyomi was never supposed to see!”

“They’re pretty good, your drawings.”

Yes─that’s what was inside the sealed closet in Sengoku’s room. The contents of the closet, which had driven me to break and enter into their home, not that trespassing is a rarity for me, had been totally useless in “deceiving,” or in “perceiving,” Nadeko Sengoku.

Notebooks.

Not just one or two, but piles of them.

Well, every kid likes to draw some frames in a sketchbook or a lined notebook and pretend to be a manga artist.

Even me, embarrassingly enough.

Maybe kids who devote their youth to sports are different, but no kid who likes manga doesn’t play at being a manga artist. The initial investment is essentially nil; all you need is a notebook and pencil.

A mountain of such notebooks had been crammed into Sengoku’s closet─they were worthless, but that’s exactly why she didn’t want anyone to see them.

Someone seeing your creations.

For a pubescent child it was worse than someone reading your diary.

If you were still in elementary school, that would be one thing, but still actively doodling all that head-in-the-clouds stuff as a second-year middle schooler?

Someone seeing your daydreams─seeing your inner self?

It’s so shameful you want to die.

“But my god, the stories… What the hell is up with that nonsensical doe-eyed rom-com? Is this the fucking eighties? No such guy has ever existed, it’s ridiculous. Not to mention how smutty it gets.”

“Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”

“And there was so much background and world-building, it was overwhelming. Don’t you think you’re overdoing it a little? If you tightened things up, I think it could have real mass appeal.”

“I-I’ll kill you! Kill you, kill you, kill you─you hear me, buddy, I’ll kill you and then kill myself!”

Sengoku’s face steamed with humiliation as she listened to me trampling all over her work, and she hit me again.

Well, well.

“Buddy,” eh?

Finally─treated as an equal.

By Nadeko Sengoku, she of the closed-off heart, who shuts out everyone and trusts no one.

“Killing me won’t help. I’ve got a habit of keeping notebooks as well, you see. There’s a fairly detailed record of everything that happened on a given day. So you can kill me, but when those notebooks come to light, your ‘creations’ will, too.”

This was not at all true.

My notebooks are encrypted to a certain degree and can’t be easily deciphered.

“Did you never even stop to think about it? Your parents are bound to open that closet if your whereabouts remain unknown, no matter how much they may dote on you. Do you really think that when they do, they’ll burn all the notebooks in there without even looking inside them?”

“…!”

She was struck dumb.

The fool really hadn’t thought it through.

“But, well, if you quit this whole god thing, become human again, and go back to your room right now, you can probably take care of the whole thing, no problem. If you’re that ashamed of─”

“Are you kidding me~~?! You think I’m going to give up being a god for such a stupid reason?!”

“Something like that, yeah.”

My words might not have come out all that clearly since I was getting punched in the face as I spoke, but as long as the message got across.

“So, tell me, what would make you give up being a god?”

“…!”

“No matter who I talked to…Senjogahara, Hanekawa, even your parents, no one mentioned this little hobby of yours. No one said a word about it, because no one had any idea. There was no hint of it in any description of you, not anywhere. No foreshadowing, nary an intimation. There were plenty of people who knew that you were sweet on Araragi, but not a single person knew about the contents of your notebooks. Araragi had no idea, and neither did his sisters. That’s how stubbornly you kept your shameful little creations secret.” My face continued to be battered throughout this monologue. “You didn’t tell a soul. Because it’s your true dream.”

Dream.

I hesitated slightly before letting that embarrassing little word roll off my tongue. The second someone like me utters that word, it starts to sound false.

But just because it sounds false.

Doesn’t necessarily mean it is.

“Because our true wishes aren’t something we tell other people─or even gods. Your beloved Fujio Fujiko didn’t tell anyone but each other about their dreams of becoming manga artists.” That last part was an out-and-out lie. I hadn’t the faintest. It was a lie that sounded like a lie. For once I hated my tongue, lying even at a time like this. “You’re probably happy as a god. You’re probably having fun. Seems like it, anyway. I’m not out to drag you off your pedestal. But you didn’t actually want to become a god, right?”

She’d said it was just happenstance.

That it was a twist of fate, a freak occurrence─like an accident, so even supposing someone intended for it to happen, that someone wasn’t her.

“You must be happy now─but happy, having fun, and nothing more. Waiting around for six months, you’ve ended up with so much time on your hands that you went nuts for cat’s cradle, okay? What are you going to do once you’ve killed Araragi and the others? Have nothing but time on your hands? I’ll tell you right now, no one’s going to come to this shrine─however happy you may be, you’ll be nothing more than the steward presiding over its decay. An administrator tasked with keeping this town’s peace. That’s a raw deal. That’s a job for the old. Is a middle school girl in the flower of her youth going to be satisfied with that? You going to start your twilight years before the sun has even come up?”

“…”

The words “raw deal” really seemed to hit home, and Sengoku fell silent.

She kicked me, silently.

“You didn’t want to be a god, you didn’t want to be happy. You wanted to be a manga artist, yes? Then─why not be one?”

Ending up in that guise.

Looking like that.

What the hell are you doing, Sengoku.

“Huff, huff, huff, huff, huff, huff…”

It seemed like her strength was finally giving out.

At long last, Sengoku stopped hitting me─but apparently she hadn’t calmed down at all, and she glared at me with bright-red, bloodshot eyes.

“Y-You moron. Those, are just doodles. They’re crappy and embarrassing, that’s why I didn’t want anyone to see them. My ‘dream’… You’re full of it,” she wheezed. “Those are trash─I wanted to throw them away, but throwing them away would be embarrassing too, so I just hid them in there, that’s all─”

“Don’t talk about your own creations that way, Sengoku,” I reproved her─there may have been some anger in my voice. “Creativity is embarrassing, and dreams are embarrassing too. That’s just the way it is. Nothing to be done about it. But at the very least, they’re not something you yourself ought to demean.”

“…”

“And they were really pretty good. I have to be honest, the plot and the setting and the characters didn’t do much for an old codger like me, but I know a thing or two about drawing. I mean, like I said, I keep notebooks too, and I make drawings in mine as well…illustrations. And if nothing else, yours are better than mine.”

I was flattering her, actually, out of self-interest. I was confident that I was the better artist. But that’s precisely why I could say with confidence that Sengoku had some artistic skill of her own.

“You’ve got that little thing they call talent.”

“You don’t really mean that,” she answered quickly. Too quickly. “Plus, it’s not the kind of thing you can just decide to be.”

“But it’s also not something you’ll ever be without trying─unlike being a god, or happy.”

“…”

“And─as long as you’re a god, you’ll never make it.”

You have to be human, I said. You have to be human to make it.

My logic was horrendous, if I do say so myself─I was pressing Sengoku to quit being a god because gods can’t become manga artists.

What a thing for a grownup to be telling a kid.

While being crushed to death by snakes.

“As a god, you should have no problem killing Araragi and Senjogahara over this romantic snafu. I’m sure you could carry it off. But is that what you wanted to do? Is that who you wanted to be? It doesn’t really matter to you, does it? That’s why you told me all about it. You could speak openly because it’s not important to you.”

This was a disingenuous accusation. You could blab just as carelessly about something that’s important to you─perhaps to spur yourself on.

In fact, when she was making eyes at Araragi, even if it wasn’t overboard, she must have tried to “back herself into it” in such a way─and actually gotten backed into it.

That was her dream, after a fashion, and I couldn’t deny her that.

But then that dream crumbled.

It turned into a dream that would never come true whether she was a human being or a god─but did her other dreams need to die along with it?

“Sengoku, I love money.”

“…”

“Because money can stand in for anything. It can be the substitute for anything under the sun, it’s a trump card. You can buy things, you can buy life, you can buy people, you can buy hearts, you can buy happiness, you can buy dreams─it’s very precious, and yet not irreplaceable. That’s why I love it.” Come to think of it, I rarely spoke about money that way. The last time I did might’ve been back in middle school─when I was the same age as Sengoku. “Conversely, I do hate irreplaceable things. I can’t live without ‘this,’ I live only for ‘that,’ I was born for ‘this’─scarcity value really chaps my hide. Does getting turned down by Araragi really make you worthless? Was that your only goal? Was that all you wanted out of life? Listen, Sengoku.”

When I paused, Sengoku kicked me. Maybe hearing Araragi’s name used like that had enraged her further.

She seemed to have realized that kicking me wouldn’t hurt her fists─and maybe that was a good sign.

At least, it meant that I’d brought her back down to earth. Enough for her to have that realization, anyway.

The proof was that she only kicked me once, no follow-up barrage.

“Listen, Sengoku,” I reprised. “A certain fool is taking care of the tiresome task of dating Araragi for you, so put him in the rear-view mirror and find your own tiresome task. You probably have all kinds of other things you want to try, things you want to do. Or you did, right?”

“Things I want to try─things I want to do.”

“Was it so painful that you’d just abandon everything? Really? Was there no high school whose uniform you wanted to wear? No monthly magazine whose new issue you wanted to read? No new season of a TV show or new movie that you were excited about? Sengoku, was everything other than Araragi just irrelevant bullshit to you? Didn’t you love your parents, those good, law-abiding citizens? Was everything other than Araragi just trash in your internal Top Ten?”

“…No.”

“Then why? Why does Araragi get such special treatment? Is he your avatar or something?”

“What would you know, Mister Kaiki.”

After taking a good long wind-up, focusing on her target like she was getting ready for a penalty kick, Sengoku kicked me in the face as I lay on the ground─turning my head a little bit wasn’t enough to mitigate the damage from an attack of that ferocity. Kicks like that could be the end of me.

“You don’t know a thing about me, Mister Kaiki.”

“I’ve done some poking around. But, you’re right. I don’t know anything. Nothing important, anyway. You’re the only one─who knows anything about you, which is why you’re the only one who can value you.”

And, I went on.

At this point, anything I said might be my famous last words.

A bunch of my teeth were broken. False teeth are really expensive… Shit.

“And you’re the only one who can make your dreams come true.”

“That didn’t work so let’s try this instead? You think that kind of half-assed approach is acceptable?”

For human beings? Sengoku asked.

My answer was somewhat garbled by the blood I spat out along with it.

“Of course it is. We’re only human, after all. Nothing is irreplaceable, nothing is immutable─for this girl I know, this girl I know intimately, her current love is always her first love. She acts as if she’s never really fallen for anyone before. And that’s the way it should be. Anything else would be no good─there’s no such thing as a one true love or an irreplaceable thing. Human beings, because they’re human beings, can always try again. They can always buy it again. So for now,” I turned my eyes towards the main hall of the shrine.

And that’s when I realized─that the hordes of snakes had disappeared. The snakes I was sure were atop my body, pressing me down, were gone. It was just that I was so grievously injured that I couldn’t move a muscle, couldn’t get up on my own.

I realized that I was at a perfectly normal shrine.

A brand-new building on lonely grounds.

The hordes of snakes had plowed clear the snow, however, and it felt like spring had arrived, just here.

I looked at the offertory box in front of the main hall.

“Go buy some real art supplies with the money I gave you. Three hundred thousand yen should be enough to get you one of everything.”

“I’m telling you, I’ve…never even thought about becoming a manga artist─not to mention, I’m a god now even if I never aspired to be one, and it just seems like a waste to ditch my good fortune.”

Hmm, I couldn’t argue with that.

It’s not like people have to become what they aspire to be.

“But─” Sengoku may have been about to kick me again at that point. She may even have been about to punch me again. Yet she did neither, she just kicked the air like she was over the whole thing and clenched her fists defiantly. “There was a manga artist that they called a god. It wouldn’t be a waste if I end up like him,” she said─dared to say.

Now, that was an impossible dream. But everyone has the right to dream as big as they want.

Every person has the right.

“Mm-hm. And I’m sure you can do it. If you don’t believe me, you’ll just have to try it and see for yourself.”

If you don’t believe me.

Coming from someone who made his living as a swindler, what turned out to be my last words to Sengoku were painfully cliché. Breathtakingly so.

But Sengoku replied:

“Okay. I’ll fall for it.”

And chuckled ruefully.

What kind of creep laughs when she knows she’s being lied to?

Who cares. Hitagi Senjogahara had commissioned me to “deceive Nadeko Sengoku,” and I had pulled it off, even if things had gone just a tiny bit differently than I had planned.

No.

Maybe I had failed.

Maybe I had failed miserably.

I extended my right arm, which felt like it had been fractured under the weight of the snakes, and with my index finger, I poked Sengoku in the forehead. “You little scamp.”