Monogatari Series - Volume 15 - Chapter 1.05

005

The next morning.

In homeroom, when I told the overly sagacious Tsubasa Hanekawa what the all-seeing expert Mèmè Oshino had said, she paused a moment then went, “Ah,” as though it indeed told her everything she needed to know.

What the hell was up with the both of them? It was scary.

Since the village idiot over here naturally didn’t understand any of it, I did my best to avoid voicing such rude sentiments and simply asked, “What’s it all mean?”

“Hm? Oh, no, just that I was jumping at shadows this time around─man, I really let you and Mister Oshino see an embarrassing side of myself. Not just a swing and a miss, a full-on strikeout.”

“That still doesn’t tell me anything… An embarrassing side of yourself? Did I miss something? Come on, what do you mean?”

“Nothing, really. This might sound like bullshit, but I had my doubts all along. If people were going to worship something, they’d do a better job of it─still, it was the very defectiveness of that half-assed object of worship and half-assed shrine that gave you the creeps and unsettled Mister Oshino, and that’s what was worrying me. I’m glad it was a false alarm.”

“Hanekawa, hang in there, I know you can find a way to explain it that even I can understand.”

“Hang in there?” Our class president’s face twisted into a wry smile. Apparently my wording had tickled her. “Listen, once all the evidence is neatly lined up, everything turns out to be totally fine. Up until now, you and I had both been focusing on the rock itself, right?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah…but what’s there…apart from the rock?”

“The shrine. Focus on the shrine.”

“The shrine?”

“Yes, the shrine. If we’d focused our attention on it instead, we never would’ve had to bother Mister Oshino.”

Bother my ass, all he did was sit in an abandoned building and listen to me talk…

“Focus our attention on the shrine… Where does that get us? That raggedy-ass─”

“Okay, um, I’ll put this as plainly as I can. I’m pretty sure the rock wasn’t put in a shrine in order to be worshipped─it was chosen as a thing to put in the shrine.”

“How’s that different?”

“It’s totally different. A shrine is only ever the container and not the object of worship─so at least, we can discount the possibility that there’s some bizarre religion at the heart of all this.”

“Still sounds the same to me. If there’s no religion involved, doesn’t that mean somebody was trying to pass off some sham religion─”

“No, that was our false assumption,” Hanekawa said. “Since that shrine wasn’t originally built to be a shrine.”

“…?”

“About the Naoetsu High curriculum─I don’t have to look at it again to understand because I’d checked it out before I took our exams.”

So she’d done that, after all.

Gives me the willies.

“Look, when we were first-years, we had to pick an art elective─I took fine art, but they also offered calligraphy and technical arts, didn’t they? Mister Oshino was specifically nudging me to consider the curriculum for the technical arts class.”

“Technical arts?”

“Yup. You know, woodworking and stuff. And the curriculum for that class includes a freestyle shed construction project─something along those lines, anyway.”

“…”

“I didn’t actually take it so I can’t say for sure, but I can only assume that the shrine in question was a shed built for that class.”

“…”

“And judging from the workmanship, I’d say it was a reject─this is just a theory, mind you, but I think this is more or less how it went: Some student tried to build a shed for technical arts but botched it. Having built the thing in class, the student was instructed to take it home. It would just get thrown out once he or she got it home, though, so off this student went to the garbage area to surreptitiously get rid of it. And passed by the flowerbed on the way.”

True enough.

There was a garbage area near the flowerbed.

A piece of junk that large wouldn’t fit in the classroom trashcan, so the logical course of action was to take it outside and put it straight into the garbage.

“As our hypothetical student passed by, he or she laid eyes on the rock in question─or maybe tripped over it, like I almost did. Either way, finding this appropriately sized rock, the student figured that even a botched job might look surprisingly good with a rock in it…”

It wasn’t that the rock looked like a stone statue─because it was inside a shrine.

It was that some scraps of wood looked like a shrine─because there was a rock in it.

Like the simulacrum phenomenon─or, not quite.

But a reject.

A botched job, ceased to be a botched job.

“So it was the opposite─the reverse,” I managed to get out, in a trembling voice.

“Yup. Of course, it isn’t any less crude, but at least it went from being a botched job bound for the dump to looking like a shrine─a shed, so the student just took off and left it there. Thus a stone statue worthy of worship was born.”

“What about the altar…and the offerings of candy?”

“I assume the altar got there in more or less the same way. I don’t know if it was for class or a club or what, but some other student must have ‘botched’ a project and figured it’d look like an altar if it were left in front of the shrine… As for the candy, I imagine either the gardener or some students passing by the flowerbed had some with them and left it there for no particular reason.”

“…You mean they just kind of leave an offering because it seems like the thing to do, and not out of anything as overblown as faith?”

“An offering, or maybe they just left whatever candy they hadn’t eaten during the day before going home… It was always a possibility, but if the stone isn’t religious in origin, then that’s the most likely scenario.”

Right…

Cheap candy─not even loose change─has a strong “I chucked what was left over” vibe…

“I don’t know who’s in charge of the flowerbed,” I said, “but wouldn’t that person dispose of a shrine that suddenly showed up one day?”

“Nah, most people don’t destroy something that looks like a shrine without a second thought. Why invite divine retribution.”

“Fair enough…”

And after a while, they start to take its existence for “granted,” I suppose.

They don’t ask where it came from.

They take for granted─the “gratitude” they feel for its grace.

“…”

“Phew, I feel so much better!”

Hanekawa stretched happily.

For someone like her, “not understanding something” must be a source of stress, because she smiled as if she really did feel much better.

“I see… Something still doesn’t sit right with me, or rather, I’ve got some feelings about that conclusion─”

“Forget about it. It’s all thanks to you, Araragi.”

“Huh? It is?”

“I mean, wouldn’t you say Mister Oshino was only able to figure it out because you told him the shrine ‘rings a bell’? Even he couldn’t if he didn’t base his judgment on the proper material─and how could he predict what the curriculum of a ‘closed space’ like a school might contain? It’s not because it was modeled on something that you recognized it, it’s because you’d made something like it yourself for class. The art elective you took was technical arts, wasn’t it?”

“Well, yeah…that would be it.”

I hadn’t seen it at a temple or by the side of the road.

I’d seen it─in the school woodshop.

When Oshino demanded that I draw a picture of it, probably it was just to learn the shrine’s shape─but witnessing my reaction when I recalled as I drew, he hit upon the truth. That was how it had gone.

That was how, but…

“Okay, case closed─wait, Araragi, where are you going? Class is about to start. Hey, c’mon, don’t run in the halls─”