Monogatari Series - Volume 15 - Chapter 4.03

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Upon reflection, I had in fact done some light organization the first time I visited Kanbaru’s room─if I hadn’t, there wouldn’t even have been anywhere to step.

That time, it felt like it’d be dangerous to go barefoot in there─like a minefield. Whether it’s rooms or thought processes, I know I’m more of a neat freak than most boys, but any human being confronted by that room would’ve been moved to do something about it.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that I underestimated the situation and assumed today’s task wouldn’t be so hard, having completed the preliminary preparations a couple of months ago.

If Kanbaru was neither fucking with me nor testing my mettle, then a certain lassitude born of the expectation that “Araragi-senpai will clean it up for me” was probably to blame for the fact that her room had ended up in this ignominious state in barely over a month.

And so as her senpai, as a senpai who should provide guidance to his juniors, the ethical and moral choice may have been to turn right back around and go home without lifting a finger to clean her room. But that’s life for you, we all make mistakes.

It’s a lot harder to stop doing something than it is to start.

I didn’t want to disappoint Kanbaru, but more importantly, I couldn’t let her go on living in a little cavern inside a mountain of trash. Also, her room’s initial overwhelming state simply stimulated my desire to clean up, just as it had the month before last.

While I had recoiled in horror, if I turned tail, Koyomi Araragi’s name would be mud.

The cleanup took hours─it’s no exaggeration that I started around noon, and night had fallen by the time I was finished. Ultimately, though, I did manage to clear out some breathing room.

“Frankly, I think some well-placed explosives might’ve been quicker…”

“Hahaha,” Kanbaru laughed cheerfully. “Hold off on the explosives, please. The house is made of wood, the whole thing’d be blown to bits.”

What’s so goddamn funny?

Just FYI, she didn’t help out with the cleanup one bit─only the bare minimum, telling me what was trash and what wasn’t from the sidelines.

Anyone observing us during those hours would’ve been convinced that she was the senpai─and that a junior had come over to help her move.

Compelled to do so under great duress.

“I’m pretty sure your grandparents would happily give me permission to carry out a bombing raid to get this mess cleaned up.”

“You just don’t get it. You have no idea how precious those books are.”

“They’re the first to go.”

First or not, it was a holiday so there was no trash pickup. All I could do was tie up all the unwanted crap with string or whatever and leave it in the courtyard─nothing to do but pray that it didn’t rain before trash day.

I wonder if I should help take out their trash as well…though maybe that was over the line, don’t want to get too involved in another family’s affairs.

“Anyway…good work, Kanbaru,” I said.

To be honest, I was the only one who’d done any work at all, be it good or bad, but I couldn’t come up with anything else. “We did it!” didn’t seem quite right either…

And if I’m being generous, I can see how watching someone else clean up for that long might constitute work in its own way.

Me, I hate it when someone else cleans my room…but with Kanbaru, who knows. Maybe she loved every minute of it.

I really don’t get this girl’s character at all.

Seriously, what’s her deal?

“Okay, I’m headed home. It’s already completely dark out─no need to overstay my welcome.”

“Hold it right there, Araragi-senpai, young man.”

“I’m sorry, but that’s just not the kind of thing you say to your senpai.”

She speaks in such a robust and cheerful manner that it’s hard to tell, but apart from calling me her dear senior, she doesn’t have time for actual polite speech.

“Do you really think I’d let an esteemed senpai just clean my room and go home, especially when that senpai is you, finest of them all?”

“‘Let’? Exactly what are you planning to do to me?!”

“Why be so alarmed…”

What do you take me for, Kanbaru said, pouting.

Why be pouting?

She’d given me plenty of reason to be alarmed.

“I just wanted to serve you some tea. Uh-uh, tea won’t cut it. A little supper, Araragi-senpai.”

“Supper? Oh, you mean dinner? No, I’m fine. I’m pretty sure they’ve got dinner waiting for me at home.”

“I can’t allow that. You’re not permitted to be fine.”

“Wha? I can’t be fine without someone’s permission? My junior’s?”

“Understand that until you’ve eaten my grandmother’s home-cooked supper, you won’t be leaving this mansion.”

“Is that a threat?”

And what the hell, her grandmother’s home cooking?

A little supper, she says, but she’s not even going to make it herself…though any way you slice it, Kanbaru doesn’t seem like the type to be any good at cooking.

Her grandmother made the lunch she gave me that other time, too.

While cooking and cleaning may both come under the heading of housework, they are not, of course, directly linked. Still, someone skilled at cooking would, at the very least, be unable to remain impassive in the face of a room in such a disastrous state.

They say the kitchen is the baseline for household mess, and once that starts to go, it’s all over…

“Heh. Or will you try and force your way out? Go ahead, try it. I wonder, though, do you have the agility to best me?”

Kanbaru spread her arms wide and stood on the threshold.

As if she was taking a defensive stance in a basketball game─clueless about proper etiquette in a traditional Japanese home. Didn’t she know it was rude to stand there?

“Come on, come at me. I may be retired, but my defense hasn’t gotten so lax that I’ll let an amateur like you get by me.”

“Um, I’m not coming at anyone, okay?”

And you know, for someone who respects me, she seems a bit too committed to calling me an amateur.

It would’ve been one thing if I were vampiricized from giving Shinobu some of my blood, but since I wasn’t, I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of breaking through her defense.

Seemed like my only option was to go along quietly.

Well, I wouldn’t be much of a senpai if I brushed off the kindness…or the gratitude of my junior.

To be honest, having consistently refused to participate in clubs or sports since middle school, I was unaccustomed to the very experience of being treated like a senpai and didn’t know how you acted like one in the first place… I couldn’t gauge the distance between us very well.

I guess I’d ask Senjogahara next time I saw her.

Was it okay to spend my entire day off cleaning my junior’s room, and then to get treated to dinner by way of thanks? Or was that a no-go?

That one doted on Kanbaru like a pet cat, though. I might not get a straight answer…

“Okay, okay. You win, Kanbaru, you got me. I give up.”

“You can’t throw in the towel yet. You’ve still got an opening, this is no time to give up.”

“Just what exactly do you want me to do?”

“Grapple with me.”

“I thought you were on the basketball team, not the sumo team…”

If I lost a sumo bout to a girl, and to my junior no less, my name really would be mud. So taking her pep talk, with due respect, as just that, talk─

“I’ll stay for dinner, then,” I relented. “I just need to call my folks.”

“Hm, if that’s how you feel, I suppose I have no objection,” answered Kanbaru, sounding strangely magnanimous.

She hadn’t gotten to grapple with me but seemed pleased that everything had, on the whole, gone according to her wishes─and if my junior’s day off had been a satisfying one, well then I couldn’t be happier.

Let’s leave it at that.

“Now then, Araragi-senpai. Before you take your seat at the supper table.”

“Hm?”

“Go take a bath. You can’t show up to our dining room like that, you look filthy.”