Monogatari Series - Volume 16 - Chapter 12.01

Chapter Twelve- Koyomi Dead

001

I don’t know what Izuko Gaen thinks about roads─that is to say, I don’t know anything about her. I don’t know anything about that woman who goes around brazenly pronouncing, pompously declaring that she knows everything─I know that she’s Mèmè Oshino, Deishu Kaiki, and Yozuru Kagenui’s “senpai,” and that she’s Suruga Kanbaru’s “aunt,” but that’s about it. If you can call that level of knowledge “knowing” someone, then I guess I know pretty much everyone.

Then again, all it takes to become friends with someone in modern society is knowing their screen name and cell number, so in that sense she and I are perfectly well acquainted. And above all, Izuko Gaen does refer to me as her “friend.”

Even though she doesn’t really know me very well.

Or does she?

Maybe she knows me─the same way she knows everything?

If so─well, that wouldn’t be all that surprising.

It wouldn’t be a surprise if I took up a tiny micro-percent of her vast array of knowledge─but that would mean that she has a handle on me, which isn’t necessarily a good feeling.

Because unlike Tsubasa Hanekawa, when she has a handle on something it’s more like she has command of it─and that right there is the difference between Hanekawa, who “only knows what she knows,” and Izuko Gaen, who “knows everything.”

An analogy to shogi should make things clear.

I may have a basic knowledge of how the individual pieces move, of how I can move them─but Hanekawa understands the sum of her forces as an “army.” That’s having a handle on things─the ability to connect and synthesize knowledge.

The ability to link pieces of knowledge with one another.

That’s what it means to be an intellectual.

You could also call it the difference between trivia and knowledge─but Izuko Gaen doesn’t just understand her own forces, she understands the enemy’s as well─though her view isn’t so unilateral as to see the other camp as an enemy at all. She sees the pieces lined up on both sides of the board as a single collective “army”─a unified “unit.”

And that’s what it means to have command of something.

To have it in the palm of your hand.

To hold its fate in your hands.

In one sense that means that she’s the kind of all-around shogi player who can sit on either side of the table, who can go first or second, and it doesn’t matter─but being seen as “one of them” by someone like that goes beyond “not necessarily a good feeling,” it’s full-on creepy. Because even if she calls you a “friend,” that only means that you’re a five-sided piece with the word “friend” on it.

Friends can be useful.

The path of friendship has a certain utility.

That’s all.

Which is to say, nothing more than that.

Then again, I don’t know how the “friend” piece moves─