Monogatari Series - Volume 16 - Chapter 7.01

Chapter Seven- Koyomi Tea

001

Tsukihi Araragi, the younger of my two little sisters, doesn’t really give the impression of someone walking down a road─but when I say that, I’m not trying to evoke some cool sense of treading a path that is not a path or blazing new trails in life. How can I put this? It seems like she forges ahead lightly, airily, as if she’s flying.

That’s just my personal view as her big brother.

I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a viewpoint.

Though I bet almost everyone who knows her thinks of her as being hard to pin down─as she floats about like a bird.

Hard to pin down, hard to figure out.

Everyone knows that birds can fly─but the fascinating thing is, apparently they were equipped with the capacity to fly even before they flew. They call that preadaptation.

Without the capacity they could never have flown, so it stands to reason. Still, it’s strange when you think about it. Before birds branched off from reptiles, before they flew, they were already prepared to fly.

When you get right down to it, isn’t that more like a dormant ability than evolution? Knowing that they’d soar through the skies someday, they steadily prepared themselves─evolution is supposed to be a process of natural selection via adapting to circumstance, but they foresaw the potential circumstance and adapted to it in advance.

That sort of canny shrewdness does remind me of my little sister. She may not have her feet planted firmly on the ground, but that only contributes to her birdlike quality.

Asking someone like her might be pointless, but I asked her anyway.

Tsukihi, how do you see the path you tread─even if her road isn’t contiguous with the ground, the skies must have pathways too.

They must have tracks.

Even airplanes follow fixed courses at fixed times, traveling along predetermined flight paths─taking into consideration air resistance and the direction of the wind. So even Tsukihi, floating along like a cloud, had to have a path, or the concept of a path, that served as her compass, that she took to be her compass.

Hence my question.

However.

“There’re no paths in the sky, big brother,” answered Tsukihi. “Even if there were, I’d ignore them. I just can’t do things the way they’re supposed to be done.”

My little sister was even more of a risk than I’d imagined.

If she was dead set on being a bird, not an airplane, then getting sucked into the engine of a jet and causing a major accident almost seemed like a certainty.