Monogatari Series - Volume 16 - Chapter 8.03

003

The subject of Kita-Shirahebi Shrine probably warrants a bit of extra explanation─fate has seen fit to bind me to the place in some strange way, as I’ve already mentioned, but above and beyond that, it’s a spot that lately─since spring break, to be precise─has become one of the hottest in town.

Since spring break.

Since Shinobu Oshino, in other words─since the vampire.

It was about half a year ago that she came to our town. The arrival of a legendary vampire, a demon beautiful enough to send chills down your spine. And the day the iron-blooded, hot-blooded, yet cold-blooded vampire arrived─was a momentous one.

I don’t just mean that it was momentous to me, nor is that some rhetorical flourish to indicate that the existence of vampires in the real world is itself momentous─the mere fact that such a mighty aberration was “on the move” was enough to be big news in the industry.

Maybe the analogy of a hurricane will make it clearer.

The category and trajectory, speed and scale of any given hurricane will dominate the news cycle for as long as it lasts. There’s a wealth of meteorological information out there, a wealth of meteorological phenomena, but is there any other kind of “weather” to which we give categories and even names?

That’s pretty much what it was.

Shinobu Oshino’s─the former Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade’s journey was in and of itself a type of disaster.

Which is why Oshino mobilized─and put everything he had into disaster recovery. During his time here, he did come off as a grubby expert, collecting local ghost stories, and urban legends and campfire tales, which is mostly how he makes his living, but he was also engaged in other work.

In fact, as far as it goes, I directly assisted him─first as a party involved in the vampire brouhaha, and then to repay my debt.

In order to return our spiritually disarrayed town to its normal state─it was terribly disarrayed by the coming of a legendary vampire─I was asked to help rectify the center of that spiritual disarray.

The center, or from what I heard.

More like an epicenter─and it was here, at Kita-Shirahebi Shrine.

People talk about urban air pockets, so borrowing that terminology, I guess you could call this place a rural air pocket: a gathering place for spiritual disarray, for all the “bad elements” that precede aberrations, but which can provide the raw material for their creation. A hangout, a haunt, you might say.

A dumping ground.

Not a blade of grass survives where a vampire passes─such seemed the fury with which Shinobu struck, but if only that had been true. Because lo and behold, the byproducts, the after-effects she left behind turned out to be a real pain in the neck.

Given the horrors, physical and mental, that I went through during those two short weeks when I myself was a vampire, I’m loath to admit it, but I can understand why those vampire-expurgation experts went a little overboard in their enthusiasm to exterminate Shinobu.

In point of fact, a friend of my sister’s called Nadeko Sengoku went through a grievous experience thanks to the “bad elements” gathered at this shrine─you might even say that the swindler who was the original cause of that grievous experience was yet another “bad element” that had crawled out of the woodwork in response to the whole vampire brouhaha.

Well, maybe that has more to do with how I feel about him─but either way, Oshino made it clear that depending on how things went, depending on certain logistical niceties, Kita-Shirahebi Shrine could very well end up as ground zero for the outbreak of a Great Yokai War.

A Great Yokai War.

It sounds so fake, but it’s no joke. Why dump into the lap of an ordinary high school student like me the job of nipping something like that in the bud? Either Oshino was living on the edge, or I couldn’t clear my five-million-yen debt to him unless he gave me something really big to do.

To put it another way, it was a job worth five million yen.

“I wonder if the whole reason Kita-Shirahebi ended up as an anchor for ‘bad elements’ was that it was a ruined, overgrown shrine without a god─that it was empty?” I ruminated, feeling emotional as I cast my gaze over the abandoned shrine for the first time in a long time. The source of emotion wasn’t the dilapidated state of the shrine itself, though, but rather my thoughts of Oshino. Maybe coming here with his niece had brought him closer to mind.

“An anchor, did you say? Ha hah,” laughed Ogi. Lightheartedly─it was forced, out of keeping with the atmosphere of the abandoned shrine. “Well, I guess people need some kind of anchor in their lives─”

“Um, I’m not talking about people here, I’m talking about ‘bad elements.’”

“Don’t people also fall under that heading?”

“…”

Like swindlers, is that what she meant?

As Oshino’s niece, maybe Ogi knew that con man─I could bring him up, I thought, wavering for a moment. If I did and she didn’t know what I was talking about, I’d have no choice but to tell her all about the bastard; if she did know him, and I got too worked up about it, that’d be just as unpleasant.

It’d be one thing if she brought it up, but for now I was going to hold off on broaching the subject of that swindler. I swallowed the words that had risen to my tongue.

And yet, something he had told me came to mind.

That in order to disseminate something─in order to make something go viral, first there has to be an empty space for it, and that emptiness is something you can “create”─

“…”

Hurricane Shinobu struck, making landfall with a rampaging fury.

Then hordes of “bad elements” massed in the emptied town as if they sought a feeding ground─at this shrine, which was emptiest of all.

And if my reading is correct (even if it doesn’t deserve to be called a reading), it was “emptiest of all” because the shrine lay in ruins and the god was absent─

“…So where did the god go?”

“Did you say something, Araragi-senpai?”

“Forget it…”

I was thinking about this talisman I’d been entrusted with─that someone had forced on me, really. The truth is, I was at a loss as to what to do with it.

I’d been instructed to do something when even Shinobu couldn’t─it was a talisman, so maybe I should present it as an offering somewhere?

I wanted to get rid of it, if possible.

“By the way, Araragi-senpai, isn’t it kind of odd that we call anyone who visits a shrine a ‘worshipper’? Most of them are probably just tourists.”

“Hm? Oh… Well, I see what you’re saying, but I can’t think of a better word off the top of my head. So, Ogi. How exactly are you going to fix this discord? This mistake with the initial configuration that you mentioned─I’m guessing a serpent deity wasn’t a fitting object of worship for a shrine founded on this mountain?”

“Fitting? You make it sound like we’re talking about someone’s outfit.”

Ogi, the niece of an expert, casually strode straight down the middle of the ritual path. Even a greenhorn like me knows that the center is where the gods walk, and humans aren’t supposed to tread there…but if no god lived here, then maybe it was no path at all.

Passing by the literally, not metaphorically empty hand-washing basin, she arrived at the shrine itself─and peered up at it.

“Hmm…” she muttered, “this is turning into a hassle─isn’t it. Makes me want to turn around and go home. If I had a home to go to, that is.”

“Huh? What about the Oshinos’?”

“Well, sure, there’s the Oshinos’ but─this…is a delicate balance. How could my uncle leave things in such a state and take off… Is this it?”

Ogi pointed at a talisman that had been pasted to the hall. I say had been pasted, but I was the one who pasted it there.

I came to the shrine for that purpose on Oshino’s orders, accompanied by Kanbaru─and affixed it with essentially no knowledge of what I was doing, certainly in the dark about the talisman’s spiritual purpose, so it was blasphemy in a way. But apparently the situation required that the thing be placed there not by an expert, but by someone like Kanbaru or myself, fully immersed in that other world and at the same time in the dark about it.

So it wasn’t entirely out of kindness, in other words to help me repay my debt, that Oshino handed me an extraordinary job: climbing a mountain once for five million yen.

I’m sure this other talisman that’s been entrusted to me serves a similar purpose─rather than being collateral for a loan, though, it’s more like a bad debt…

“Yeah, that’s the one,” I replied. “Oshino sent me to put it there, back in…”

I’m pretty sure it had been June. Was it already over four months since then? It’s not exactly something I view with nostalgia, but I’d been reunited with someone from my past, Nadeko Sengoku, thanks to the job Oshino gave me, so in that sense it meant something to me.

If it weren’t for that chance reunion, we almost certainly wouldn’t be hanging out now. Fate can be a funny thing.

And it’s not just Sengoku─that goes for Hanekawa, and Senjogahara, and Hachikuji, and Kanbaru…

And Shinobu.

The vampire, too.

“Well, it’s precarious, but I suppose you managed to maintain the balance─the air in the shrine grounds feels clear.”

“Clear?”

“Yes. Hard to imagine it was a hangout for ‘bad elements’ to gather, if only temporarily.”

“…”

If the grounds of this abandoned shrine were indeed “clear” at the moment, I had a sense of why that might be─obviously, since on the last day of summer vacation, Shinobu and I cleared them out ourselves.

Did I already tell Ogi?

“With this, we’re good for the next hundred years or so─provided things stay as they are. We’ll say it scattered nicely. It’s not why I came here today, though…”

As she spoke, Ogi did something unbelievable. It was an inarguably bizarre act─true, no one had tended to the dilapidated shrine hall for who knows how long, but she suddenly began scaling its wall.

“Wh-What are you doing, Ogi?”

The actual feel I was going for was more of a shout: “What are you doing, Ogi?!” It can be hard to raise your voice when something happens, so it kind of ended up as a regular question.

I don’t know if her claim to be a bookworm was serious or a joke or what, but in the blink of an eye, she clambered up onto the roof of the shrine like a wild animal.

Like a monkey, or a cat.

There may’ve been time to say something, but there wasn’t time to stop her─it was quite a feat, and the fact that she was wearing restrictive clothing and the wrong shoes didn’t hold her back one bit.

Just because she’d made it to the top didn’t mean she was safe, though─at the risk of repeating myself, the shrine was dangerously dilapidated with the passage of time. It looked like one good gust of wind was all it would take.

The weight of a single person on the roof seemed like more than enough to flatten the building. If she were in an elevator, an alarm would be going off, one hundred percent.

But thanks to that derelict state, there were plenty of possible approaches to the ascent, the uneven surface providing plenty of hand- and footholds, which is maybe why Ogi was able to clamber up it like a jungle gym…

“What’s wrong? Come on up here with me, please.”

“No, um, I’m wearing a skirt today, so…”

As if.

Still, however devoted I may be to my juniors, I wasn’t ready for something quite so audacious, or so active.

“I don’t think I can do it.”

“Sure you can. My oh my, I never thought I’d hear such pitiful words from the man they call the Rising Dragon of Naoetsu High.”

“No one calls me that. What am I, a shoryuken?”

“Speaking of, I heard that Ryu from Street Fighter writes his name with the character for prosperity.”

“Really? Not the one for dragon?”

“Nope. Ken does use the character for fist, though. At least, that was true back in the day, maybe it’s changed at this point─which reminds me, Araragi-senpai,” she said, not actually looking down at me from her perch atop the roof but gazing out over the entire town, though I wasn’t sure how much of it you could see from up there. “This isn’t about dragons, but snakes. Do you mind?”

“Go ahead… You wanna talk about the serpent deity you’re trampling right now?”

“Serpent deities are the best example, sure, but even regular snakes are seen as sacred. Do you happen to know how that came about?”

“How snakes came to be seen as sacred?”

Hmm.

Well, they do engender a certain amount of dread, but it’s true, there’s nothing jarring about the idea of a “snake god”─why that might be, though, is something I’ve never really considered.

“They aren’t useful like horses or cattle, say, and they aren’t exactly woven into the fabric of our everyday lives─when some other reptile might have served, why do you think it’s the snake?”

“Why?”

“Consider the signs of the Chinese zodiac. Mouse, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake─doesn’t that sequence seem kind of unfair? Don’t you think the dragon must be a tough act to follow, coming right before the snake like that? Though the snake might be able to eke out a laugh with a line about the dragon having bad breath or something.”

“I’m pretty sure the Chinese zodiac isn’t a comedy club─” I began, craning my neck towards the roof.

It’s a surprisingly difficult angle at which to speak. Being looked down on by my junior didn’t exactly make me want to jump for joy, at the very least.

“─but I give up. Why is it? Is there some particular source? A myth about a snake or something─”

“No, though of course there are myths involving snakes. A veritable mountain of them. But what I’m asking here is why snakes might be eligible for a leading role.”

By here, did she mean the roof? I started thinking, or searching through my memory banks─Hanekawa or Oshino might have mentioned something.

“Wait, I’ve got it. Isn’t it because the snake is a symbol of immortality, or regeneration?”

“Oops, the right answer, out of the blue,” nodded Ogi. She didn’t look down at me, so it was hard to know if she was actually nodding or just moving her head to scope out the scenery from a different angle. “I guess college hopefuls really are a breed apart.”

“Well…thanks, but it’s not like this subject is included in the national exam.”

“They shed their skin as they grow─what’s more, the skins they leave behind retain a clear, or you might say obvious shape, since snakes don’t have any limbs to disrupt their evenness. And when you consider how stealthy snakes are, their shed skins might be easier to spot than the creatures themselves.”

“…”

“And in an age when the study of biology wasn’t as advanced as it is today, someone witnessing a snake molting─might well see it as sacred.”

Immortality, regeneration.

And─divinity?

“But listen, Ogi. That’s─”

“Yes, it is. Ecdysis is a physiological phenomenon that has nothing whatsoever to do with immortality. The exceptional vitality of snakes isn’t particularly rooted in fact, either.”

“It’s like how people view hyenas?”

“Yes, indeed. Mistaken assumptions from the outset─yet it’s impossible to rid snakes of their sacred image at this point, right? Even though─”

“…”

“Everyone learns about ecdysis in science class. There probably isn’t a single person in modern Japanese society who doesn’t know that snakes shed their skin, but nevertheless─somewhere deep down, everyone still holds snakes in some kind of awe. We unconsciously accept the term ‘serpent deity’ without a second thought─”

A mistake in the initial configuration.

No, not a mistake─it was just a different time.

“What’s wrong, Araragi-senpai? Do you think it’s boorish of me to explain away articles of faith through science? Am I being insensitive? But if you peruse the pages of history, you’ll find countless examples of people being arbitrarily executed or irrationally punished because of groundless faith, a veritable mountain of them.”

“Again with the veritable mountains…”

“If we should cut something loose, we ought to do so rationally─but no need to worry, it’s exactly as I just described. However boorishly one tries to explain it away, faith, once engendered, won’t be dispelled by reason or logic.”

“…”

I already knew this story.

I heard it last month, from my sister.

She logically debunked the rumors of a ghost haunting the tearoom, the “eighth member” of the tea ceremony club─debunked it thoroughly, from top to bottom, leaving no stone unturned. Knowing how immature she can be, I don’t even want to know how she went about it.

But in the end, it meant nothing.

The other members believed in the “eighth person” no matter what she said─and so within the confines of the club, it was Tsukihi who came across as the fringe loony.

“They say that faith can make even a sardine’s head sacred─so why not a snake’s discarded skin? That’s just the way it goes, Araragi-senpai. A few hundred years of science aren’t going to upend thousands, if not tens of thousands of years of instinct etched into our very bodies. That’s people for you, always going with their gut. That’s human society in a nutshell.”

“But don’t you think even that might change someday? If the scientific evidence mounts over hundreds or thousands of years, can’t humanity start prizing truth over feeling?”

“Probably, given that much time.”

Though I sincerely doubt human beings who prize truth over feeling could still be called “human”─qualified Ogi.

It seemed that way to me too.

That is.

I felt the same way.

“But the future can be considered in the future─after you’re dead, Araragi-senpai, I’ll go ahead and think about it.”

Blithely tossing off this pronouncement about living longer, much longer, than me despite my tinge of vampirism, Ogi switched gears.

“The problem right now is what to do about this place, Kita-Shirahebi─where over a thousand years ago they enshrined a snake that lived for over a thousand years. Though you might just call it cleaning up after my uncle.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? In terms of keeping bad stuff from building up, that’s already taken care of, isn’t it?”

Wasn’t that chapter over thanks to the “errand” Kanbaru and I ran?

“It isn’t over. In fact, it’s only just begun.”

“You’d drop on me what’s become a stock phrase…”

I wonder who said it first?

I’d like to know who came up with that line, same as with: The real adventure starts now.

“No, it really isn’t over─because my uncle took a passive approach. He took care of the defense, but not the offense.”

“Oshino’s…not really the aggressive type, is he.”

“Broadly speaking, my uncle succeeded in dealing with the fallout from Hurricane Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade striking this town. He prevented a Great Yokai War from breaking out, which was definitely an achievement, a great achievement for him as an expert. But was that enough? Personally, I think my uncle’s too soft─he didn’t take any steps to deal with the next Heartunderblade-level aberration that shows up, did he?”

“…”

The person who entrusted the talisman to me─had said something similar. Or rather, said it and then entrusted the talisman to me.

But…

“Now that security has been ensured for the time being, I think the next step is to do something about this place itself─without a hangout, the ‘bad elements’ won’t have anywhere to hang out.”

“Hmmm… Well, I see what you’re saying. But doesn’t that seem like too much for a private individual to handle? If this is about Oshino having to procure the funds to rebuild this shrine…”

“Funding alone isn’t going to cut it. Ideally, this abandoned shrine would be rebuilt from the ground up and turned into a place where a ceaseless stream of faithful came to worship year in and year out… In other words, the cult of the serpent deity needs to be revived… Ha hah, but it’s just as you say, Araragi-senpai, that’s probably impossible for individuals…”

Just because it’s impossible doesn’t mean we can give up, though, continued Ogi. “We can’t shirk our duty to correct what needs correcting─even if it’s meaningless, and even if it’s impossible. Don’t you think it’s wrong not to correct mistakes, even if doing so is meaningless?”

“Well, as someone who’s constantly making mistakes in his exam-prep workbook, I have no choice but to answer that question with a yes. But the reality is that there are things we can and cannot do. Isn’t that reality in its proper form? I can’t get behind the idea that a world where anyone could do everything is proper.”

“Nor can I. This is a question of will. A question of my determination to implement an offensive defense─ha hah, though ‘offensive defense’ makes my will seem pretty low-key. Um…should we get back to the topic at hand?”

“Was there ever one to get back to? I still don’t have a clue what you’re trying to tell me, Ogi. You said that the fact that this shrine is on this mountain involved a poorly balanced mistake in the initial configuration, but that of all things isn’t something a high school girl like you could do anything about. It’s not like we’re going to move the shrine somewhere else at this point, after all this time.”

“Yes, you’re right,” Ogi readily assented.

This sudden reversal was redolent of her uncle─the conversation never quite turned into an argument.

“Let me give you a little history lesson, Araragi-senpai. Originally, this shrine─Kita-Shirahebi was in another place altogether.”

“Another place altogether?”

“Yes. It also had a different name back then─but it had to be moved for a reason, to this mountain. It was jammed on here. At the summit, where I’m standing now.”

“…”

“If you want a slightly more in-depth explanation of what happened, at that time this mountain was considered highly sacred─and so the shrine was moved here to enjoy the benefits of its great spiritual power.”

“When you say ‘moved here’…you mean they established a branch shrine?”

“No, they moved the original shrine to this new location.”

“You can do that? Okay, I don’t know much about how shrines work…but aren’t shrines and temples the kind of things that basically stay in one place?”

“Not necessarily. Sometimes they’re forced to move by circumstances beyond their control, like hurricanes, for instance─but that’s not what I want to talk about.”

“Huh? Weren’t you giving me a history lesson?”

“No, no, the history is irrelevant. I discussed it, but it wasn’t what I wanted to discuss─there’s just one question I want you to consider, Araragi-senpai. How did they, by which I mean the people involved with the shrine back when it was in a different location─at the time it had a different name as well, but for the sake of convenience and clarity let’s call it the old Kita-Shirahebi Shrine─relocate it to the top of this mountain?”

“How? Well, whenever it was, we’re talking about a super long time ago, right? Seems unlikely they had the technology to move the entire building as is─so I imagine they took it apart temporarily, then reassembled it at its new location. Smaller things like the offertory box they could probably bring as is…”

“Mm-hmm. This kind of structure is built without using a single nail─it’s probably not all that troublesome to dismantle it. You know, the way you describe it makes it sound like a ship in a bottle. To get the ship through the narrow opening, you put the pieces in first and then assemble it on the inside… But a shrine wouldn’t necessarily be easier to transport once you’ve taken it apart.”

“Huh?”

“Look─back then, not even the road we took to get here existed.”

As she said this, Ogi pointed beyond the torii to the steep mountain path, up which we’d climbed. Right, a steep mountain path. It seemed hard enough to get lumber and building materials up such a narrow, precipitous route─but even that wasn’t there?

“Nope. It wasn’t there. The steps weren’t installed until after the war. Recently.”

“I wouldn’t call it recently…”

“In Kyoto, ‘after the war’ apparently means after the Onin War, over five hundred years ago…”

“Well, I never believed that story. That can’t actually be true.”

“Think about it. It has a certain logic. During a so-called world war, Kyoto emerged relatively unscathed from the bombings that decimated other major cities, so it doesn’t make sense for them to use that conflict as their yardstick. In light of that, it’s quite plausible for them to use the expression to refer to the Onin War.”

“Interesting. Maybe you’ve got a point…” When I hear the phrase, it takes me a second to realize people aren’t referring to the time since spring break, so I guess I get it. “Anyway, the stairway was constructed relatively recently.”

“Yes. So to put it in ship-in-a-bottle terms, the neck of the bottle was abnormally long and twisted, you see?”

“In which case…isn’t the conventional approach to clear a road and use that for transporting the building materials up the mountain? Once it was finished, the road would’ve fallen into disuse and ended up obscured by the trees and plants that regrew there. At least until the stairway was constructed…”

“That’s right. Anytime you want to build something, you have to build a road first. From the Silk Road on down, you could say the history of humanity has been the history of roadways. From roadways, to shipping lanes, to flight paths─I suppose the next step will be pathways into space? That’s still not the right answer, though.”

“Huh? It’s not?”

“No. As I told you a minute ago, this is a highly sacred mountain. That kind of large-scale construction would be out of the question. In the course of moving a shrine to the top of it, of course, a minimal amount of building would be inevitable, but doing everything possible to avoid harming the mountain was the humane route. Humane─or pious, I suppose.”

“They didn’t build a road?”

“Nope. Not an artificial one, anyway. Look, we came up that postwar stair, but if we plucked up our grit─we could’ve made it to the top without it, trekking through the foliage without the benefit of a real path, right?”

“…”

I wonder.

If we plucked up our grit, probably, but then I just don’t have that much grit. Though it might be fine for a Patagonia type like Ogi…

Well, the grit of our forbearers was nothing to sneeze at.

Especially when it comes to architecture. They left behind all these unbelievable World Heritage treasures without recourse to Mister Bulldozer or Miss Crane…

I said I couldn’t necessarily get behind the idea of a world where absolutely anyone could do literally anything, and yet, once you ignore little things like human rights and labor conditions, people can probably accomplish just about anything.

But even so.

Even on those terms─how would you actualize this shrine’s “move”?

I don’t know anything about the mountain’s great spiritual power at the time, but from a purely architectural standpoint, how would they have moved a building to such a wildly unfavorable location?

“Are you saying they used some otherworldly skill? Supernatural superpowers, or spiritual ones… That really would take some great spiritual power.”

“No, nothing like that. Just plain old human ingenuity. As far as I’m concerned, nothing could be more annoying than that ‘move’─in a way it was the whole reason I had to come here, to this town.”

Kita-Shirahebi? What white snake of the north? she muttered.

As if something bad had happened to her─though her expression didn’t change, she gave the shrine roof beneath her feet a gratuitous kick.