Monogatari Series - Volume 17 - Chapter 1.12

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1: Keiri Ashine─already introduced.

2: Michisada Igami─apparently called Doctor because of the character for “medicine” in his name, it wasn’t as if his parents were doctors. Still, they seemed to be reasonably wealthy, and he was well known for his generous nature. He never went as far as to modify his school uniform, but I heard rumors that his street clothes were pretty flashy. They said he’d brought snacks for everyone to the study session. However, he strongly insisted that he couldn’t be the culprit─the reason being that he’d only gotten a 68.

“Who would raise everyone’s scores, come to the study session, and still get a 68 on his own test?”

While his argument made sense, it didn’t clear him of all suspicion for reasons stated earlier. There was a high material chance that you committed the crime if you participated in the study session. By the way, he was the only participant who scored in the 60s. There weren’t even students who scored in the 70s; everyone else received an 80 or above. A single student getting an unusually bad score might be termed suspicious.

3: Sodachi Oikura─already introduced.

4: Enji Kikigoe─you could say he was more suspect than Ashine, specifically because he was known to be a prankster. Once, he planted a paper-cutter blade inside a blackboard eraser so it’d screech the next time someone went to erase some chalk─fortunately, this was discovered in time. Otherwise, we’d have been lucky if only a window or two shattered. “I don’t do any pranks that inconvenience anyone,” the kid said, convincing nobody.

What’s funny was that his first name, which included the character for “smoke,” earned him the nickname Spy, making him seem that much more suspicious─though I’m sure he only found it galling, not funny, that his parents’ sensibility was cause for suspicion.

5: Hoka Kijikiri─already introduced. As a special note, it’d be closer to the truth to say that she’d absentmindedly been sitting in the classroom when the study session took place around her. She did get a good score, however, and since she was at the scene, she couldn’t have heard nothing…

6: Aizu Kube─known as the library assistant, even though Naoetsu High had no such position. It was the school’s ethos not to let us do anything but pursue our studies─she only got the title because she loved to read. She read on the way to school, of course, and during breaks, and sometimes even during class─a true warrior that read Rilla of Ingleside as a high school freshman. There was one other student in our class addicted to the printed word, Hitagi Senjogahara, but while she was an indiscriminate reader, Kube had a special love for classic foreign novels. Hadn’t gone so far as to read during the study session, apparently.

7: Nageki Gekizaka─already introduced.

8: Sosho Kodo─a tall student on the girls’ volleyball team. For some strange reason, she had a tan despite playing an indoor sport. I suppose the running and muscle-building parts happened outdoors. In any case, the rare example of a student who devoted herself to extracurriculars in a class that mostly went straight home after school. She had a contradictory personality, coarse yet high-strung─might be overstating the case in a mere introduction, but to put it simply, she hated it when anyone used her things but was always using other people’s things. She’d borrow pens, notebooks, and textbooks without asking, even destroying, ripping, and losing them, but never let anyone borrow anything of hers. She got livid, too, if you went ahead without asking first… According to Fuyunami, an old friend of hers, Kodo was “mentally immature.” Clubs and teams went on hiatus before testing periods, so she had no problem taking part in the study session.

9: Tsuma Shui─already introduced. While Oikura ran the study session, naturally the vice president supported her. “If Oikura is the most likely suspect, I’m just as likely of a suspect,” he said calmly─no doubt an attempt to shoulder some of the suspicion placed on Oikura, to which she replied, “It doesn’t make sense for there to be two most likely suspects. I’m the most likely.” She had to be number one at everything, even when it came to suspicion.

10: Judo Shuzawa─even if he hadn’t raised his hand, everyone would have assumed he’d taken part in the study session. Shuzawa didn’t seem to realize it himself, but he was the kind of boy who loved these kinds of events. I guess he liked study sessions, or maybe just teaching people things? He always wanted to teach. He “taught” me a lot of things for our midterms, but I was more bothered by his pushiness than grateful for his help. I say that because he didn’t care one bit whether I understood him─still, his eager-to-teach personality matched the assumed profile of our culprit. This probably has nothing to do with any of the above, but he also wore a watch on each wrist. “It keeps me from being unbalanced”─mental balance might be what he really lacked.

11: Kokushi Su’uchi─an understated student. By which I mean he had no notable qualities and tried to hide among the rest of us. As a fellow student on the less popular side, I’d interacted with him before, but without getting any kind of read on him. It was unclear what Su’uchi liked and what he disliked. Of course, he wasn’t going to open up to someone like me. He didn’t seem like the type to participate in a study session, but if he had without incident, I guess he wasn’t particularly antisocial. In other words, I was the only one of us who thought we were alike.

12: Ki’ichigo Daino─while I thought the girl’s first name, “raspberry,” was the more distinctive of the two, for whatever reason both the boys and the girls in class took the beginning of her last name and called her Daa. She was eloquent, a born talker, and built a logical case for just how not suspicious she was─convincing me that whoever the culprit was, it couldn’t have been her. When I thought about it afterwards, she wasn’t convincing at all. She seemed to be in a real rush to leave, maybe she had somewhere to be─we all wanted to go home, though. Even I wanted to go home already.

13: Choka Nagagutsu─simply put, the class clown. He was the one who set the mood in Year 1 Class 3. But a lot of the girls hated him. Like, actually hated him. He had a tendency to go overboard and make them cry─okay, not often enough to call it a tendency, but in high school you don’t forget when someone makes a girl cry. The impression was burned into our minds. Maybe the problem was that the kid didn’t seem sorry at all. Oikura had half given up on him─why wasn’t she bothering to give up on me too? He showed up for the study session but didn’t take it very seriously, treating the whole thing as a joke, depending on who you asked. Did his presence actually drag down their average?

14: Roka Haga─an athletic girl on the track team, but also a gamer. A problem child who brought portable gaming systems to school and had them confiscated. She even played during class with the sound off─Kube read novels during class, but this was verboten on a whole other level. Yet she took part in the study session because her midterm results had been awful thanks to her track and videogame commitments. She needed to recover from that─and her efforts paid off, earning her a 96. Thus, like Oikura, she was disappointed that her achievement had been called into question. It made me a little curious to know how she did in her other classes.

15: Sekiro Higuma─a student council president during middle school, he ran against Oikura in our election at the beginning of the term. Losing only by a slight margin, he was nominated for vice president, but apparently not interested, he withdrew himself (it didn’t sound like he’d become class president during middle school out of personal ambition, either─more like, the teacher forced him to). This stance of his struck people as modest and virtuous and made him popular with the girls─he was second only to the “handsome” Ashikura. Initially known as Ice thanks to the character “hi” in his surname. This was too similar to Tone’s nickname of Icing, and he started getting called Kilo for the “kiro” in his given name.

16: Joro Hishigata─a member of the softball team and our dependable big sis type. Unmistakably one of the core pieces of our class, alongside Oikura’s charisma-through-fear and Tetsujo’s oddly unreliable mediation. As a girl she did make a habit of siding with the girls─but boys respected her too, cowed by how she never took so much as a half step back in the face of anyone, even a boy. She certainly could’ve worked on her temper, though.

17: Shijima Fudo─a girl on the swimming team. She lied and said her father was a professional baseball player, a mysterious fabrication she couldn’t easily take back. She had brown hair, but unlike Hayamachi claimed it was due to all the chlorine in the pool─this too may have been a lie. She was at the study session, which we knew for sure thanks to witnesses.

18: Kabe Madomura─another one of the few students involved in extracurriculars. The light music club, too. To think that Naoetsu High had any activity that fun-focused. His often-standing hair wasn’t an expression of his rock-and-roll spirit though, just bedhead. Kind of a letdown. Good English thanks to all the Western music he grew up on, while math, he admitted, wasn’t his forte, hence his presence at the study session─did he really need to lead in with that stuff about being good at English?

19: Shokei Yoki─an old-fashioned kid. An anachronism, even. He was given to asking what it means to be a man, annoying us boys, let alone the girls, with his sweaty talk. He just kept going on about masculinity, oblivious to our reaction… If you put up with it, though, he sometimes said surprisingly substantial stuff─what it means to be a man was actually about being a gentleman, not that it made him any less of an anachronism. Still, he had a bad habit of being blustery and was the first one to suggest that Kikigoe, the prankster Spy, was suspicious.

In total─nineteen individuals.

These nineteen had taken part in the study session held the day before the final. The culprit may have been among them, or perhaps not.