Monogatari Series - Volume 17 - Chapter 1.18

018

“Komichi Tetsujo is the culprit.”

No preface, no pause, no build-up.

The words casually slipped out of Ogi Oshino.

In response─to hearing that the culprit was someone so “unexpected”─I was surprisingly unsurprised. It did nothing to move me, my heart was unshaken. Why? It should have been news to me.

Could some part of me have known, like Ogi said? That the crime was hers? And that Sodachi Oikura was a victim, the patsy?

“Shall I continue?” asked Ogi.

“…Yeah,” I managed.

She didn’t need to say more, having spoken the name─but I had a duty to listen. A duty, as the tale’s narrator, to hear the truth of the matter─to listen rather than tell.

“What made you suspicious of Tetsujo? She was basically in the same position as the rest of us. Sure, her name came up a few more times than average, but couldn’t you also say─the less they’re mentioned, the more suspicious? If I was being arbitrary.”

“It wasn’t the frequency─my initial doubt involved how many of you there were.”

“How many of us?”

“Thirty-eight. The number of characters who appeared in your tale─I counted them. Then I counted them again, so I’m pretty certain. But it doesn’t make sense.”

“It doesn’t? Why not? It seems like a normal number of students.”

“It’s not that.”

Ogi took a look around the Year 1 Class 3 classroom. As if to inspect every empty seat─as if to observe them.

“I believe you said the following, when you spoke of just how isolated you were: whether it was groups of two, three, or four, you were always the one left over. That doesn’t make sense. If there were thirty-eight students in your class, that number is divisible by two, and two students would be left over for groups of three and four. There are no situations in which just one student is.”

Agh─I couldn’t even manage a response.

She was right─and it wasn’t even math, it was simple arithmetic.

“Mathematics isn’t my strong suit. Math III or Math C are far beyond me. Still, I can do division. Well, let’s look for a number that leaves a remainder of one, whether we divide it by two, three, or four. Does that just barely count as mathematics? We simply have to find a common multiple of the three numbers, then add one.”

“…”

“The least common multiple of 2, 3, and 4 is 12. 12 plus 1 is 13. An odd coincidence, given that you were in Class 1-3, but nowhere near enough students. Let’s go to the next common multiple─which we can find by multiplying by 2. 24. 24 plus 1 is 25. A fair number of classes around Japan are that size, but you described the study session as comprising about half of the class. You couldn’t call 19 of 25 ‘about half.’ So let’s give it one more try. Multiply the least common multiple by 3 to get 36─plus one. 37. Thirty-seven. Isn’t that the correct number of students in Year 1 Class 3?”

“There was one outsider in there with us? But think about Oikura’s decree. She specifically said no outsiders allowed, so how─”

“True. There shouldn’t be. But her rule could be taken to mean that it’s fine if you’re a part of Year 1 Class 3. For instance…”

Its homeroom teacher.

Ogi spoke the words with a nasty smile.

“As you noted at the very beginning─you found every last member of Year 1 Class 3 assembled there. Yes, and you used the word member. Not every student of Year 1 Class 3. Of course. You could call your homeroom teacher a member of Year 1 Class 3. It wouldn’t be odd for a teacher to attend a class council.”

“…”

“From there, going back over your introductions of the thirty-eight, you used words like ‘student,’ ‘kid,’ ‘boy,’ ‘girl,’ ‘uniform,’ ‘classmate,’ ‘first-year,’ ‘high schooler,’ ‘club member,’ and so on to describe all of them except for one─that being Komichi Tetsujo. And so, through a fundamental element of both mystery novels and mathematics, the process of elimination─and of non-contradiction─I could identify Tetsujo as the culprit. Oops, should I be using her title? Should I say Tetsujo-sensei? Then again, it sounds like she went by Joe, and you yourself didn’t bother, either. She seems pretty laidback, so I guess it’s fine?”

Ogi grinned, then continued.

“When you said she was on the softball team, you probably meant as its adviser─now really, you talk in such misleading ways. Oh, but you did call her above-the-fray. Was that meant to be allusive, now that I think about it?”

“Nah, I wasn’t trying to be.”

“Haha, is that so.”

“…”

“Furthermore, when the three girls brought you to the classroom, I said that all of the seats must have been filled, to which you said that technically, Arikure, Kijikiri, Tone, and Oikura’s were open─but that doesn’t seem right, does it? It’d be strange unless your seat was open, too─or could anyone have taken in it? Like, say, your homeroom teacher?”

It’s not that Oikura wouldn’t let you sit, you couldn’t to begin with─remarked Ogi.

“Just corroborating evidence, of course. A small detail. So, tell me. Is my deduction, that Komichi Tetsujo was not a student but a teacher, completely off the mark? Am I just nitpicking?”

“You got it. You’re right─there were thirty-seven students in Year 1 Class 3. There were thirty-eight people at the class council, including Tetsujo, our homeroom teacher. But,” I said, as if I needed to give a forceful rebuttal─as if I’d been fingered as the culprit. “Just because Tetsujo was our teacher doesn’t mean she’s automatically the culprit. All it means is that we had a friendly teacher who’d sit in a student’s seat during a class council meeting─”

“The mediator! What a clever way to refer to a homeroom teacher…”

Ogi laughed, almost ignoring me.

Her attitude made me lean forward in my chair. “Hey─”

“Of course, I would have suspected your homeroom teacher even if Tetsujo wasn’t there, even if her name never came up at all. Someone said it as the meeting began to break down, right? Could anyone really find out the questions on a test before it’s given?”

Ogi stepped toward my leaning body─our faces were far too close, and I shrank back. Weak…

“It’d be so hard. Sneak into the teachers’ room? Hack the computer system? What kind of culprit would do something like that just for kicks?”

“Teachers are free to go in and out of the teachers’ room, but that’s not enough of a reason to doubt─”

“Please don’t play dumb, not after how far we’ve come─this, too, was brought up as the meeting broke down, if I’m not mistaken. Year 1 Class 3’s homeroom teacher was a math teacher. Komichi Tetsujo taught math. Given that position, it’s not an issue of prior knowledge. She was making the questions. There was zero risk.”

Ogi really had listened carefully, to even the smallest details.

An honest-to-God good listener.

“Even if that was true,” I said, “how could she get the questions she made to the study session? Tetsujo didn’t take part in it. Not that a teacher ever would…unlike with class council meetings. So how did she leak the info? Through whom?”

“She didn’t have to go through anyone, and neither did the information. Who was it again, Higuma? They’d have found it unnatural if someone tried to leak the test questions. It was only his impression, so I’m not sure if I should buy it, but his testimony is worth considering. One more thing, an important point─why not leak all of the questions if you’re going to leak? I don’t see a reason to leak just part of the test.”

“If you’re going to say that, why leak them in the first place?”

“That will be made clear later. The logical answer would be that Tetsujo didn’t disseminate the information to the study session─it was nothing but a wholesome place of mutual learning and betterment. Just as Oikura wanted.”

“Then why did the nineteen students in the session─”

“Simple. Tetsujo was in a position to create the test questions. In that case, she just needed to have them match up with what the study session covered.”

“!”

An exclamation mark, on cue─but I still wasn’t shocked. The very picture of composure, my mind accepted Ogi’s “surprising truth.”

“Sunahama, on day duty, complained about having to clean up after the study session early in the morning, right? She had Tetsujo and Mebe and Fukuishi help her. What kind of cleaning up did they do? Come on, won’t you tell me? How did they clean up after them?”

“They threw out bags of snacks and straightened the desks.”

“The other thing!”

“And erased the blackboard, I guess.”

I’d hesitated to reply─the blackboard.

Yes, in heavy use during the class council meeting─but any study session had to involve examples on a blackboard too. In other words, the participants had left traces of their session on the blackboard for all to see.

The surface of a blackboard is only so large, of course, so they must have written and erased and written again. Not everything they put there would have been legible, but─

“You’d be able to read a portion of it,” I admitted.

“Yes indeed. And if you knew what they went over at the study session, you could create matching test questions. It was the day of the final, of course. Even if you could change the questions, I’m sure you could only change a portion of them anyway.”

So only a portion of the questions lined up with the study session because she couldn’t get a full picture of it from the blackboard─and because there wasn’t enough time.

“We had math during second period, so she’d have reworked the questions during our P.E. test… Could we chalk Mebe’s high score up to the fact that like Tetsujo, she saw the questions while she was cleaning up before class─and they were imprinted on her mind?”

“Right,” Ogi concurred. “She must have realized during the meeting, which explains her discomfort. She must not have wanted to slip up and say anything that’d lump her in with the participants. Of course, there were also some students like Sunahama and Fukuishi who looked at the blackboard and didn’t learn a thing. I think we should call that a show of talent from Mebe.”

True─not every student can get math questions right just by knowing them ahead of time.

“And Tetsujo must have thought so too─I bet she was surprised when the average score went up by so much. Only Igami participated in the session and got a bad score, while everyone else got an 80 or higher? Really? What really blindsided her, though, was Oikura holding this whodunnit meeting. I’m sure Tetsujo’s heart was pounding the whole time─she thought her crime might come to light.”

“…To the point that she couldn’t mediate between me and Oikura.”

I pulled back─Ogi creeped toward me. She continued, a desk in between us, but close enough for me to feel her breath.

“We might also surmise that she took part in the meeting out of fear. In order to lead the discussion if it came down to it, you see. Not that she should’ve been worried. No one is going to think that the teacher, of all people, is the perp─it’d be like the detective or the police being the culprit of a mystery novel, a real blind spot for people. Then again, stories where the detective or the police are the culprit have been done to death. Seriously, did no one suspect the teacher?”

“No one.”

“Other than you.”

“Well, if you’re going to say I did, I’m sure everyone else did too. But we were trying to convince ourselves there was no way.”

Were we relieved, then? That the majority vote came to an end at suspect no. 6? No, it didn’t matter how far down the roll we went, our homeroom teacher wasn’t on it. Her name would never have been called.

“What’s left─um, the motive?” said Ogi. “The motivation behind the crime. Not leaking the questions, exactly, but whatever it is she did.”

“Oh… You promised you’d make that clear later, does that mean you have that figured out, too?”

“It’d be a nonsensical crime for a student. Even for thrills, it’s hard to figure out a motive. Raising the average score would have the relative effect of worsening the grade deviation among the students, one of the most important methods of ranking them. If I had to come up with something, maybe boosting the reputation of whoever─Oikura, in this case? But then, why convene the class council? As you said, it’d be something she absolutely shouldn’t do. But there’s one person whose reputation rose if the class average rose─that being math teacher Tetsujo, also Year 1 Class 3’s homeroom teacher. It would reflect well on her skills of instruction and guidance─and that was her motive.”

“But in that case…”

In that case, she could just tell us during class, “This will appear on the final.” Why go to the trouble of lining the test up with her students’ predictions─

“No, no. She’d be found out, if she did it in class. It had to be subtle─though she went a little too far. Three questions is too much. She should’ve kept it to one or two swapped in at the last second─seems she underestimated the academic abilities of her students.”

Yeah. It also meant she made light of her own abilities as an instructor─her own class had managed to come up with the problems.

And as a result─

She lost one of her best students.

“Anything else, Araragi-senpai?”

“Why would there be…”

“Ah. Then why don’t we get going.”

With that─beaming back at me and my curt answer, Ogi hopped away and made her way to the door, with light footsteps, insouciant.

“You can leave now,” she put her hand on the door and said.

“Yeah…”

I followed Ogi’s footsteps with plodding ones. Looking down at my wristwatch, I saw that it was 5:58, the exact same time as the classroom clock. The angle of the hands agreed at last, like the stars aligning. Even a broken clock is right two times a day─no.

The clock hanging in the classroom─must have started ticking again.

Like the gig was up.

Because Ogi─because I had come out with the answer.

Because I went and identified the culprit─time resumed.

The bell announcing the end of the day would be ringing soon.

“What do you mean, I can leave?”

“Excuse me?”

“Well, it was an odd way to put it… What did you mean by that?”

“Oh. Do you not know? Vampires need permission from someone inside a building or a room in order to enter it.”

“Right… I’ve never experienced that myself, though.”

“Well, Shinobu is a special model. But since you couldn’t exit here rather than enter, I thought I’d try telling you that you could. A little incantation meant to put you at ease.”

“You’re almost making it sound like you were the one who locked me in.”

“Don’t be silly. I’d never lock you in a room. Why would I ever,” Ogi defended herself with a chuckle. “You were trapped by your own past. This whole time, for two years. Isn’t that right?”

“…”

“Just a guess, of course. But think of what it must feel like for a teacher, someone meant to symbolize fairness to a student, to do something dishonest─and a friendly, trusted teacher who acted as the class mediator, at that. Who could blame you for closing off your heart, out of a sense of betrayal? It destroyed one student, after all─she’s been promoted despite her attendance partly because of her excellent marks, but isn’t it also atonement on Tetsujo’s part?”

“Atonement? No, it’s an excuse. She just wants to believe that she’s a decent human being,” I muttered, in a harsher tone than I expected. As if to distract from this, I put a hand on the classroom door to open it─but Ogi gently laid her hand on top of mine a moment before I could.

What happened next.

You need to tell me.

Until you do─I won’t let you leave.

She seemed to be saying this.

“What made me give up…”

So I did. Digging up memories I’d locked away, unable to ever forget, of the meeting that had taken place in this classroom two years ago, on July fifteenth─

Recalling─that majority vote.

The true reason I gave up on justice.

I didn’t despair because of the meeting itself─because of the vote itself.

It wasn’t the aspect of truth itself.

All right, next.

No. 6.

Who thinks the culprit is me─Sodachi Oikura.

Please raise your hand.

“I gave up on justice because…”

I gave up on justice because.

“There, among all my classmates designating Oikura as the culprit…was Tetsujo, our teacher, her hand raised straight. That’s why.”

The bell rang.

The door opened.

Now let’s go home─the meeting is over.

You can’t stay at school forever.