Monogatari Series - Volume 17 - Chapter 3.09

009

“I want you to find my missing mother.”

Many twists and turns later.

Oikura eventually said this.

“If you do, I wouldn’t mind going to school for you─or even apologizing to Miss Senjogahara.”

To explain how our discussion ended in such a bizarre, or even off-the-mark place, I need to go into Sodachi Oikura’s history from her perspective. In other words, how she spent her days after leaving this town─and the kind of person she was, there out of my sight.

That kind of story.

A manhunt is of course a staple element of mysteries, whodunnits, and detective stories, so it’s not as if this twist turned us in a weird direction. If anything, it flowed naturally─but I still need to describe the channel that it took to this point.

“So you remembered… What’s more, it looks like you’ve finally understood what I tried to do back then, after five whole years. Which means─you must really think I’m an idiot,” Oikura began.

Bitterly.

Hanekawa taking the teacup must have been impossible for her to process because she was pretending that it never happened.

“The way I tried so hard to pander to you and get you to save me…”

“Pander to me?”

Is that how she saw it?

During the summer break I’d remembered─I had been the fool for not answering her call for help. It could even sound like a heartwarming episode in the hands of a skilled narrator, but Oikura describing her fey demeanor and joyful smile as “pandering” only trampled on my tattered memories.

I couldn’t complain, though.

Yes, it was the same memory as mine, but seen through her eyes─however she wanted to tarnish it was her choice and hers alone.

Still, how could you describe it as anything but bankrupt when she criticized me for forgetting about it and cursed me for remembering it? Not that I wanted to put any failures of her current personality up for debate after everything we’d gone through…

“Wh-What an idiot,” she said.

I fully assumed this to be more abuse hurled my way─her sneering at me for never noticing, when she’d kindly taught me math.

But I was wrong─this time I was wrong.

The “idiot” she talked about was herself this time.

“What an idiot, what an idiot, what an idiot… I am such an idiot! I-I’m so embarrassed that I ever pandered to someone like you hoping you’d save me! I-I threw away my pride to flatter and suck up to someone like you! I licked your boots clean! Emotionally!”

“…”

“I tried to fix one failure and failed in an even worse way… I’m so embarrassed, I’m so ashamed! I’m so embarrassed, I’m so ashamed─I want to die!”

I want to disappear!

She screamed and collapsed on the table.

I heard an awful whack.

It sounded so bad I thought she might have split her head open─but her face rose seconds later. She returned looking determined. A grinning, resolute, threatening look. What kind of switch had been flipped in her mind?

I want to disappear.

Literally speaking, she did “disappear”…

The failure she’d tried to fix must have meant her custody at the Araragi residence─where she said nothing and opened up to no one. She must have meant the way she failed by not pandering to anyone, if you wanted to put it that way, and going back to her desolate home alone.

If that had resulted in her roundabout cry for help, I did have to admit she’d made a distinctive, or rather, a very unusual choice─but it also underscored the reason why she couldn’t go directly to my parents for that help. In short, she felt self-conscious about how she’d swatted away their outstretched hands in the past.

“But, Araragi. I think the same thing would have happened, even if it wasn’t me. I don’t think there’s anything special about my misfortune. These kinds of things. They happen all the time. Don’t you think? You couldn’t possibly feel any sympathy for me.”

“…”

“There are a lot of people in worse situations than me. All over Japan. All over the world. All over the papers. I don’t have some incurable disease, I’m not starving, I’m not caught up in some war, I’m not getting beaten by some stranger for no good reason. I’m not misfortunate, I’m not misfortunate, I’m not misfortunate. Right? Don’t you agree?”

“…”

Though she was asking me to agree with her, I couldn’t say anything─if there was one thing I could say, her misfortune was so deep that pointing to people who were more misfortunate was the only way she could affirm herself.

There are a lot of people in worse situations than me─that’s not something you say about yourself, is it?

“So don’t take pity on me─it makes me want to die when someone I hate as much as you takes pity on me.”

“I don’t think there’s anything I could say to you that would make a difference. Because I haven’t paid you back in any way for what I received from you.”

I was water that thought I’d made myself boil.

I had only been on the receiving end with Oikura─in other words, I only ever took from her. There was nothing I could give her now, nothing that could be taken back.

“So if you say not to pity you, I won’t. If you say you don’t want me to atone, I of course won’t.”

“What, are you trying to act cool or something? Do you think you’re being gallant with that attitude? You’re a decent human being? Is that supposed to be manly? All you’re doing is giving up.”

“Yeah─but aren’t I giving up in the same way you did?”

Oh no.

I argued back without thinking─I always let my guard down when it feels like I’m in a real conversation. In reality, only I felt that way. It was a one-way street─or two opposing lanes of traffic, right and left, cars zooming by one another, head-on collisions just one little steering error away.

I thought she might throw something at me again, but nothing sat in front of her, even her spoon or sugar bowl. On further inspection, Hanekawa had them all for some reason─when did she take the opportunity to confiscate them? I hadn’t noticed…

Hanekawa wasn’t inserting herself into our individual strokes, but she would at least create a situation that allowed us to rally. Her position was more a referee’s than a partner’s, but I was grateful to have someone who’d make fair calls.

“What was I supposed to do? It wasn’t my fault. It’s my parents’ fault that I give up, that I run away whenever things are too much for me.”

It’s my parents’ fault.

Oikura spoke begrudgingly. She threw words my way instead of objects─words that made flying objects seem like the more preferable of the two.

“It’s my parents’ responsibility that I’m like this now.”

“What are those parents doing now?”

“Oh? What’s this, you’re worried about me! Little old me and my family situation! Why the change, you never once stopped to consider it back in middle school.”

Words soaked in cutting sarcasm, but the kind of sarcasm that seemed to wound the speaker too. They could only have come from someone who’d been cut to the bone.

“They had themselves a happy divorce after you didn’t save me. My mother took me and left this town… As for what my male parent is doing now, I don’t have the first clue.”

My male parent─that was how she put it.

It was quite clear how she felt about him. Which suggested that it was her father who’d wrought havoc on that house─he must’ve been responsible for the violence in that trashed household.

I wasn’t expecting Oikura to have enough extra room in her mind at this point to figure out my line of thinking, but she said, “That’s right. My male parent made that house the way it was. That piece of trash.”

Her face was red, but with what seemed like shame, not anger─perhaps she felt embarrassed over being such a fool in elementary school that she made the decision to return to the custody of such a piece of trash.

Or perhaps she felt like there was no period in her life when she wasn’t a fool─and it embarrassed her.

“My mother would hit me now and then, that’s all. To take her mind off of him hitting her,” she continued─then paused for a moment, as if to wait for my reaction. She had just told us about being the final link in a chain of violence─but didn’t seek compassion. Not at all. So I had no idea at all how to respond, or what the right answer was.

Once, she’d wanted me to save her─what did she want now?

I didn’t know.

The question seemed worse than illogical.

In the end, all I could do was ask a question.

“Did you decide then to go with your mother, since she was the better choice of the two?”

But Oikura only sneered back.

“Do you think I was in a position to make any kind of decision? Back then─adults just made all the decisions on their own. I guess you could say my mother was the better choice, but really, society must have seen her as a victim when I look back on it now─and I thought the same back then, too.”

Just as she thought her male parent was her father back in elementary school, she thought her mother was a victim back in middle school?

It went beyond hopeless.

No, what right did I have to make comments about hope when I’d been responsible for keeping it from shining on her life─however, that’s not where the hopelessness in Oikura’s life ended.

Not by a long shot.

It would be a little more than two years until she entered high school. The period between her second term in middle school to the time she graduated─hopelessness descended upon her again while she’d been away from this town. Misfortune descended upon her.

A kind of misfortune not nearly as bad as incurable illness, starvation, or war: the disappearance of her mother, as she mentioned at the start. The girl deserved at least one decent thing happening in her life─but so far, nothing. It was always in shambles, just like the balance of the room’s furnishings.

It was a mess, and─lacked so much.

“I don’t know just how great of a person you are─well, I do know just how base of a person you are, but you’d have turned out the same way with parents like mine. I mean, I wish they were police officers.”

“It’s not like parents get to choose their children,” I argued needlessly again. The words were in part self-reproach, but they seemed to strike her heart much harder than I expected. She looked astounded.

Then she nodded. “Yes. My mother said the exact same thing─to me.”

To be honest, I had big expectations, she said. That my life might reverse course. That it might be my big turning point.

“I’d been off the mark in hoping that you’d do what I wanted you to do, but I still had expectations. I thought nothing worse could happen now that my family had fallen apart. I told myself I’d already seen rock bottom. Really, that household had always been broken, even when I was an elementary schooler─I knew what was coming. But I thought failing meant I’d be able to get back up and try again. That after all the tragedy, someone like me would get to lead a happy life. That’s what I expected because it wouldn’t make sense otherwise─but that’s not what happened at all. My life kept on being tragic.”

“You’re saying the violence continued? From your…mother?”

“Wrong. Were you not listening to me? My mother hit me to take her mind off of my male parent hitting her. She wasn’t going to hit me now that the piece of trash was gone.”

“…”

I still had trouble accepting that premise, but if her logic held up, it did at least mean the chain of violence had been broken. In that case, though, what was so tragic?

“One of my grounds for blaming my parents, the reason I’ve shut myself in like this for over two years─”

My mother shut herself in too.

“As soon as we became a single-mother household, the divorce finally caught up to her. She shut herself in a room of our new home and stopped coming out.”

“She stopped─”

“Can you even imagine what it’s like for one of your parents to shut herself in? I had to take care of her as a first-year middle schooler─isn’t that laughable?”

Go ahead, laugh, she hounded me, laughing herself─maybe because she’d remembered those times, or maybe because she found it funny that I’d been rendered speechless. I couldn’t tell.

“There are lots of books and shows out there for parents whose kids are shut-ins─but nothing about how to handle a shut-in parent. So back then… Well, back then, I guess I swore I’d never shut myself in no matter what happened. I didn’t think twice about breaking that vow a few years later, of course.”

But my mother’s case was a serious one, an extreme case of withdrawal. I look completely normal in comparison, Oikura said. She was saying she wasn’t as broken as her mother.

“It really was awful. She shut herself in a room with a locking door and curled into a ball in the corner. I had to bring and take away all her meals. It wasn’t long until she stopped eating altogether. Not only did my mother board up the windows, she kept the curtains shut all day long, making the room pitch black. Total darkness. She even unscrewed the bulbs so that no one could turn on the lights. And she kept on muttering to herself…muttering on and on about how parents don’t get to choose their children. At some point she even started to ignore anything I said to her─like an adolescent or something. She was far more the adolescent than my middle-school self, much more the rebel. You sometimes hear about children giving birth to children─but I was a child taking care of a child.”

Had the collapse of their household broken Oikura’s mother’s spirit? Had their household, violent or not, made her happy─supporting her heart and mind?

In any case, no, I couldn’t imagine─what a daughter must feel when her mother falls into a state like that. Maybe Senjogahara could show some degree of understanding─no, even her case was different. She never had to take care of her mother.

“My grades at school plummeted. It felt so frustrating… All those kids dumber than me, passing me by. All because I was a good girl who cared for her mother… Well, the school did seem to consider my situation and offered me their egotistical sympathy by bumping my grades. Heh, I mean, how else would I have ever gotten into Naoetsu High with grades and a transcript like that…”

Perhaps that was why she seemed so unnecessarily proud to be a Naoetsu High student in my first-year eyes. Perhaps it was part of the reason for her math complex involving me as well.

Something she should have been able to do but couldn’t. Unable to make use of her talents as opportunities were stolen from her─that feeling of being left behind. Given her pride, that multi-year stretch would have been an unimaginable struggle.

“But still, your mother is your mother─your mom is your mom. And your parent is your parent. I’d already lost one of them, so I thought I needed to be careful not to lose the other. That she’d decide to leave her room someday. That maybe she’d even apologize to me for saying things like parents can’t choose their children─maybe she’d say she was glad to have had me. After all, you never know what’s going to happen in this world, right? No one knows what the future holds. Or are you going to say that the future is predetermined and locked in place?”

Oikura coughed here─not to pause, but as if she’d choked on something. She’d had trouble saying my name, too, so it did seem like she wasn’t used to talking.

“Fortunately, Japan has relatively substantial social welfare programs. Even if my mother didn’t earn money, even if my male parent never sent alimony or child support, get the right documents in order and a mother with one child can get enough to just barely put food on the table. So I never once thought life would be better if my mother disappeared─that I can be sure of.”

Then it resumed. Her madness.

“I mean, I prayed every single night. Please, keep me from thinking life would be better if my mother disappeared. Please, keep me from thinking life would be better if my mother disappeared. Please, keep me from thinking life would be better if my mother disappeared. Please, keep me from thinking life would be better if my mother disappeared.”

But.

My mother disappeared.

Against my wishes.

“She disappeared one day, without saying a word to me, without telling me anything─I came home from school and my mother was gone. She disappeared all of a sudden, without warning─just like me, wouldn’t you say?”

They say girls take after their male parents, but I think I’m more like my mother─and.

Oikura laughed. I suppose she had her mother’s laugh.