Monogatari Series - Volume 17 - Chapter 3.13

013

“I win, but this is…”

Though Tsubasa Hanekawa declared victory, she seemed in no way haughty or proud─neither the victoriousness of victory, nor the winnerliness of a winner. I saw distress on her face if anything, like she’d savored the taste of defeat.

Ogi, meanwhile, was unchanged. Not a thing about her had changed. She was still grinning, even after Hanekawa’s proclamation─no, Ogi even looked to be enjoying this.

I had no idea what to do while the two fought this battle of wits off in another dimension. Knowing nothing, about either the mystery or their thoughts, I could only sit there quietly.

“You…”

Hanekawa spoke at last.

As if she couldn’t believe it.

“You really came up with this as your first theory? Minus any examination? You heard a fragment of our conversation…and came straight to this truth?”

“Yes,” Ogi nodded. “That’s where the thinking started─I took that hunch and, with some deduction, straightened out the story. Any other possibilities do seem very unlikely, after all.”

“How exactly does your brain work? Thinking of this off the bat isn’t the act of a sane person.”

Not the act of a sane person─Hanekawa used words that were unusually strong for her, but her facial expression made it clear that even they weren’t enough.

“You arrived at the same truth in the end, didn’t you? In that case, what right do you have to say that? You’re just as bad as me. It’s just a matter of speed. There’s no definitive difference between me and you. And─isn’t Miss Oikura the one acting the least sane?”

“…”

“She is by far the least sane one here.”

“…”

Hanekawa said nothing in response. Even though she’d been told that her classmate, Oikura, wasn’t sane─what was going on here? What was this truth that Ogi, then Hanekawa, arrived upon?

“Araragi… We can’t.”

Hanekawa said this facing me─but not looking at me.

“We can’t… There’s no way we can tell Miss Oikura. I know you wanted to give her the truth, no matter what… I know you said it’s your duty, but even you’re going to change your mind once you hear this.”

“Change my mind…”

“Awww, you can’t do that, Miss Hanekawa. You can’t indulge the foolish─you’ve got to make him think for himself a bit. He’ll be a fool forever otherwise. No matter how much time passes,” Ogi jumped in gleefully. “We need him to come up with it, too─the truth of the matter that’s sickening even to come upon.”

It seemed this was letting her get over everything with Hanekawa, even her large breasts. Ogi may have lost the battle, but making Hanekawa come up with this mad truth was enough to satisfy her.

But what could it be? A truth that’s sickening even to come upon? A truth we can’t tell Oikura? A truth we can never speak? Was there really anything we couldn’t tell Oikura, after all she’d already gone through?

Something that surpassed, that undercut the status quo?

“So you want me to come up with this awful truth, but─”

“Hint 1. Miss Oikura’s mother is already deceased,” Ogi declared.

Okay, that was one of the possibilities I’d considered─but why did Ogi, then Hanekawa, come to that conclusion?

“She’s dead… Which means, okay… Oikura’s dad killed her mom or something? And this led to her bizarre disappearance. The way she vanished as if she’d been spirited away─”

“Completely wrong.” Ogi shook her head. She graded my answer harshly without even letting me finish. “You’re so kind. That’s the worst possible truth of the matter you can think of? All right, Miss Hanekawa. Please go ahead with hint 2.”

“M-Me?”

“Yes. I opposed you over your chest, but we share a common interest in wanting to educate him, do we not? Let’s work together to teach him. You’re even acting as his home tutor, aren’t you?”

“…”

A brief silence, and then─

“Hint 2.”

Hanekawa must have decided that while keeping the truth from Oikura was one thing, she couldn’t hide it from me as well. Still, it seemed like she’d been given a difficult role─like she’d sooner play the villain. I needed to arrive at the answer quickly to spare Hanekawa, but…

“Just as you mistook Miss Oikura’s home for an abandoned one when you were in middle school, Miss Oikura misunderstood something herself─she misunderstood something about her mother. She still does.”

“Oh, Miss Hanekawa. You’re giving him too many hints. I did too, in the first chapter, but─how indulgent. You’re oh-so-indulgent. You must be the one to blame for Araragi-senpai’s sorry state.”

“…”

Though she said Hanekawa had given me too many hints, I still didn’t have any idea.

The worst possible truth. The worst possible truth. The worst possible truth.

A misunderstanding.

“Her mother was murdered…and the culprit is Oikura, and she doesn’t realize it…or something?”

I tried saying the first thing that came to mind, praying it was wrong. There’d be so little hope in a truth like that─but if hopelessness was what backed up the right answer, was this it? Was this the worst possible truth?

“Bzzt.”

Ogi shook her head. I breathed a sigh of relief. This was no time to feel relieved, though─because if that was wrong, an even worse truth lay in store for me.

“I’ll concede the possibility that Miss Oikura’s story is entirely fiction, that she made it up from A to Z, and that really she killed her mother under completely different circumstances─but we’d never get anywhere if we started with such doubts. Yes, narrators can be unreliable, but at a certain point we have to decide to believe what other people say. Believe one another─we need to, don’t we? Don’t we, Araragi-senpai?”

Her words rang so hollow.

But she was right.

So, if I were to believe Oikura’s words─while also knowing that she’d misunderstood something.

If there was any kind of discrepancy there.

“Hint 3. Disappearing from a locked room does not necessarily mean escaping from that locked room.”

As Ogi said this, she circled behind me again─she really did like taking my back.

Disappearance and escape were different?

True.

For example, there’s the classic mystery novel trick that’d surprise no one these days─in fact, it’d be more of a surprise if an author innocently used it─where the culprit hides somewhere in the locked room together with the victim’s body. The trick where it looks like he’s escaped, when in reality he’s still inside. In other words…

“In other words, when Oikura unlocked the door and walked inside, her mother was still there…and hid behind the door or something before sneaking behind Oikura to leave the house?”

“Bzzt. What would be the point?”

True.

It’d be pointless.

Why leave the room while Oikura was home, yet out of her sight, when the house was empty as she went to school?

It was a pointless risk.

The trick might be a possibility if her mother had been locked inside the room by someone else─but she’d shut herself in.

Though this was a locked-room case, it wasn’t the kind of mystery that involved some sort of trick.

“Hint 4. So, Araragi, if her mother passed away, why couldn’t she find the body? Why does Miss Oikura continue to treat her mother as missing?”

“…”

I’m sure it was by design, but it was as if Ogi had set up a situation where she and Hanekawa, two towering talents, took turns attacking me. I really wanted to come up with the answer, since I knew this was the last thing Hanekawa wanted to do─but if nothing was clicking in my brain, was it because my brain was refusing to click?

She couldn’t find the body…

In other words, Ogi’s roundabout way of saying she knew where Oikura’s mother had gone off to for the most part must have meant she was dead and likely somewhere in the next life… Or did for the most part also include her still-missing corpse?

“Hint 5,” Ogi continued, not pausing for an answer. “There are some things that even an excellent listener like me won’t fully get from a tale told orally. While I may have only heard it secondhand this time around─I doubt I would have understood the exact details about that from Miss Oikura’s story even if you’d picked me to be your partner. Thus, our investigatory fieldwork ought to go beyond interviews to include good, old-fashioned leg work in the form of an on-site survey─but what exactly could I be talking about?”

“Hint 6,” Hanekawa took her turn. She wanted to end this as soon as possible. I felt irritated at myself for not being able to make it happen. “Miss Oikura had no time to clean up at her previous house. It was full of trash.”

“Hint 7. Her mother suddenly disappeared one day. Suddenly one day, suddenly on that day. So what about the day before that?”

Ogi wasn’t pausing either.

They were firing off hints at this fool.

“Hint 8. Miss Oikura’s mother had been left with a terribly weak heart and mind when her family collapsed. To the point that she shut herself in. To the point where she lost the will to live.”

“Hint 9. Miss Oikura looked after her mother, but it seems that at some point she stopped eating entirely. Have you interpreted this ‘entirely’ to mean ‘she must have eaten at least a little bit’? Have you decided on your own to go with a mild interpretation?”

“Hint 10. Miss Oikura said that her mother stopped responding entirely to anything she said…didn’t she?”

“Hint 11. And that she stopped moving from her corner of the room.”

“Hint 12. She didn’t eat, didn’t listen, didn’t speak, didn’t talk. Would you call that living?”

“Hint 13. Really, could a middle schooler care for a parent who’d shut herself in over a span of not just months, but years? Caring for a corpse might be another story, of course.”

“Hint 14. I wonder how long a human corpse retains its form.”

“Hint 15. The answer to hint 5 is ‘smell’─smell is just so hard to pick up on through an interview. You didn’t get much of a sense of smell from Miss Oikura’s story, did you? Taste is another very sensory thing, but we have a wide variety of ways of describing taste. Sweet, spicy, sour. For smells, we really just have good smells and bad smells. Aside from that, we’re only left with direct comparisons. The smell of roses. The smell of rain. The smell of milk. The smell of rotten eggs─the smell of a rotting corpse.”

“Hint 16. But a house packed with trash might envelop it all…even if there was a corpse there, and even if that corpse was in the process of rotting, the neighbors might not notice.”

“Hint 17.”

“Hint 18.”

“Hint 19.”

“Hint 20.” “Hint 21.” “Hint 22.” “Hint 23.” “Hint 24.” “Hint 25.” “Hint 26.” “Hint 27.” “Hint 28.” “Hint 29.” “Hint 30.” “Hint 31.” “Hint 32.” “Hint 33.” “Hint 34.” “Hint 35.” “Hint 36.” “Hint 37.” “Hint 38.” “Hint 39.” “Hint 40.” “Hint 41.” “Hint 42.” “Hint 43.” “Hint 44.” “Hint 45.” “Hint 46.” “Hint 47.” “Hint 48.” “Hint 49.” “Hint 50.”

“I get it already!”

I shouted.

Or wailed.

I was nearly shrieking.

“You’re saying that─for most of those two years! Oikura was taking care of her mother’s corpse! Until it fully rotted! Until it was so fully rotten that it disappeared, and that she never noticed!”

Yes─that’s right.

I’d overlooked the truth during the class council meeting two years ago.

And in that derelict house, five years ago.

I still couldn’t remember my childhood friend from six years ago.

And so.

I couldn’t run now. I couldn’t avoid it now.

I had to face it. Sodachi Oikura’s tragedy─Sodachi Oikura’s madness.

That’s what it means to move forward.

What it means to properly face Oikura.

“A brilliant answer. Look at that! All it took was some effort─arriving at the truth of the matter after a mere fifty hints. You might be a fool, but you show some promise.”

Promise.

No, Ogi actually seemed impressed as she clapped with joy as if she were offering me her unqualified praise.

“Yes─yes, so in that sense, Miss Oikura’s mother didn’t disappear suddenly. She disappeared gradually. After refusing to eat, she gradually starved to death and gradually began to rot. And once she decomposed to the point that her body was unrecognizable─once it had fully melted into the room, Miss Oikura realized that her mother had gone somewhere.”

Ogi continued as if she were making an aside.

“It’s like water evaporating. She hates water that thinks it made itself boil─was it? Well, you can say that her mother did make herself boil.”

“Water…”

“Have you ever kept bell crickets?” asked Ogi, gleefully bringing up an example. She was trying to explain the situation with an easy-to-understand analogy─so that the utterly tragic truth would be clear to anyone. “Well, I have… I like the sound they make. This is back when I was in elementary or so, though. Anyway, you feed them with cucumbers. Bell crickets just love cucumbers. I’d check in later to find that the cucumbers had vanished and think, wow, bugs have such incredible appetites! But apparently, it was something else. Cucumbers are mostly water, so they’d just evaporated and gone all thin.”

Oh, and also, the bell crickets were wiped out because they ate those rotten cucumbers, Ogi said, tacking on an unnecessary and unpleasant bit of detail.

“Miss Oikura’s mother also evaporated─humans do have a lot of water in them, after all. Disappearing into thin air, and evaporating. They end up meaning the same thing here, in an ironic twist─but that solves the case of the locked room, as well as the two locked doors. In that case, it’s only natural that the front door and the room were locked. Her mother never left the room in the first place. She hadn’t vanished like smoke─she vanished like water.”

“But humans aren’t made entirely of water. What about the rest?”

It was all I could do to pose that question─but Ogi simply answered, “Didn’t I suggest something about that at around hint 29? The fact that there haven’t been any real problems until now,” she stated plainly, “must mean that they dealt with her alongside the garbage when they dealt with a house full of trash.”

She spoke plainly about a human being disposed of alongside trash.

“It might even be the case─that an environment like that helped speed along the decomposition of a body.”

“Then what,” I asked.

Fearfully, bracing myself for an even more terrifying truth.

“It was…suicide by starvation?”

“I wonder. She may have lost her will to live, but I don’t think you call that suicide. Losing the will to live and wanting to die are two different things in the human heart. But I’m sure people will be split on this. Shall we take a majority vote? What do you say, Miss Hanekawa? There’s no way, right? A mother would never choose suicide and leave her daughter behind.”

Hanekawa didn’t answer.

Ogi must not have known. How could she?

She said she didn’t know anything, so she must not have known─that Hanekawa’s birth mother did just that, commit suicide and leave her daughter behind.

She could never have asked that if she’d known.

“All I think,” Hanekawa said quietly.

Quietly, painfully.

“Is that Miss Oikura ought to live her life not knowing about this and never knowing about it.”

“Yes. It would be better. But I bet a little part of her must think that something is strange here. Which is the reason she asked you two to investigate. Why did she ask you to find her mother? That’s why. A feeling that something is off, that she’s covered something up─a feeling that she’s pretending not to notice something. She must have had those kinds of thoughts─for the last three years. And she will for the rest of her life, too.”

“No. Until today,” I said.

To Ogi─and to Hanekawa.

“I’m telling her. I’ll be the one to tell her. I’m going back to Oikura’s room right now to tell her everything.”

“What?”

Hanekawa raised her voice in shock, and while Ogi didn’t, she looked surprised as well. Personally, I didn’t think I was saying anything surprising─I was just going to do what I needed to do.

“That person from Town Hall must have left by now─so I’ll go by myself, you two can just wait here.”

“A-Araragi… Are you serious?”

“I am. Didn’t I just tell you? I’ve been ignoring Oikura for all this time─for over six years. I haven’t been able to look her straight in the eye, just like she wasn’t able to face her mother’s death. That’s why I can’t neglect Oikura any more than I already have,” I replied to Hanekawa.

“There’s no telling what might happen, Araragi-senpai─Miss Oikura might end up hating you even more than she already does.”

“Don’t worry, she can’t hate me any more than she does now. Even if she can, if she’s able to love herself through hating me, I’d prefer that,” I replied to Ogi.

Then I began walking─to Oikura’s place.

Not to apologize, not to atone.

To speak, to tell.

Yes, I was going to teach her.

As her senior just a few steps further down the road to happiness, I would teach her how to get started on it─of course, my pupil was the highly gifted Oikura. Once she had the basics down, she’d surely overtake me. Even when it came to happiness… Not that it was a competition. If she overtook me, I could just start learning from her. We could learn from each other, each of us teaching and furthering the other.

We could hold study sessions.

We were as foolish as people could be, but─

Why don’t we get smarter together?

Let’s be as happy as we should be.

“Is that really how you’re going to repay her kindness? With malice?”

I could hear Ogi’s voice from afar─and it made me think. Even if it was malice, I was so glad I had something I could give back to Oikura.