Monogatari Series - Volume 19 - Chapter 5.04

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“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!”

I screamed.

A shriek from the bottom of my heart.

“Hell?! Hell?! Avīci?!”

“Correct. The hell known as Avīci. Not Raurava, so would you be so kind as to stop yelling? You’re being noisy.”

“What, no! How could I not scream?! I feel like I’m in Maharaurava right now!”

“Again, you’re in Avīci. You don’t want to be criticized for misinforming people.”

“Fine, but it’s not helping me get it together!”

Hell? And Avīci, the deepest of them all?

A quick aside for some hell trivia (source: Tsubasa Hanekawa).

According to one school of thought, there are eight great hells, and the deeper you go, the crueler it gets. From top to bottom, these are 1: Sañjīva, the hell of revival, 2: Kālasūtra, the hell of black threads, 3: Sa ghāta, the hell of crushing, 4: Raurava, the hell of screams, 5: Mahāraurava, the hell of great screams, 6: Tapana, the hell of heating, 7: Pratāpana, the hell of great heating, and 8: Avīci, hell without interruption─for a total of eight great hells.

There are also eight cold hells, but I’m going to omit those─they say that Avīci, the deepest hell, involves more suffering than hells 1 through 7 combined, a true inferno.

Of all the sinners who fall into hell, only the worst make it all the way down. A top private institution among hells.

That is Avīci.

“And wait! I might not have led the most praiseworthy or extolled life and never saw myself as the kind of character who’d make it into heaven, but the lowest circle? No way! What did I do?! If it has to be hell, just let it be Sañjīva or so! How’s this realistic?!”

“I’d say ‘realistic’ went poof the moment we started talking about hell.”

She sounded upbeat.

Like she enjoyed my confusion─what a nasty personality. Well, they do say that seeing someone in the grip of panic sometimes make you more objective…

“We might be at the end here, Hachikuji, but this is absurd. Hell? Really? The world we live in has stuff like hell and the afterlife?”

“It’d be absurd not to assume there’s a hell in a world with aberrations.”

“…”

Shinobu once said something of that nature.

Time travel should be possible if aberrations exist─fine, hell was more plausible than warping through time.

But something about heaven and hell made them sound more fantastic than the occult. Maybe thanks to Japan’s unique sense of religion, where all kinds of beliefs are muddled together…

“It’s not uncommon,” Hachikuji said. “Like characters not believing in fortune-telling when they’re in a realm where magic is real. And this might be more of a balance issue in world building, but who’d eat meat in a world with talking animals?”

“I see what you’re trying to say…but I’m still going to have trouble believing you if I’m told that I’m in hell. I mean…”

“You do stress out over the details, don’t you? You need to take a more relaxed approach.”

Sure, but…

You need to take a relaxed approach and accept being in hell?

“What you need to do is adapt to the situation and not shamelessly flail around in dismay. Be like a character in Izumi Kawahara’s laid-back manga.”

“Spare me your specific examples.”

“What, are you a life-after-death denialist? After all those extravagant deaths of yours?”

“Well…”

True. Come to think of it, I couldn’t be denying the idea of an afterlife when I recognized the existence of ghosts like Hachikuji and zombies like Ononoki.

Should I say a tacit understanding?

To be precise, regarding vampires, it seems more like they continue to live without dying rather than revive. You could explain that without the afterlife if you wanted…

“But,” I said, “it’d really shake things up if death isn’t the end…”

“Shake things up? How?”

“Well, take the meaning of life… It’d be nothing more than a warm-up. If there’s an afterlife, whether that’s heaven or hell, living with any kind of urgency seems a little pointless… It affects the austerity of life and death.”

“Who cares if it isn’t as austere? Or are you a fan of books where the author’s all, Trust me, I know how tough the world can be. Heh. That’s why I’m writing this book. Heh.”

“…”

What kind of book was that?

And what kind of description was that?

“Oh, you know the kind. People die left and right, the most terrible things happen to girls, you feel awful for the children, truly evil villains show up, and the world is cruel and unfair type thing.”

“I get it, but ‘type thing’? You’re being so spiteful that I don’t feel like arguing with you…”

“That was an academic classification, right?”

“No.”

“I’m just saying, authors ought to depict sweet ideals, not the bitter truth. What’s wrong about dreaming?”

“Said like an Izumi Kawahara fan.”

“It’s not too late─can we aim for that worldview too?”

“How?!”

It’s way too late!

Not when there’s only one book left!

And even if we had a hundred!

No matter how we hard we tried, we’d never arrive at that clean of a world!

“The line separating clean from not: whether a young girl like me is described as a sprite or as Lolita.”

“That’s where the line is?”

“We ought to build up from there. They’re only going to get less permissive.”

“Doesn’t matter, this is the last volume. And anyway, let’s examine this bit about me being in hell. Can we dig deeper here?”

“Tragically, Mister Araragi, there’s nowhere deeper than this.”

Right…

The lowest layer of hell, its deepest─Avīci.

“Actually, it’s more ironic than tragic,” I noted. “Araragi, Avīci… The first letters use the same character! I never even imagined it was foreshadowed from the very start. From birth, I mean.”

“I do think that’s a bit of a stretch…”

“They say that Avīci is covered in flames as far as the eye can see, so maybe my little sisters being called the Fire Sisters was foreshadowing too!”

Hm? But this park wasn’t covered in flames or anything─and according to Hachikuji, it had been recreated here.

Why recreate the park in Avīci? What was the background there?

No, the question was more basic. If this was Avīci─I had one big question.

“A big question? Oh, you want to know why you’ve been sent this deep into hell. Um, you can figure that one out with a little thought.”

“A little thought…”

Hm.

I needed to consult a few more entries in the dictionary that was Tsubasa Hanekawa.

Though Avīci is where those who committed the gravest sins are sent, what exactly were those again? Killing your parents or something?

I’ve been a pretty bad son, becoming a washout since entering high school and all, but I never killed my parents, or even thought about killing them…

“No, not that. You turned into a vampire, didn’t you?”

“Huh?”

“You saved a vampire─and despite many other sins worth mentioning, that’s the main one that brought you here. Of course you’re going to hell for saving a demon.”

Just like Taro Urashima was brought to the Dragon Palace at the bottom of the sea after saving a turtle─Hachikuji said, but that didn’t sound like my situation at all. It didn’t work as an example.

“This is completely off topic, but wouldn’t it be interesting if we had a gender-swapped version of Urashima, a ‘Hanako Urashima’? Then you’d get a handsome Dragon King in the fable.”

“Don’t take us off topic,” I complained. “And Dragon King? Sounds tough.”

Oh. So because I turned into a vampire…

I did remember now. Slaying a holy man was another way to end up in Avīci─even if I didn’t kill them myself, I was indirectly involved in the deaths of Guillotine Cutter and Tadatsuru Teori, so maybe being sent this far down was justified in its own way.

Not that I wanted to think so…

“Agh. Whatever the reason, getting sent to hell is super depressing. It’s like a total negation of everything I’ve done…”

“My condolences. I’m very sorry for your loss.”

“…”

Well, putting aside feeling depressed.

My big question didn’t have to do with any grave sin─we could put me aside.

It was Hachikuji.

The girl in front of me with whom I’d been reunited. Mayoi Hachikuji.

Sprite or Lolita aside, too─why was she here?

Wait, what?

No, really! Why was she here?!

“Why am I here?” Hachikuji had seemed to enjoy my confusion, but now she looked a little stuck, or maybe just stuck-up, at becoming the subject. “Well, you know. Because I was sent to hell.”

Nonetheless, she hadn’t so much as paused.

Like there was nothing serious about it.

But it didn’t get more serious. Because I was sent to hell. What a joke!

“Right? Ha ha!”

“That’s not what I meant!”

“I was foreshadowing earlier when I brought up Z-Ton and his trillion-degree fireballs.”

“If anything is a stretch, it’s that! Whaaat?! You’ve gotta be kidding me! Seriously, you got sent down here after passing on in that moving of a way? What a waste! What are you even doing? How’s that possible?!”

“Calling it impossible won’t change the fact that I’ve been sent here. You’re reacting as if a senior of yours who wanted to become a musician, and whom everyone loved to the point of giving him a send-off party, greets you as a hard-working businessman ten years later. Don’t make his greeting stiff and awkward, okay?”

“That’s a perfectly likely scenario compared to you being sent to hell! And what kind of business is this? What a career change, it’s too steep a fall! Your selling point was your innocence and purity, and you’re in hell? Did you commit some awful sin I don’t know of when you were still alive?”

The eleven years she spent wandering the streets as a lost child shouldn’t count─that was after she died, and you’re only sent to hell based on the life you’ve lived.

How does a ten-year-old girl commit a sin so grave that she ends up in hell? No─but you’d be surprised by how minor, or rather, nonsensical the reason can be.

That tidbit is courtesy of Tsubasa Hanekawa too, of course.

“Well, it’s technically a grave sin,” Hachikuji tried to soothe me, “though I didn’t know either until I ended up here. A child is sent to hell, no questions asked, if she dies before her parents.”

“Oh…”

The ultimate act of disobedience.

Right, dying before your parents gets you sent to the Sanzu River, where you pile up stones to atone for your sin.

On Mother’s Day, Hachikuji left her dad’s home, alone, to meet her mom─and got run over and died before she arrived at her destination.

Whatever Mayoi Hachikuji’s mother and father were up to now, they were alive at the time, eleven years ago. In other words, the daughter died before both her parents.

And so.

She was sent to hell─fell here.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me…”

That was all I could say.

I understood the reason but couldn’t agree with the reasoning─how could I?

Society once saw children dying before their parents as an act of disobedience, and maybe some people still think so, but that mentality ignores how regretful the child must feel.

It wasn’t as though Hachikuji wanted to die first─damning her to an afterlife of piling up stones was too severe a punishment…and even if she’d sinned, wouldn’t her death be punishment enough─

“…”

“Hm? What’s the matter, Mister Araragi?”

“Well, I was shaking with indignation over the absurdity of it… Yet my tragic fate as a master detective forced me to notice that something isn’t quite right.”

“How are you a master detective? Even when you seem to be solving mysteries, it’s always someone else doing the actual solving for you.”

Wow, harsh.

But true.

“So, what did you notice?”

“I already expressed my doubts when I heard that you were sent to hell after our moving farewell. Even if I were to back off by a trillion degree─of deduction and not temperature─I still don’t see how you committed a sin grave enough to end up here with me. You’re supposed to be stacking up rocks in children’s limbo, no?”

I didn’t know much about the topic, but straining my memory to its fullest to conjure up relevant bits from Hanekawa, that seemed to be the case. Children’s limbo, Sai-no-Kawara, was the riverbed of the Sanzu, a kind of entrance to hell.

There, children had to build stone towers for their parents; each time, a demon─not a vampire, but an oni─came to knock it down. A harsh sentence for children, yes, but Jizo Bosatsu, the Bodhisattva of deceased children, would eventually come to rescue them. A hell with a bailout mechanism, so to speak.

A hell on the mild side.

As gentle as a slap on the wrist compared to the cruelty of Sañjīva, where you spent an eternity suffering, slain by demons only to be revived again.

Perhaps not severe enough for the vampire Koyomi Araragi, who’d experienced dying and coming back to life plenty of times during his battles on earth─be that as it may, why was Mayoi Hachikuji in Avīci, for the lesser sin of dying before her parents?

“A very astute observation, Mister Araragi. Let alone a master detective, you’re the reincarnation of Sherlock Holmes.”

“Except I’m dead.”

Not to mention, it wasn’t that sharp.

Anyone would wonder─Tsubasa Hanekawa, the source of all my info, probably would have the moment she faced Hachikuji.

Not that Hanekawa would ever end up in hell, no matter what kinds of mistakes she made─but who knows? Hachikuji and I were here, no questions asked, so given all the trouble she got up to as Black Hanekawa, maybe the class president among class presidents didn’t have a guaranteed ticket to heaven.

“Unless this Avīci stuff is just a mean joke on your part, and we’re both in children’s limbo for dying before our parents.” Sure, it did seem to be a park, not a riverbed, but I wasn’t seeing spires of flame, either.

“Stop trying to inch your way into a better situation every chance you get. Avīci is the hell you deserve to be in.”

“When you’re that emphatic about it, my downfall feels like it was a foregone conclusion…”

Tell me it wasn’t.

How sad, if that’s the series finale after nineteen volumes.

“Yes, Mister Araragi. That’s right,” Hachikuji doubled down. “I knew you’d land all the way down here─knew it in advance. It was a given. Which is why I left the riverbed where I belong and came here to receive you.”

“To─receive me?”

“Yes. Like a welcoming ceremony. I wish I were waiting with a garland of flowers like in Hawaii. It was too much of a pain so I didn’t bother.”

“What a great attitude.”

Not that I’d know how to respond if I were welcomed to hell that way. Presented with a garland of spider lilies, the flower of death, should I smile?

“I told them I needed to take the day off from stacking up stones because a friend of mine was here, then took off.”

“It’s that relaxed in children’s limbo?!”

“Well, with all the people undergoing near-death experiences just dropping by, parts of the river are kind of like a tourist destination lately.”

“Bullshit.”

“I’m tight with the demons there. I get a free pass, they don’t block me. Call it a killer pass.”

“Could you not use your hell jokes on me? I haven’t figured out the sense of humor down here just yet.”

Not that I could tell where her joke started or ended─but I was intrigued that she knew in advance.

Of course, she couldn’t have waited for me if she didn’t before the fact… Before the fact?

“Yes,” Hachikuji said. “It’s not like I foresaw it─but I knew.”

“You knew?”

“Yes. The fact that Miss Gaen would kill you, and that you’d end up here─I knew.”

“You…knew…”

“Not me─the person who told me knew.”

Everything, Hachikuji said, as if drawing on a memory.

Apparently, this person knows everything.