Monogatari Series - Volume 20 - Chapter 1.06

006

Lukewarm or not, whether it did it or not, this setup─or rather fact was something I needed to accept.

Having been told this, I took a look at the gate to find that it said “   ” Left and right were indeed inverted. I wasn’t going to fish them out to check, but when I’d thrown my offering into the box, something had felt wrong─I suspected that left and right had been flipped for the number on the coins.

As for my difficulties riding the BMX to the mountain, the bike’s structure had been mirrored─the left brake controlling the front wheel and the right brake controlling the rear more than sufficed to make it a new experience, and if the town had been flipped around as well, that explained how I’d gotten lost. Of course, hearing it from Mayoi Hachikuji, the once-lost girl, felt backwards in its own way.

I confused hot for cold when I washed my face because the handles had switched places… And everyone’s voice sounded somehow reverberant─or reversed, for the same reason.

Right. In hindsight there’d been hints all over the place, and as a professed fan of Doraemon: Nobita and the Steel Troops, about a mirror world, I should’ve noticed sooner.

An upside-down world.

Karen, Ononoki, Hachikuji─were inverted here.

I also needed to accept that Shinobu wasn’t in my shadow. Vampires, who aren’t reflected in mirrors, didn’t exist in this world.

It was a world with a different worldview.

I still didn’t get what was up with Tsukihi. She’d only worn her yukata in the wrong order.

“B-But,” I objected, “going from my big all-out fight with Ogi, which had me going to hell and back, to something this lukewarm…”

“I think it’s fine,” Miss Hachikuji answered with an encouraging smile. “Chilled-out mascot characters have been all the rage, so what’s wrong with a chilled-out world? A churld.”

She was trying to encourage me…but “churld”?

It sounded so lame.

If you’re curious, Miss Hachikuji’s line here and the ones that follow were all still reversed. I concede that it’s hard to read, so I’m using my narrator privileges to translate them.

“Ogi, huh,” she muttered meaningfully but continued with a shrug. “I got carried away and said you’re ‘inside a mirror’─but I don’t know. For us, this is the normal world, and that side is in a mirror, to match your perception. If you’ll allow me to spin this, I don’t think it’s as lukewarm as you think. Aren’t you in a pretty bad spot?”

Her assurance that it wasn’t lukewarm freaked me out just as much. “Wh-What do you mean?”

“There’s no way for you to return to what you’d call your original world, is there?”

“…”

A way to return?

Ah. Distracted by the lukewarm setup, I hadn’t gotten around to wondering about that. If I was in another world, then I had to go on to return to my world─how?

The Araragi residence’s bathroom mirror.

If I’d been pulled into “this side” when I touched it, returning from there seemed like a possibility. But right after I sensed something was off, I checked it myself─and found it to be a plain mirror.

Or found it had returned to being a plain mirror─I couldn’t come and go between worlds simply by touching its surface.

Had a temporarily opened gate been closed, or was it a one-way path? I started to fret.

I was no Hanekawa, but I’d been stranded alone in a foreign country─even at a sunny tourist destination, being in another culture can be unsettling.

Yes, this reminded me of how I’d been sent to different realms, whether by traveling through time or by going to hell. The very rules of the world were different…

A world with different rules.

People I was familiar with becoming different made this more than a matter of, say, just trying to stay calm. The fact that Karen was shorter than me, for example, scrambled one of the factors that defined me (my complex over being outgrown by my sister) and messed with my ability to maintain my ego and sense of self.

…I guess I wasn’t unhappy about getting to meet the grown-up Mayoi Hachikuji again, even if it was under these circumstances─then.

“Hup.”

Then Miss Hachikuji pulled me close, not with another rough hug, but gently, as if to embrace my head.

“It’s okay, it’s okay. No need for you to be so scared. You’re okay, Araragi, I promise.”

Based on nothing, but it’s also a divine pronouncement, assured Miss Hachikuji, patting my head repeatedly.

I felt embarrassed, almost as if I was being nursed, and wanted to pull myself free─I was too old to be comforted like this, I’d just graduated from high school a day ago─but reconsidered and let her have her way with me.

This was another world, even a kind of illusion reflected in a mirror, but that’s how much seeing a grown Hachikuji meant to me. I was like a kid brother for this twenty-one year old, but having known her ten-year-old self best, it felt like seeing a daughter grow up.

In that sense, we were on totally different emotional pages, but even the ten-year-old Hachikuji had always comforted me, saved me. This wasn’t much of a change.

“Still, what to do?” Miss Hachikuji freed me at last and began wandering around the shrine grounds─a little too restlessly for a goddess. Circling around with me as her focal point, she asked without slowing her pace: “You traveled back in time by eleven years once, to rescue me from my traffic accident. Remind me, how did you go there, and how did you get back?”

Her history, the tragedy eleven years ago and such, seemed not to have changed─I guess this Miss Hachikuji died back then, too?

By the way, if we’re being precise, traveling eleven years into the past to rescue her was a reason we made up after the fact, after we ended up in the wrong year by accident. We were just trying to go back by about a day so I could do my summer homework─but I saw no need to go out of my way to correct her.

“How? Well, we used this shrine’s torii as a gate…not that there was any deep meaning to it…”

Shinobu had used the spiritual energy gathered at the then-abandoned Kita-Shirahebi to open a gate─precipitating a major incident that would ensnare the whole town, but that had nothing to do with time travel.

“Hmm…” Miss Mayoi said, looking pensive.

Given my first impression, I couldn’t help but see her as a mischievous young woman. Sinking into thought like this for my sake, however, did quite a lot to affect me and win my trust─so there was a connection between her and the Hachikuji that I met in a ruined world.

“In that case, couldn’t you go home if you made another one of those gates? I’m not sure the same logic applies, of course.”

“Er, that’s not really…” I started to convey the obvious fact that Shinobu, not I, had summoned the gate, and that we were now in a mirror.

But did Shinobu Oshino, or the former Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade, ever exist here in the first place? Even if I mentioned her to Miss Hachikuji, wouldn’t her reaction be, Who’re you talking about?

But then, she’d brought up Shinobu a moment ago: the former Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade, though it was a little standoffish of Miss Hachikuji to call her that.

Hm─the more I thought about it, the more it threatened to turn into a wholesale rejection of the life I’d been living. This was hardly a lukewarm twist.

If Shinobu didn’t exist, though, would I have met Hachikuji at that park? How were those loose ends tied up?

“The loose ends,” Miss Hachikuji said as if she’d read my mind, “must not matter─in this case.”

“…”

“In this case─which is to say, this world. There are no paradoxes in a mirror world─or maybe I should say everything is a paradox here. That’s how logic works, right?”

The word logic coming from Hachikuji’s mouth felt like its own paradox, but she continued.

“Just as taking a true statement like ‘Araragi is a pedophile’ and flipping it around makes it false─‘pedophiles are Araragi,’ or ‘you aren’t a pedophile if you’re not Araragi’─paradoxes and contradictions can exist here. There must be some propositions that hold up even if you turn them on their head, so ‘everything is a paradox’ is an overstatement, but I’d imagine a great number of things here will feel ‘inconsistent’ to you since you came from a world that acts as the standard.”

For instance, I don’t realize it myself, but don’t you see me as a pretty contradictory presence to begin with? asked Miss Hachikuji.

And I had to agree.

If she’d grown to be twenty-one, she’d lived until that age, but the accident eleven years ago also seemed to have happened. Even if she was a living god, we shouldn’t have ever met, but she knew who I was.

The young woman was a walking mess of contradictions.

She was all loose ends.

And yet─her existence was undeniable.

Still, what kind of an example was that?

You aren’t a pedophile if you’re not Araragi─really?

“A world where loose ends are just fine,” she said. “Considering how you’ve solved many cases by making ends meet by hook or by crook… Sounds like a cruel world for you─far from lukewarm. Haha!”

“…”

Perhaps she meant to buck me up with that cheerful laugh, but her analysis was plenty cruel on its own.

Given how little information I still had, I didn’t know how meaningful it’d be to piece together a hypothesis, but if I were to: I looked at that mirror in the morning─and the “world” reflected at that point, when my movements didn’t match up, got reversed, but not all of history up until then?

“Maybe. After all, I know about Miss Shinobu Oshino, the former Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade. At the same time, I know that vampires don’t exist in this world. I don’t find it strange that I’m talking about her and seem to be familiar with the name of a non-existent aberration. I accept the contradiction without a second thought, like how I might claim that life should be treasured and still eat meat every day─neither is a lie.”

“…”

A world where contradictions were fine.

A dream scenario for a novelist. Not being needled with points like the ones Ononoki raised─but it also seemed tough.

What was it called again? The Ozma Problem?

How explaining the difference between left and right to an alien would be difficult, verbally, or something─but just as perfect spheres don’t exist, probably nothing has perfect bilateral symmetry, so the world I knew and the mirrored land I now inhabited would conflict at every turn…

“No, Araragi, I don’t think that’s necessarily true. It’s not that everything is upside down─though you could also say that makes the situation all the more troublesome.”

“What do you mean?”

“Take Karen. If everything about her was reversed, she wouldn’t be your little sister, she’d be your big sister or your little brother─she may have appeared from the bath when she shouldn’t have been there because that part of her had been reversed, but getting out of the bath and wiping your body dry with a towel is the most proper thing in the world. If we were to be strict about it and reverse even that, she’d need to soak herself in a towel before splashing herself with water.”

“I don’t know if she’d need to…”

That’d be beyond bizarre.

Even I wouldn’t have been able to keep my cool in that case─and would’ve questioned Karen’s sanity.

Not everything had been reversed. So then, what had been?

I couldn’t comprehend the standard when it came to things getting flipped around─considering the reversal of the bicycle’s structure, the placement of the faucet handles, and letters in this world, the scenery did all seem to be reversed. Its denizens, on the other hand…

“The fact that there’s been no change to your other little sister, Tsukihi, does seem key─I wonder about knowledge. Hey, Araragi, what’s one plus one?”

“Should I answer using the decimal system? Or in binary?”

“Stop being clever and just answer me, kid,” threatened Miss Hachikuji. A lady who was my senior─but she followed up with a gentle admonishment: “It’s a serious question, so could you give me a serious reply?”

The emotional turbulence made me queasy.

With the ten-year-old Hachikuji, my light jab would have kicked off a three-hour conversation, but I guess it was natural for this lady to have left behind what you might call the Hachikuji-ness of the Hachikuji I knew, now that she was eleven years older─she didn’t mangle my name even once.

If anything, I’d tried to mangle her earlobe.

While I felt a tinge of sadness, I’d be worried if she was still acting that way at twenty-one, so I accepted it.

“…”

But no, maybe this was a part of her personality that had been flipped around─the more I thought about it, the deeper I sank into the quicksand.

“Two. One plus one is two,” I gave a straightforward answer anyway, as embarrassing as it was.

“Hm. Okay, then what’s 100 minus 50?”

“50.”

“What’s 9 times 7, and 9 divided by 3?”

“63 and 3.”

She tested me on the four basic arithmetical operations, one at a time.

Those laws were the same wherever you were, though… At least, they seemed to be in this mirrored land. And so─

“Okay. I’ll ask non-arithmetic questions too,” Big Sis Mayoi said.

“Bring it on.”

“Maybe I should start with science.”

“Sure thing.”

“What is the biological species name of a seahorse?”

“Why would I know that?” Something a little more general, please?

“What’s the largest star in the solar system?”

“Saturn.”

“Is that so. Here, it’s the Sun.”

“Don’t ask me trick questions!”

“Excuse me? Is that how you speak to an older person? This is for your sake, you know.”

“…”

Awkward…

I actually knew that trick question and the correct answer. I’d replied with the ten-year-old Hachikuji in mind, but our banter wasn’t going anywhere. It made me realize just how important age differences are when you’re conversing.

“Also,” she said, “if you’re going to fall for it, the answer in this world is Jupiter.”

“Oh, right!”

I’d fallen for it on purpose but mistaken it wrong. I didn’t need to wait for my test results at this point, I knew my fate. It sapped my motivation to return to my world─not that I wanted to make this realm of contradictions my final resting place.

That said, as I confirmed more things with Hachikuji, this world didn’t seem too different, in terms of knowledge and common sense─even idioms like right-hand man and out of left field weren’t flipped around.

Even if most people were left-handed from my point of view, the logic here meant that they were called right-handed─hmm, this really was the Ozma Problem.

“Well,” I said, “I guess I’m lucky that causality, or the overall laws of nature, aren’t flipped around. How would I plan any course of action if my predictions and reasoning of X causing Y to happen had been turned upside down too?”

“Don’t let your guard down. It’s only true for what we talked about just now─but then, being too cautious might be counter-productive in its own way,” Big Sis Mayoi warned, touching my hair.

She didn’t know how to keep her hands to herself. As a healthy young man, I was sort of tickled.

“Well, to summarize, it looks like there’s only one way for you to get back to your world.”

“Just one? You sure narrowed that down quick.”

I wished she’d range a little further when it came to my options, but you can only ask a god for so much.

In fact, I was shamelessly receiving her divine favor for an offering of just four yen. I’d best shut up and listen with humility.

While I was perplexed after getting lost in another world all of a sudden, I was also enjoying this, improperly enough. Another world or not, it was Hachikuji’s first job as a freshly appointed (freshly anointed?) god. Listen with humility, humbly watch her work her magic.

So…how’s Miss Hachikuji gonna save me here?!

Perhaps to punish my mindset─Mèmè Oshino, who held that people just went and got saved on their own, would have sneered at me─the deity said, “Just get the former Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade to open up a gate.”

“…”

“What’s with the dissatisfied look? Wasn’t that Aberration Slayer a broken, anything-goes character? She should at least be able to create an opening in and out of this mirrored land.”

“Er, when you put it that way, I guess she could, but…”

I wasn’t sure.

There are theories that time travel is physically possible with a massive amount of energy…or so I’ve heard, but traveling between entire worlds fell outside the purview of physics classes.

I suppose it was possible, if time travel were a type of travel between worlds, or for that noble king of aberrations, the exceptional aberrational existence─at her peak.

Practically Majin Buu, the way she could do anything.

But not now, when she was a little girl─and even if we could address that, “Shinobu doesn’t exist in this world, though,” I reiterated─stating her absence. “Vampires can’t in a land of mirrors. Maybe you’re assuming that a thrall might do the same, but I’m telling you, I can’t. My being here means our link is as close to severed as it can get. Think of me as a plain human now that I’ve been separated from Shinobu, just like back in hell.”

“I’d never expect something so unreasonable─only the former Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade could open a gate.”

Her tongue really didn’t slip, did it? Even when she was saying that whole name. “B-But like I’ve been trying to tell you, Shinobu’s not on this side of─”

“Even if she’s not on this side, she can open it from the other side,” the god suggested. “If she’s not here, it means she’s there. And if you’ve been separated, isn’t the legendary lady free from her bindings and back in peak form?”

“…”

A brilliant, unimpeachable plan─would be going too far.

There were details that needed filling in, but it was indeed a neat and clearheaded approach that I hadn’t thought of myself. She’d responded solidly to my plea.

Geez, look at her.

I didn’t have anything to worry about. She was doing just fine as a god.

“Ha ha ha, call it The Only Neat Thing to Do. One of science fiction’s three greatest cool titles.”

Not that I’ve read it, she added flippantly─in a faint echo of the eleven-year-younger Hachikuji.

“…Can I ask what the other two are?”

“The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Neither of which I’ve read.”

“You haven’t read any of them…”

Read them already.

Putting aside whether this setup was more science fiction or fantasy, there was now a ray of hope─I’d get Shinobu to open a gate from the other side.

Having been left behind, she’d figure out in no time that I’d gotten wrapped up in some sort of anomaly. Even if a vampire couldn’t enter this land of mirrors, she’d be able to open a gate if she’d returned to her peak condition.

I’d been causing her nothing but trouble lately, forcing her to become big, then small, then big all over again─but the question was how I might convey the plan when she inhabited a different world.

Maybe I needed to go home and start banging on that mirror? Did I just have to knock?

No, it had gone back to being a regular surface, and even if there were something to the mirror, Shinobu might not be standing in front of it… If she’d regained her full powers, she wouldn’t show in it and wouldn’t go out of her way to look in any─unless she’d heard my voice calling out to her right before I was sucked in.

Still, she was tired from all this getting bigger and smaller lately…so I might not have done enough to wake her up. If she’d woken up to find me missing all of a sudden, she’d simply be confused. She wouldn’t possibly imagine that I’d become Araragi Through the Looking-Glass (doesn’t roll off the tongue, does it).

Having been too powerful, she wasn’t the intellectual type, and living for centuries had worn down her mind. This state of affairs would only make her panic, and she might not be able to trace my steps─this was bad.

“If you wrote a letter and left it on your desk, wouldn’t it show up on the other side?”

“No, it doesn’t seem like acts in the other world and this one are linked. Just a single moment got sliced out…”

In that case─why did the Araragi residence’s bathroom mirror turn into a gate to another world at that moment? Was there some kind of reason?

There’s a reason for every aberration, the experts say, but it happened so abruptly that I couldn’t see the need. It seemed more like a random supernatural phenomenon─I’d been spirited away, if you would.

It did seem ironic that I was asking a god for help if they spirited me away… So, how to contact Shinobu. If only I could communicate with her telepathically as her thrall.

“Well, relax, Araragi, it’s not as if your life is in immediate danger. If your little sister looking a bit different is too hard on you, you’re welcome to stay the night here,” Miss Hachikuji offered considerately─while it wasn’t exactly hard on me to see small Karen (amusing, more like), I didn’t relish this turning into a drawn-out battle.

If I was getting accepted to college, I needed to go through the actual matriculation process… I had to return within the next few days at the latest.

“Oh, right… Yes, you did study hard. In that case, hmm, maybe forget about counting on Shinobu, and just wait stubbornly in the bathroom you came through, until the gate opens again?”

“…”

While the plan wasn’t neat, it would certainly do─assuming that what happened once would happen again.

But there was no guarantee it would in the next few days─it might just take another thousand years was the issue here, and that issue was a dealbreaker. Little wonder Miss Hachikuji had discounted it at first.

Also, realistically speaking, I couldn’t stand on guard forever in front of the sink. I mean, that space connected to the bath, which my parents and sisters used.

They’d chase me out of there every time they wanted to take a bath, like in the morning─I might somehow stand my ground against my little sisters, but I’d have to leave when it came to my parents. The gate could open during one of those intervals, which put that many holes in the plan.

Moreover, it’d be impossible to keep watch over my bathroom for twenty-four hours a day with dinner-plate eyes. Disconnected from Shinobu, I was nothing more than a regular human, and I needed to eat and sleep─how could I even live in a bathroom to begin with?

I’d be able to soak in the tub the moment I felt tired, of course, but really, what kind of benefit was─

“Oh!”

“Ahh!”

When I shouted as inspiration hit, Miss Hachikuji let out a super-cute scream of surprise─so cute I nearly lost my hold on the new idea (come to think of it, her scream during her young-girl days was “Graaah!”), but I just barely kept one pinky around its tail.

“Wh-What? Yelling like that all of a sudden.”

“Kanbaru’s home,” I began to explain without preamble, but with a lot of gusto. “I think their cypress bathtub─”