Monogatari Series - Volume 20 - Chapter 1.09

009

I needed to rethink this all through.

To readjust my understanding.

Black Hanekawa might laugh again and tell me I was overthinking things, but I wasn’t capable of doing as little thinking as her─I needed to think. Bereft of my vampire skills, it was all I could do.

As shocked as I was when the great and holy Mayoi Hachikuji informed me that we were inside a mirror, I accepted it─but maybe it wasn’t that simple.

Kanbaru’s left hand. Hanekawa’s right breast.

Nor was that all─the duo I encountered in quick succession had been flipped around in a way that seemed distinct from what I’d seen until then.

I mean, they’d turned into aberrations.

They’d aberrated. How did that make any sense?

A monkey and a cat. The Rainy Devil and Black Hanekawa─and you know, Tsukihi still bothered me too. Why had there been no change to her and her alone among everyone I’d met?

Dammit. It was times like these that made me regret how antisocial I was, or maybe just how few people I knew. There were passersby, but since I didn’t know them to begin with, I didn’t know how they’d changed, if they’d changed at all.

They say a friend in need is a friend indeed, and I was learning just how true that is by having so few… Pathetic.

As I thought this (and was finally able to move again), I settled on my next course of action─pride aside, taking Black Hanekawa’s advice uncritically seemed risky, but sauntering back to Kanbaru’s home unarmed went past reckless and straight into foolish territory.

I didn’t know what she meant by finding a partner before heading to Kanbaru’s. If I could call anyone that, it was Shinobu Oshino, but I needed to reach the Kanbarus’ cypress bath precisely in order to contact my partner.

The reasoning already felt flimsy enough. Land of mirrors or not, it wasn’t as if I could ignore moment-to-moment continuity.

So, the advice aside, I was going to head to the bookstore to grasp the situation, or maybe to reassess my strategic position. I decided on the location because, naturally, the sight of Black Hanekawa’s body had ignited my passions, and I could use some dirty magazines─no, of course not.

While I had few real-world friends, I knew more than a little about historical figures from studying for my entrance exams. If I leafed through books that described them, I ought to be able to gauge how people had been flipped around in this world. A way to increase my sample size.

I wouldn’t need to unfurl any massive historical tomes; reference books for grade schoolers should do. Descriptions of Nobunaga Oda and Ieyasu Tokugawa, of Napoleon and Lincoln, would show me how they’d changed from the figures I knew and aid me in understanding how this world worked.

When Miss Hachikuji and I had compared notes, we’d focused on nothing but scientific matters, so that’d been a blind spot. If personalities and bodies were flipped around, characters throughout the ages should’ve changed as well, even if history itself stayed the same. Maybe some people even differed the way Kanbaru and Hanekawa did… All right, I was probably expecting too much (though some historical figures turned into aberrations, didn’t they?).

I might discover yet another pattern of transformations nonetheless. With that thought, I picked up the bicycle, made sure once more that it wasn’t broken, and began pedaling toward the one large bookstore in town. Unsteadily─it’d taken a few hours for me to recover from Black Hanekawa’s energy drain, so I did try to hurry to make up for lost time.

To cut to the chase, though, it was utterly fruitless, or rather, I ended up conducting a meaningless survey.

Well, the idea of looking into great historical figures wasn’t meaningless in itself, but the failure came from looking to the written word for answers. I entered the store and immediately started deliberating on what book to buy only to find that I couldn’t read all the flipped-around characters.

They were only mirrored, of course, so it wasn’t too hard to decipher each character on its own, but when it came to the meaning of the passages, none of it stuck in my mind.

As if reading a book drained my energy─it was extremely wearying. I soon gave up on the approach. Not that I had any other plans if I gave up…

Return to Kita-Shirahebi Shrine? No, Miss Hachikuji probably wouldn’t be back yet. In which case, I wanted to try something before meeting up with her.

Well… I was reluctant, or it was pretty much the last thing I wanted, but the only option seemed to be to go home and pay my respects to the tween doll plopped brazenly down in my little sisters’ room. What I should’ve done at the very start…

Her dashing look and tone pissing me off had blotted out everything else, and asking someone who was experiencing these abnormalities hadn’t seemed like a good idea. But why use that criterion to pick who to talk to if almost everyone in the world had been flipped around?

Whatever. If her dashing look pissed me off, I should just avert my gaze─come to think of it, her nasty personality wasn’t new by any stretch.

I’d try to see her as conceited, not malicious. I steered toward my home─my sisters, Karen and Tsukihi, must have gone shopping, so now was a better opportunity than this morning to have an open conversation with Ononoki. Even if things took a turn for the worse and we ended up brawling, I could keep the damage to a minimum, or so I thought, but my plans always having a hitch in them held just as true in this mirrored land as it did in my original world. Maybe I should just call it nothing ever going the way I wanted.

No, even then, what happened next was too inconsistent a twist, or not to mince words, in bad taste─when I got home, parked the BMX, and entered from the front entrance, there in the house that should’ve been empty except for a doll, now that my sisters had left…

Stood a girl I didn’t know─coming down from the second floor at the sound of the front door opening. I really had no idea who she was.

Shorts and a camisole with no bra.

A girl with shaggy short hair─not exactly in her underwear, but in an outfit that came close in terms of exposure.

Her attire seemed far too at-home for any guest my sisters might’ve invited over. Not even homewear but roomwear, like an open statement that she lived here. What, did I have a third little sister in this world? A bigger little sister, a littler little sister, and a middlish little sister? Things were already complicated enough now that my bigger little sister was littler than my littler little sister, so for a third little sister to appear─but wait, wasn’t she coming across like the oldest of the three?

As I blinked in the grip of confusion, the girl looked at me and expressed her relief.

“Oh, it’s just you, Koyomi. You scared me there.”

For a moment I couldn’t fathom why she’d feel relieved, but since my little sisters’ shoes weren’t by the front door (a pair of sandals I was seeing for the first time, not having noticed them in the morning, sat in their place─were they hers?), I realized she was afraid a burglar had come in while she was home alone. But hold on, home alone?

That really made her a third little sister… Her dismissive tone, though? Was she my big sister? Miss Hachikuji did theorize about Karen flipping around and turning into my older sister…

No, wait a sec. I’d thought I’d never seen this girl, but her voice sounded familiar…

While I wasn’t the best at distinguishing between girls’ voices, I’d heard this one before, only the tone was different─it used to berate me.

“Hm? What’s the matter, Koyomi? Why’re you just standing there?” asked the girl in the shorts, puzzled, as she descended the stairs rhythmically and closed the distance between us. She grabbed my hand and pulled me into my home.

I’d considered leaving, timidly enough, but instead hurried up and took off my shoes, forced to by her assertive attitude─I say forced, but she hadn’t tugged my arm with all that much force, I’m just easily persuaded.

This overbearingness… I’d experienced it before…

“Hmmm? Huh? I thought you might’ve gone out, Koyomi, was it to the bookstore?” interrogated the girl in the shorts, keenly spotting the plastic bag in my other hand. She grinned. “You bought another dirty book? Ah, you’re hopeless.”

How did she know?! I omitted that whole bit─how did she know I’d purchased a photo collection where the mirrored characters didn’t matter, and brought home Cat-Eared Class Presidents of the World?!

Only a little sister had that kind of intuition!

“Talk about rude. After living under the same roof with this cute a girl for almost a decade, you prefer books? Come on! But I guess we’re like family at this point. Maybe I can’t blame you.”

“…Like family?”

In other words, not family?

Huh? Then seriously, who was she? Another freeloader, like Ononoki? But this girl was clearly human, not an aberration or a doll…right?

Almost a decade, though?

“C’mon, Koyomi. I know you want to enjoy that dirty book, but at least join me for a cup of tea. I was so bored holding the fort, I didn’t know what to do! Listen, I have some sweets for the tea, and the perfect math puzzles,” the girl in the shorts said, hauling me along into the living room.

Dammit, why couldn’t I resist her?

I couldn’t, at all. Partly because I was recovering from that energy drain, but I also couldn’t disobey her on some instinctual level, her familiar voice enfeebling me─math puzzles?

…

……

………

“Wait, you’re Sodachi Oikura?!”

“Whoa! Geez, don’t scare me like that!” the girl in the shorts exclaimed in a familiar voice─that once showered me with abuse.

She sounded even more surprised than me.

“You’re saying that now, Koyomi?! I’ve been living with you ever since elementary!”