Monogatari Series - Volume 20 - Chapter 1.13

013

Of course I didn’t.

Snakes being called kaka in old Japanese hadn’t been required knowledge for my entrance exams─as much as the idea resisted being put to rest, this too was proof that I wasn’t experiencing a dream.

Maybe the fact that Shinobu Oshino, someone previously compared to a sea serpent, laughed with a distinctive “Kakak!” sat deep in my mind, and theoretically you could connect the dots to arrive at a dream, but that was far too forced a payoff as far as foreshadowing goes─in any case, I hadn’t even considered hoping for an expert on mirrors, but her appearance now, whether goddess or middle school student, was appreciated.

“Aren’t you hungry, Araragi? It sounds like you haven’t eaten anything all day. Let’s eat and talk. C’mon, Miss Serpent, you too.”

Now that she mentioned it, the tea Oikura made me was just about the only thing I’d consumed─I hadn’t really noticed because the sight of her had filled me up on its own. Having lost all of my vampiric qualities, however, I needed proper nutrition if I didn’t want to collapse.

And so, I was invited inside Kita-Shirahebi’s main shrine for the first time and sat down to eat a meal prepared by Miss Hachikuji.

“Hold on, aren’t these offerings?”

“That’s right, they are.”

“…”

I should’ve been the only person paying visits, so maybe they were Miss Serpent’s offerings? And wait, was it okay to eat them?

As I sat there hesitating, Miss Hachikuji and Miss Serpent dug straight in. To avoid any awkwardness, I humbly joined them.

I doubt this bears repeating, but what a situation─I was sitting in a circle with two gods and having a meal.

Who exactly was I?

In the world I’d been living in until that morning, Mayoi Hachikuji was a god as a result of Nadeko Sengoku no longer being one─in other words, the two never reigned concurrently, but this was another point of incoherence, or maybe inconsistency in this world.

“Gulg glug glug glug.” “Glug glug glug glug.”

The two gods drank straight from sake bottles that also seemed to be offerings─Miss Mayoi, twenty-one years old, was one thing, but Miss Serpent, outwardly a middle school girl, was a sight to behold.

“Big Brother Koyomi─could you be thinking that mirrors show the world with left and right reversed?”

Miss Serpent got to no warning with the matter at hand─sorry, Miss Serpent got to the matter at hand with no warning.

So suddenly that I stumbled over my narration… How embarrassing for my tongue to slip in Hachikuji’s presence, though hers didn’t anymore.

“Ah, um, what? Could you repeat that?”

“Could you be thinking that mirrors show the world with left and right reversed─I’m asking you a question, hmmm?”

She spoke like she was trying to pick a fight with me. Was this some kind of stress interview? That wasn’t why, but I couldn’t make out her question’s meaning even if I understood it.

Mirrors show the world with left and right reversed─yes, that’s what I thought. The kind of common knowledge possessed even by an elementary schooler.

Why do you think mirrors show the world with left and right reversed? would have some kind of philosophical edge to it, so I wouldn’t have minded it. Her question, though, seemed less philosophy and more Zen koan─was she going to tell me that it’s in fact us who are reversed, that our mirrored forms are the truth?

No, wait.

Elementary schoolers probably didn’t know about this property of mirrors, but honors-roll students like Hitagi and Oikura would point out that it’s not left and right that are reversed, but front and back, strictly speaking… Is that what she meant? That was just semantics, though. The way we see it─the “mirror image”─remains the same.

“I’ve heard that if you take multiple mirrors, like on a vanity mirror,” I offered, “and put them at a right angle and look at where they meet, left and right are where they should be… Is that what you want to say?”

Wasn’t there some mirror that shows left and right correctly even as a flat surface, by making good use of reflections? I didn’t know about this world’s Rainy Devil, but Kanbaru did love new and unusual things, and I remembered seeing one as I cleaned her room.

“No, no─hsshh hsshh. That’s not what I mean, I’m asking if, just looking into a mirror, you think left and right are reversed.”

“Well…yeah, I do. When I raise my right hand, my reflection raises its left, and if I raise my left leg, my reflection raises its right, doesn’t it?”

“Huh. You do ballet stretches in front of the mirror? What a weirdo.”

“It’s just an example. Why would I?”

It’s Karen who does them, not me. Did she in this world too?

“In any case, my reflection moves in the opposite way as me.”

“Do you really think that?”

Relentlessly.

Miss Serpent closed in on me─my image of snakes was that they were persistent, and that’s exactly how this situation was playing out.

“Don’t you just think that because it’s what everyone says?”

“D-Don’t be ridiculous. Do I look like the type to be bound by common sense?”

True, mirrors reversing left and right─or front and back─was a piece of common knowledge, which is to say a preconception. If I were asked to explain a mirror as an object, that’d be how. I don’t remember who, but someone must’ve explained a mirror to me that way, and I must’ve understood it that way: Oh, so it’s a board that shows reality, but with left and right flipped around.

“Miss Serpent, are you saying that’s not the case? What do you think, Miss Hachikuji?”

“I’ll chime in with my opinion at the end. Keep going for now,” the young lady replied.

With dignity. She sounded so authoritative.

Since I knew her back when she was ten, it was hard to tell if she was being serious, silly, or just glossing over the fact that she didn’t have an opinion.

“You know the mirror test, don’t you? To see if an animal─for example, a snake─recognizes itself in a mirror,” Miss Serpent said. “But doesn’t the animal recognize the reflection as itself precisely because left and right are flipped, and the image is its counterpart? If left and right moved exactly the same in the mirror, the animal would think it’s moving in a different way, that it’s a different creature─maybe. Hsshh hsshh.”

“Well, the reflections do move with left and right reversed, so…”

“In any case, snakes don’t have limbs, so your phrasing isn’t convincing me─and anyway, mirrors don’t give off any light. They just reflect the light that enters them, and the viewer just assumes that it’s ‘showing’ an image. When you think of it that way, that’s not the function of a mirror at all, is it?”

“Miss Serpent…” It felt like I was being toyed with─or straight-up being teased, so I replied in a somewhat stern tone, even though I was speaking to a god. “If a mirror doesn’t show you the world with left and right reversed, then what exactly does it show?”

“The truth,” Miss Serpent declared. “And no, Big Brother Koyomi, I’m not saying that there’s a ‘true’ left and right. It’s how mirrors were treated in ancient times─they were holy items.”

“Oh… Yeah, magical mirrors and the like crop up all the time.”

“Like Cinderella’s mother’s,” Miss Hachikuji chimed in knowingly, when she’d confused Cinderella for Snow White. Still, it was a good example.

We have an unromantic explanation nowadays, but images in mirrors seemed quite wondrous in the past, so people naturally granted them some sort of meaning─hence all the aberrations revolving around mirrors.

They show the truth, huh?

“Shown the truth, Medusa turned to stone─but who wouldn’t be petrified by someone with snakes for hair? Hsshh hsshh!” laughed Miss Serpent. Maybe I didn’t get snake humor, but having witnessed a serpent-god Sengoku looking just that way, I didn’t find it funny at all… Did that version of her never exist in this world?

“They show the truth? Okay, I admit that’s suggestive, but so what? What kind of lesson am I supposed to take home here?”

Going on about lessons made me sound like that conman, but my only impression so far was that looking back on history could sure be edifying.

You call it the truth, but it’s still facing the wrong way around, I almost wanted to say in a salty mood. While I’d made a four-yen offering to Miss Hachikuji, I couldn’t take that attitude with Miss Serpent, who’d made a cameo appearance free of charge.

In hindsight, my donation to Miss Hachikuji was so meager I’d be better off not having paid anything. I suddenly felt like apologizing─sorry for my callous quips, even if I kept them to myself.

“Do you still not get it, Big Brother Koyomi? Listen here, I’m just trying to tell you that the same goes for this world. Viewed head-on, it might seem like left and right are flipped, but that doesn’t mean it’s reversed─it’s not about deciding which one is correct, both of them are, okay?”

“What?” Both─were correct? The truth?

“This world might look like an inconsistent mess from where you stand, but just like your world, that all depends on if you lewd in the right way.”

“Lewd in the right way…” I took her seriously, but wait, my world wasn’t that lewd.

“Pardon me, view it in the right way.”

“How do you make a mistake like that? How do you confuse those two phrases? They’re practically opposites.”

“Opposites, eh─hsshh hsshh.”

Miss Serpent echoed my vacuous quip as if it were profound─hm?

“All right, fine, let me recap,” she continued. “All the nice people you know who you’ve met in this world, whether your sisters or your friends or your juniors or your childhood acquaintances─along with me and Miss Mayoi. It’s not like our left and right have been flipped around. You’ve started to figure that out by now, haven’t you?”

“…”

“Yes. It’s not that we’re flipped around─we’re out here as our honest selves, in our own way. We might be reflections, but we’re not illusions─hsshh hsshh! Judging by the way you’ve been looking at me, I’m nothing like the me you know, to the point where you can’t believe that we’re the same people─but I’m sorry to say, this is also who I am.”

I’m Nadeko Sengoku, Miss Serpent said.

Nadeko Sengoku said, in other words.

Even my dull self was beginning to see her point─but something about it wasn’t sinking in. Was it some visceral reaction?

The logic that the reflection in the mirror is identical, is the same person, made sense for Tsubasa Hanekawa and Black Hanekawa, but I couldn’t bring myself to accept it for anyone else.

Take the first person I met. If Karen got shorter, didn’t her entire identity crumble away?

“People who’re tall don’t always wish it was that way─just as some people develop a complex over being short, others can about being tall. Your cute little sister only just graduated middle school, right? Do you think she’s grown up enough on the inside─to catch up to her height?”

“On the inside…”

Well, when you put it that way, yes, her body had done all the growing but the person inside of it had yet to fill it out. She was still a child─it seemed to me, at least.

“…”

And?

If you adopted that approach with Tsukihi─Ononoki─Hachikuji─Kanbaru─Hanekawa─Oikura─Sengoku─the jumbled way they’d been flipped around finally started to line up along a common theme. But what did it mean?

“Hsshh hsshh. It’s starting to come together now, so why don’t we jump back a bit. You said that mirrors flip around left and right because when you raise your right arm, your left arm moves─but that example doesn’t apply to a snake with no limbs. What would you say is flipped around in the case of a snake? How would you─how do you explain left and right being ‘flipped around’ to me?”

“I’d, um, use the shape of your scales, or the way they’re lined up…”

“Don’t picture literally explaining it to a snake. What are you, stupid? I’m asking how you’d explain left and right being flipped around to someone who lacks those concepts.”

“Well…”

It was like a variation on the Ozma Problem. It might seem easy, but it’s harder than you think. For example, moving your body to the right would make your counterpart move left─but the key is to explain left and right being reversed without using the words.

“The Ozma Problem reminds me of the Wizard of Oz,” Miss Hachikuji chimed in with a comment that I could safely ignore (not quipping even silently at her expense now just made me seem cold). But as I continued to agonize over the question, I arrived at a very simple answer.

“That’s it. You could just show them reflected letters.”

“Hsshh hsshh. Letters?”

“Yeah. Well, there are a lot of symmetrical letters depending on the way you write them, so maybe use full words? Put that in a mirror and it’ll be reflected with left and right switched around, which should let you explain a mirror’s properties, right?”

Koyomi Araragi would be reflected as    . Miss Serpent would be reflected as    ─the “mirrored letters” that made me give up at the bookstore.

Seeing them, it was immediately obvious that you weren’t looking at a simple piece of glass, and that reality isn’t being shown to you as it is.

“Yes.”

That’s it, Miss Serpent said.

Her facial expression was less of a Right! You’re smarter than I thought, Big Brother Koyomi! and more of a So you finally managed to put together the answer I wanted─look at all the work you made me do. Well, then maybe you should’ve just given it to me up front in an itemized list.

Maybe gods had some kind of rule where they couldn’t deliver messages too directly from on high, but I’d heard enough about mirrors; I was even reminded of that abandoned cram school and Oshino force-feeding me his extensive knowledge on aberrations. For her to look disappointed on top of it all was too much to handle.

Speaking of which, what became of that cram school in this world? It didn’t exist in mine anymore. The designs of buildings and other sights around town were flipped around, but that was all I’d noticed…

“Okay, Big Brother Koyomi. Time for the next step.”

“You weren’t done yet?”

“Don’t you worry, this is the last of it─we’ll ask Miss Mayoi for her opinion after this.”

“Huh?” Mayoi Hachikuji seemed honestly surprised to hear Miss Serpent mention her─she must’ve forgotten her own earlier statement.

I was right, it was just an excuse and she didn’t have an opinion…

“If, out of the blue, someone showed you the words    , not in a mirror but on a piece of paper─what would you do?” asked Miss Serpent.

“…So I’m playing the snake now? Do I also need to pretend that I have the brain of a reptile?”

“No, even yours should be up to it.”

What a mean thing to say─well, of course Miss Serpent would be partial to reptiles, she was a snake god.

Umm.

“Well, I’d probably just think of them as mirrored letters.”

“But you don’t know what a mirror is. Nor do you know what mirrored letters are.”

“Okay, then I wouldn’t think of them as mirrored letters, but that just means I don’t know how to read. I’d still think of them as flipped─”

Hm? No, that wasn’t it. I’d normally only think of mirrored letters as “flipped around” if I were in front of a mirror. Try to remember, what did I do when I struggled to read those history books?

Right.

I tried to read the pages from the opposite side, through the paper─an attempt that failed, but that meant if I saw mirrored letters on a piece of paper…

I’d probably turn the page to look at it from the inside out.

Yes. Mirrors didn’t turn left and right around─

“They turn people─inside out.”

Now I understood.

For the first time since coming to this world, I finally got it─this was no mirrored land. Well, it was a totally correct understanding, but─the girls I’d seen hadn’t been flipped around.

They were turned─inside out.

What was hidden inside of them was now on the outside.

Ah… That’s why Tsukihi was the only one who hadn’t changed, aside from her clothes─actually, even the clothes were a regular mistake by her standards, but in any case, that’s the kind of person she is.

Someone with only one face─Tsukihi Araragi had no inner self that could appear, even in a mirror.

Yes.

Here, on the other side of that mirror, was an inner world.