Monogatari Series - Volume 20 - Chapter 1.14

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To start with a discussion of terminology, the world you’re placed in after completing a videogame used to be called a secret world─this might not be common knowledge since games these days tend not to have endings at all, but think of it as an especially hard stage, or maybe a bonus stage.

In my case, it meant the world on the other side of the surface, like the opposite side of a coin─you could also take it to mean an inside-out world.

I’d spent almost an entire day up to this point getting it all wrong. Of course, a world where left and right are flipped around and an inside-out world might not seem that different, and you might be thinking that they’re the same thing at the end of the day. While that’s true of the world as I saw it, it wasn’t of the personalities that it contained.

I suppose Hanekawa’s example is the easiest to understand. Black Hanekawa might not be Tsubasa Hanekawa, but it’s not true either that they’re two different people─nor is Black Hanekawa a fabrication who doesn’t exist in the real world.

The aberration that appeared during Golden Week was both the yokai known as the Afflicting Cat and Tsubasa Hanekawa herself.

Something that saintly woman had repressed.

Her self and her long-suppressed pain.

That─was Tsubasa Hanekawa’s inner self.

Oshino may have named it Black Hanekawa, but in truth, you could call the cat “Tsubasa Hanekawa” and Hanekawa “White Hanekawa”─and if we looked at this world from an inside-out perspective, the same applied to the others.

Seeing small Karen was so unconventional and novel that I felt a shock on the level of the discovery of a new continent─but as Miss Serpent said, Karen really was concerned about her height. The gap between her lack of growth as a person and her growing body existed in her mind.

It must’ve been there. If that inner part of her came to the surface─it’d take that form.

The way she looked wasn’t at all new. It was a manifestation of her poor balance as a person.

In Ononoki’s case, being a shikigami meant taking the form of an inexpressive, affectless doll lacking any intonation in her voice, but she’d told me in the past that she simply wasn’t able to surface those qualities─couldn’t display them on the outside, and that she wasn’t inexpressive or affectless at all.

Taking into account Tadatsuru Teori’s testimony, we might say that her interior in contrast to her exterior, who she was on the inside in contrast to on the outside, had been made visible.

In fact, my impression of Ononoki wasn’t that her personality had changed but that her nasty personality had been exposed─and Mayoi Hachikuji’s case was even easier.

Hachikuji, who previously appeared before me as a ten-year-old girl, was in fact a ghost who’d died ten-plus years ago. She’d be twenty-one if she’d aged normally.

She looked like a young girl on the outside but had the temperament of an adult woman on the inside. On the one hand, ghosts don’t mature, time doesn’t accumulate for aberrations, and you can’t just tally up her mental age; on the other hand, even being sent to hell and becoming a god didn’t annul her history of wandering the streets for eleven straight years.

I didn’t understand it too well myself, but she had an inner side that was invisible to people like Kanbaru, who praised her to the skies and went on about cute young girls─and what I saw was what you got if you turned that inside out.

Speaking of Kanbaru, Suruga Kanbaru, her case was a little complicated─it was intertwined with her mother, Toé Kanbaru, and her aunt, Izuko Gaen. But if you looked at her on her own and spoke of her just in terms of inside and outside, her left hand─the Monkey’s Paw─read the inner wishes of its owner from the start and granted them. Its very existence as an aberration was like a cheat code.

She wore a raincoat and tall rubber boots.

Her form as the Rainy Devil was the hidden, interior Suruga Kanbaru─while her attachment to me as her senior was genuine, she couldn’t ever fully rid herself of the hatred she bore me.

It’s not like something that never existed appeared.

It always existed there, always was there.

The distinctions make it sound like I was dealing with mathematical definitions, but you can simplify the problem by saying that the Rainy Devil was none other than Suruga Kanbaru─and speaking of math, there was Sodachi Oikura and her unwatchable version.

Honestly, I had yet to process what I’d witnessed. That open and free personality she’d never given a glimpse of, and the way she acted like one of the Araragis, might be something I’d daydreamed, but it was more for her sake, more than she’d ever ask for─so I’d like to think.

That happiness, too good to be true.

I wanted to believe from the bottom of my heart that Sodachi Oikura hoped for that kind of thing─a girl like that on the other side of her prickly personality and hostile behavior did feel like some sort of saving grace.

Maybe I’m being too self-serving, but it’s impossible for me to speak about her, a childhood friend, logically.

Compared to that, my evidence for Nadeko Sengoku’s case might be slightly more convincing─because the god known as Miss Serpent, the indigenous god worshipped at Kita-Shirahebi Shrine, was something she’d hatched within her.

Maybe not quite a case of split personalities, but Shinobu and I had seen Sengoku speak with this serpent god once─a snake that had nested inside her, invisible to both of us.

That rough way of speaking, that rude, carefree behavior.

That too was Nadeko Sengoku─one and the same, as she said herself.

As hard as it was for me to accept, having only ever seen her as my little sister’s friend, there was no Nadeko Sengoku who was simply reserved, introverted, and cute─something I had no choice but to accept with remorse.

Beneath the reserve was a childishness.

Beneath the introversion was aggression.

Beneath the cuteness was audacity, all there.

A Nadeko Sengoku who could explode, who could burst at any moment resided in Nadeko Sengoku─that’s how it was.

I went back over my adventures through this world I saw as strange to find that it wasn’t so at all. I’d simply been seeing these girls turned inside out.

This world allowed inconsistency and contradiction─not because it was a land of mirrors, but because the girls appeared as the characters they were in their own hearts and minds.

Freedom of thought.

Is that what you’d call it? It did center this world, which had felt so unstable and uncertain to me. It even changed the way I saw the sights, which simply seemed mirrored until then.

By the by, regarding what Miss Hachikuji told me about the etymology of “mirror” in Japanese, kagami, and how it’s derived from “snake eyes,” kaga-mi─there are of course many competing theories, one apparently being that it comes from “seeing shadows,” or kage-mi. A device to see people’s shadows.

Wherever there is light, there are shadows.

Whenever you see a surface, something exists underneath─everyone has another side to them.

Miss Serpent explained it to me in manga terms─out of nowhere, but I assumed it was for my own ease of understanding.

“I’ve heard you pick up certain bad habits when you’re drawing faces looking left or right, depending on which hand you draw with─so when you draw a face looking in your weak direction, you check it later in a mirror, or even draw a face looking the other way on the back side and trace it over on the front. Yes, obverse and reverse are also about strengths and weaknesses─the same essence expressed in completely different manners.”

The manga metaphor was easy for me to understand, but it was from an artist’s perspective for some reason…

Hm. Okay, there were many types of reversals, and lazily, I’d harbored a major misunderstanding until now. Miss Serpent had been worth my time, and she’d just worked a miracle─still, hearing her interpretation made me wonder, So what?

Being in another world, in a place I saw as a foreign land, and not having the first clue as to how to return plagued me just the same as before.

This expert on mirrors had enlightened me with the knowledge that mirrors pierce a person’s truth from the inside out, but there was no Which is why you need to do this! along with it.

Even if they weren’t the girls I knew, they were still one side of them, so I’d resolved not to treat them with disdain─but I’d gained no answer or solution to the question of how to get back to my original world and why this had happened.

No, strictly speaking, she made a fairly sharp point about the why, even if it wasn’t a full hypothesis─she in this case being not Miss Serpent, but Miss Hachikuji.

Lo and behold, she hadn’t been bluffing about giving her opinion at the end─she did have one doubt, unrelated to Miss Serpent’s take. A question she’d found herself with after we’d parted ways earlier that day.

“Well, putting aside this place being inside a mirror, or a mirrored land, or another world, or another dimension, whatever─there are people you know here, right? Like your family and friends, your juniors and childhood acquaintances?”

“Yup… In that sense, I haven’t been tossed into a completely unfamiliar realm, but your point?”

“What about you? Where are you, Araragi?”

Me?

“You haven’t met you, Araragi─isn’t that strange? Everyone knows you, me and Miss Serpent included─we each have a relationship with you. Some of us, like Suruga, might try to attack you, but that’s still a kind of relationship. But doesn’t that mean you’ve existed in this world long before you ever came here?”

“…”

“In that case, where did that Araragi go? Your personality and behavior seem familiar to us…but you’re not this world’s Koyomi Araragi, are you? Shouldn’t another Araragi aside from you─shouldn’t your inner self be in this world?”

There we go. The idea, or maybe clue that slipped away from me when I was talking to Oikura…

The normal Koyomi Araragi.

Traveling through time with Shinobu, we’d talked about there being two patterns: “you” existing in the time traveled to, and “you” being absent. In this case, though, there was only one possibility.

If the girls here knew me, it didn’t make sense for me not to exist─even if I wasn’t here now, I had to be before now.

When I looked in the mirror this morning.

That mirror image that didn’t line up with my movements.

Those eyes that seemed to glare at me─

“Could Araragi have gone to the other world, switching places with you, Araragi? And now he’s confused by ‘a nonsensical world where everything is consistent’… Heh, I think they’d be having a tougher time over there than we’re having here.”

“…That still makes things tough for us, too. We’d have to sync up perfectly with the other side when both of us return to our original worlds.”

Oh─actually, if the me who wasn’t me was in a world with Shinobu, things could get settled faster. We might be able to communicate with that world without using the Kanbarus’ wooden bath.

No.

Even if that were true─even if the me from this world had gotten sucked into the other world to take my place, it still wouldn’t go that well.

How would we pull off a perfectly synchronized two-man play? There was no guarantee that we thought the same way just because we were two sides of the same coin, the same person.

Twins can share the same genes but have different fingerprints. Why would the timing of our actions line up─this was the bigger issue.

Because.

Because thinking this through─judging by the examples of Black Hanekawa and the Rainy Devil, even if Koyomi Araragi existed in this world.

The flip side of Koyomi Araragi─was my nemesis.

It would have to be Ogi Oshino.