Monogatari Series - Volume 20 - Chapter 1.15

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I wanted to complain if all of this was Ogi’s plot. This is way too fast for you to be coming for revenge, how obsessed with retaliation are you, I know it’s not on the heels of yesterday but this is still on the heels of the day before yesterday, I’d say, but what good would it do to make speculative comments to a person who wasn’t even present─though the fact that the girl known for appearing at the most unexpected of times had yet to show herself for once did make me feel very uneasy. If this world’s Ogi had been sent to the other world to take my place, that meant there were two Ogis over there, and well, just the thought was scary. The world I needed to return to would be enveloped in darkness. Two Ogis… I couldn’t think of any way to deal with that. I nearly felt glad I wasn’t present for it.

“True, Araragi, it doesn’t change what we have to do─somehow sneak over to the bath in Suruga’s place and communicate with the other world. I don’t imagine avoiding the Rainy Devil’s watchful eye would be easy, though.”

“Yeah…I guess,” I sighed.

“I know I’m repeating myself, but there’s no point in panicking… Go to bed for today. You only have a regular human’s stamina now, so resting is an important step in achieving your goals. What do you want to do? Wanna stay here at this shrine?”

“I appreciate the offer, but no, I think I’ll go home… There’s something I want to check there, anyway.”

“Oh. Well, Miss Serpent and I will keep on going, so come by again tomorrow, maybe in the evening. If you do get the chance to go back to the other side, though, you of course shouldn’t let it get away. Leave a letter behind or something if that happens.”

“Okay… I’m sorry for causing you all this trouble.”

“You haven’t caused any trouble at all─and it’s my job now to keep this town under control,” Miss Hachikuji said, with dignity. She only recently became a god in this world too, but seeing her so in her element was somehow very reassuring.

So this was what divine favor felt like─even if Miss Serpent added, “Well, you’re causing trouble for me, pulling me back in like this when I’ve retired.” Although she spat this venom at me (in keeping with her nature as a poisonous snake), she also said, “Eh. I’m curious about what that cat is up to,” hinting at something before going quiet.

Come to think of it, we’d never gotten to Miss Serpent and Black Hanekawa’s relationship, and the snake god started heading back before I could ask… Maybe she’d never meant to tell me─not that it seemed important. Logic suggested that a third party had gotten involved if I’d been saved by Black Hanekawa, who hated me, but logic had no meaning in this world.

“This might be turning into a drawn-out campaign, but I can’t stay here for too long,” I griped. “There’s paperwork I’ll need to do to enroll if I passed my entrance exams.”

“In the worst case, just have Shinobu take you back to the past once you’ve returned.”

“That’s the kind of obviously flawed solution from an episode of Doraemon…”

“By the way. In Doraemon, Nobita ends up getting married to Shizuka because he changed his own future. But that means Shizuka has to get married to someone she used to look down on, when she should’ve married Dekisugi, a way better guy who’s almost too good to be true. How are we supposed to feel about that?”

“…”

A view befitting a young woman. As a boy, I didn’t know what to say.

In any case, I walked down the mountain, got on the BMX, and headed back home─where was the owner of the bike?

The BMX existing in this world implied that Ogi existed in it until at least the day before yesterday, but I couldn’t say for sure… It was hard to live in a world that allowed for inconsistency.

It defanged all of my theories and reasoning.

I’m not clever by any stretch, but in my own way, I’d used my wits to get myself out of every situation thus far─so it felt like I’d lost a weapon here in a world with no use for wisdom. Even if that wisdom wasn’t much to speak of.

Even my line of thought that a Nadeko Sengoku unlike any Nadeko I knew proved this wasn’t a dream might be an instance of overthinking things─there was no rule saying that knowledge you didn’t possess couldn’t appear in a dream.

And even if this wasn’t my dream, it might be someone else’s─though that gave this story an SF tinge all over again.

…I suddenly wondered what Hitagi Senjogahara was like in this world. Oikura showed that you could be the complete opposite, and while I didn’t have the bad taste to desire it, what was Hitagi Senjogahara like in a world where your inner self came to the surface?

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t curious.

Still, I had to admit it’d be in bad taste─even if it provided me with a hint on how to escape this world, it was only a pretext for sneaking a look at my girlfriend’s heart.

Anything that’d make me unable to look her in the eyes after I got back home was off limits─and as I swore this to myself, I arrived at the Araragi residence.

Half as a joke, I tried imagining how things might be for her. No harm in that, right? Maybe it was fine if a Hitagi still lived in the palatial estate that once stood, supposedly, near Shirohebi Park, where Black Hanekawa had taken me after kidnapping me.

The Valhalla Duo might be going strong, too, with no rupture between their time together in middle school and high school─it didn’t link up with the Rainy Devil’s existence, but consistency wasn’t a thing in this mirrored land.

While this world was nothing but trouble for me, that made me wonder if it wasn’t so bad after all─this place could even allow for a future where everyone’s happy, that idea mocked by Oshino.

Well, it was nothing more than wishful thinking, and things naturally didn’t turn out as I wanted─the detail I wanted to check at home ended up being a swing and a miss. I thought meeting my parents once they came back from their jobs might strengthen Miss Serpent’s divine hypothesis (hy-apotheosis?) about this being an inside-out world, but their work was going late, and neither would be returning tonight.

Talk about bad timing… I did get what info I could from my little sisters and Oikura, but my parents, like Tsukihi, weren’t too different from the people I knew.

I couldn’t say for certain until I saw them, but then again, even if it wasn’t at Tsukihi’s level, neither was the type to have a hidden side… Of course, I’m sure part of it was the fact they were adults, and my parents.

You could turn their personalities inside out, but if you covered it all up with “adulthood,” they wouldn’t seem any different… I had to admit, I was a bit relieved. The feeling wasn’t as strong as with Hitagi, but I didn’t particularly want to see who my parents were on the inside.

I began to regret not taking Miss Hachikuji up on her kind offer if this was the outcome. In addition to not wanting to impose too much, I’d refused because my good sense told me that while a ten-year-young girl was one thing, staying the night with a twenty-one-year-old Hachikuji was out of the question.

The wall between minor and adult wasn’t nothing, but if you just looked at the numbers, only three years separated us─seeing Mayoi Hachikuji as a woman didn’t come easily at this point, but I still needed to draw a line.

Yes, I knew how to behave myself.

Or so I thought, but after I got out of the bath and saw there indeed wasn’t anything strange about my bathroom mirror and felt dejected; after I put on an optimistic mask and decided to go to bed because everything might be back to normal when I woke up in the morning; once I entered my flipped-around room─

“Koyomi! Oh, you. You’re gonna catch a cold if you don’t dry off your hair. Not that it’d make you any less hot! Haha,” Oikura said from her top bunk. She was wearing heart-patterned pajamas and reading a book of sample math questions.

…Come to think of it, I hadn’t entered my room in this world, but I should’ve seen it coming.

Since Oikura lived with us and we only had a limited number of rooms, the kids─me, Karen, Tsukihi, and Oikura─had to form two pairs. Apparently, I was with Oikura.

Not spending the night with the older Miss Hachikuji was making me use the same bunk bed as Oikura, who was my age… I began putting together a sneaky escape to the sofa on the first floor, but it ended in failure.

“Whaaat? Why, why, why? Did I do something wrong?! Are you mad, Koyomi? Stop it, don’t act so distant! What, are you seeing me as a girl now?!” asked Oikura, or someone else I didn’t recognize, squashing my plan. As much as I dreaded an extended war, I didn’t have a solid idea of when I’d be returning to my world, so I had to be careful not to act too suspicious.

Witnessing Oikura in such high spirits was probably insulting to her, but this Oikura didn’t totally satisfy the theory that I was in an inside-out world where the internal was made external. There was the very practical matter of having to observe her… Talking to her made it clear that we did indeed live in the same room, but we at least respected each other’s privacy when changing and the like, so I gave up resisting and got into the lower bunk bed.

As sad as it is to admit, I felt a little excited about getting in a bunk bed for the first time in so long… Back when I was little and sharing a room with my sisters, I’d insist on the top bunk (Karen, Tsukihi, and I rotated each night between a bunk bed and a single bed), but the bottom bunk was interesting in its own way. Knowing that someone was sleeping right above me felt odd─even apart from the said person being Oikura.

“Hey, Oiku─Sodachi. Do you know anything about mirrors?” I asked upwards after turning off the lights. I wouldn’t say I was going all-in, but I should make effective use of anyone as smart as her.

With so much I couldn’t say, my question had become pretty straightforward. Despite the complete change in her, Oikura’s answer wasn’t perfunctory and went beyond flipping things around.

“I guess I remember hearing that they never reflect an image accurately,” she replied sleepily. “Because while mirrors reflect the light that hits them, it’s impossible to reflect all the light. How did it go again? Normal mirrors are only about eighty percent reflective? They always end up absorbing some amount of light. So─mirrored images look blurrier than the real thing.”

“…”

“We might look at ourselves in the mirror, but we only ever see a blurred image…can only know a blurry version of ourselves. Inaccurately, with a dim outline…”

I was intrigued and wanted to hear more, but it seemed Oikura had fallen asleep.

Mirrors aren’t precise with their reflections.

Info that could turn into the first step of a solution, or maybe not─perhaps it was a careless question if my goal was to keep up appearances.

It also felt like I was hitting some kind of limit… Relying too much on gods like Miss Hachikuji and Miss Serpent didn’t seem right, maybe I should take this opportunity to visit Kanbaru’s home tomorrow with Oikura? No, probably not.

Find a partner.

That’s what Black Hanekawa said─but that partner didn’t exist in this world.

Someone I could rely on in a situation like this, without forethought…not even about the trouble I might cause. She really was the only one for me in the end, I thought, and before long I fell asleep too.

As I did, a dreamy notion went through my mind: I’d forgotten and couldn’t remember, but maybe, back when I was a grade schooler and the Araragis had taken her in for a time, I’d drifted off to sleep with Oikura like this.