Monogatari Series - Volume 20 - Chapter 1.24

024

Toé Gaen.

A name that has come up many times─but not someone I ever imagined popping up, which is why I hadn’t introduced her properly.

Suruga Kanbaru’s mother.

Izuko Gaen’s older sister.

The individual who left Kanbaru the Monkey’s Paw, the only person in this world for whom Izuko Gaen, the woman who knows everything, feels any awe and fear.

And─she’s deceased.

Deceased… Right, she ought to have died in a traffic accident along with her husband, Kanbaru’s grandparents’ eldest son… So why was she here?

Why was she here now, bathing with me?

“Ah, sorry about that, sorry about threatening you. I never thought you’d be Suruga’s senior, is all. You should’ve just told me in that case,” Ms. Toé said in a laidback tone, with a hearty laugh─was laidback even the right word? She still wasn’t making any attempt to hide her body…

She knew her breasts were hanging out in the open, didn’t she?

Unable to leave due to this turn of events, I sat back down in the bath─sinking down to my shoulders, hiding as much of my body as I could, in contrast to Ms. Toé.

Call it unmanly, but I can’t say I’m positive about my body.

“Araragi, was it? So, how’s Suruga at school? I bet that idiot’s getting into nothing but a bunch of stupid trouble.”

“U-Um…”

Forget school, she was fighting an idiotically savage battle out on the front lawn─did Ms. Toé not know?

Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that people in this world acted in inconsistent ways, but then I was a confused mess─not having prepared myself emotionally for a hot-tub experience with my junior’s mom.

And wait, wasn’t she way too young?

I couldn’t be sure because she lacked the surprisingly important factor in determining someone’s age, namely, clothes…but how old was she, again? Was I told at some point that she was several years older than Miss Gaen?

Hard to say when she was fully au naturel, both in attire and makeup, but Miss Gaen had such a babyface she didn’t look above thirty, and maybe the same went for her older sister? Either way, I suck at guessing women’s ages even when they aren’t naked. Or perhaps─

Perhaps I was seeing her as she was when she passed away in the accident. Like with Hachikuji in my world… Possible if this lady was a ghost.

Damn, I couldn’t think straight.

My thoughts were all jumbled up─you couldn’t blame me, with a naked lady right in front of me, but I needed to get ahold of myself.

“…”

I decided to approach the situation like a test and begin with the questions I did know the answers to. With the easiest bits─first off, was this person really Toé Gaen, Kanbaru’s mother?

Given the illogic and inconsistency of this world, trusting her self-reported info seemed to be my only choice, really.

But well, if you asked…I guess she looked similar?

To Miss Gaen, and to Kanbaru.

Personality-wise, she was definitively bolder, or less sensitive, but her build was similar: short and slim. She looked closer to Miss Gaen, if I had to pick one─didn’t that make genetic sense for sisters? At the same time, Kanbaru had inherited her intense, driven eyes, her eyebrows, and more…

“Wow. You’ve got some nerve, ogling me like that. Just how thirsty are you?”

“Huh? N-No, I wasn’t. Your face…” She’d misinterpreted my gaze (really, it was a misinterpretation), but her understandable reaction made me stammer. “I was looking at your face. I-I was just thinking how much you and Kanbaru look alike.”

“Oh, she looks like me? Keheheh. I see, so her breasts have gotten this big.”

“Er, no, like I said, your face…”

Come on, I’ve never seen Kanbaru’s boobs. Just barely, but I haven’t.

Hm? Hold on, something was off about this last exchange─she didn’t know about Kanbaru’s breasts getting bigger?

“…”

“Mm. Ha. Does it really matter if I didn’t know?” Ms. Toé seemed to intuit my doubts. I suppose she and her little sister, Miss Gaen, had different values.

Well, maybe values overstated her lackadaisical attitude, but the big sis of a little sis who knew everything laughing that what you knew didn’t really matter was…unfortunate.

Actually, I was remembering some stuff now, and this lady seemed pretty different from the image Miss Gaen had given me of her older sister…an extremely self-critical, austere person if I recalled correctly. I didn’t see a hint of that.

She was an approachable mom─well, okay, even an approachable mom didn’t normally bathe with her daughter’s senior from school. Of course, I couldn’t fault her or say there was anything wrong with her since I was a trespasser who could easily be handed over to the cops otherwise.

Family members don’t always see one another as others do─and come to think of it, Miss Gaen’s characterization of me was off the mark too. She thought I was stoic and no different from her big sister.

Maybe knowing everything didn’t necessarily make you a good judge of character.

“Oh, no, I only calmed down after I got married─after I found myself a man, in other words,” Ms. Toé answered before I could speak, seeming to anticipate my queries again.

No, hold on. Wasn’t she a little too good at it? I wasn’t planning on asking her anything that personal… If she’d seen it in my expression, then my face was far too eloquent.

“While I say I calmed down, I never got as lukewarm as this setup, so give a girl a pass─things happen once you become an adult, okay? Being told that I haven’t changed one bit since the old days might make me happy, but it isn’t true.”

“Okay… Hm?”

A lukewarm setup─a silly line I’d used with Miss Hachikuji. Why would Ms. Toé know it? Hello…

It felt like she was seeing straight into my mind.

Yes, we were quite literally baring all, but did it really include my thoughts and feelings? I mean, I couldn’t begin to read her intentions, for my part.

What was she, the mind-reading yokai satori?

“Wh-What─do you know?”

“Like. I. Said. Knowing, not knowing, none of it matters. What’s important is understanding. You can know something, but it’ll only go to waste if you can’t use that knowledge, and half-assed knowledge can keep you from understanding by way of intuition.” Ms. Toé smirked, running her fingers through her wet hair. “I’m telling you, even if you don’t know something, you begin to get it just from seeing it.”

“…”

The brilliant type.

I’d thought she might be like Oshino, or maybe her sister Miss Gaen, but these remarks made her seem completely different… In other words, did she not know anything when she stepped into the bath but manage to put together a rough guess as to my predicament? Just from my demeanor, speech, and behavior, even though I hadn’t told her anything in particular?

Hard to say.

Maybe I was overestimating her. Maybe she’d only meant to describe our bathing together as a lukewarm setup. As far as hot-spring travelogues went, this was pretty tepid, after all…

“Of course, back in my day, suspense dramas always had a steamy little bath scene right in the middle. Keheheh. Are there restrictions on that kind of thing nowadays? You don’t see too many tops on television lately.”

“Tops? Er, no, um…”

Our conversation risked getting dangerously off-track, so I did my best to correct its course─or rather, the question here was how to get myself out of this.

I needed to escape this suspense drama.

No, hold on a second.

As Miss Gaen’s sister, and having bequeathed the Monkey’s Paw to Kanbaru, she was, if not an expert on aberrations, at least a pro…or I guess a wild card.

I didn’t know if it applied in this one, but in my original world, I often came across her influence─the responsibility for Ogi’s birth lay squarely on my shoulders, but it was also a fact that this lady was involved.

In which case… I had no idea why she was here now, but Kanbaru’s mom or not, she was on bad terms with the Kanbarus and shouldn’t be allowed on these premises─didn’t I need to welcome this encounter? My idea of trying to communicate via the water’s surface had been a bust, but if that failure meant getting to meet Ms. Toé, it turned my moonshot into an all’s well that ends well scenario…

“Hm? You’re staring at me again,” she reacted sharply to my gaze for the second time─my assessing gaze. Ms. Toé then put both her hands behind her head, as if in resignation, and said, “Okay, I get it. We’ll do it later, so just come to my room. You’d better keep this a secret from Suruga, though.”

“No, that’s not it!”

There was nothing okay about it!

Seeing it didn’t always mean getting it, even for her─well, I suppose she was just kidding, but it was in pretty bad taste.

What kind of person was she?

Even if the lady didn’t necessarily equal my mental image of Toé Gaen, this did seem to banish the notion that the land of mirrors was all my delusion or a dream. If you told me that somewhere inside of me, I wanted to see an energetic Sengoku or a playful Oikura, I couldn’t argue with you, but even I didn’t yearn to take a bath with the mom of one of my juniors.

What kind of unconscious was that?

“Ha… Seems like this has been an interesting development, I’m glad for you. A lot happens once you become an adult, but also when you’re a kid, I guess? Hang in there, young man.”

“And what am I to do with such easy advice?”

“Oh, you wanted advice? Well, I suppose you might─but you see, Araragi. I’m not anyone’s idea of a life coach.”

“…”

“I mean that in all sorts of ways. Considering your situation and given what you’ve done for Suruga, I want to help you, but I don’t know about butting into this story when no one’s asked me to.”

She was being awfully mystifying for someone so laidback. How was I to interpret that? What I’d done for Kanbaru…in this world, or in the other world? I had no idea, and couldn’t even tell if I should. As much as I wanted to bombard her with questions, I needed to be careful, as a potential negative influence on this world.

In her case, though, she proactively─or rather, spontaneously figured out the situation just by looking at me. If I didn’t want to influence this world, my best course of action was to hurry up and get out of the bath and retreat to Ononoki’s position.

Yet escaping from this place meant running away naked. Without so much as a towel, I’d be baring my ass to Ms. Toé.

How embarrassing!

Putting aside my own shame, turning and showing my butt to the mom of a junior I felt indebted to was beyond rude.

I hoped that she might get out first, but Ms. Toé, her scrub towel folded atop her head, looked poised for a long soak. If only I could act so unconcerned.

“…”

“About what I was saying about knowing and not knowing─things aren’t that simple here, Araragi.”

“E-Excuse me?”

I’d gone silent, only for her to start speaking. I wasn’t asking her any questions, but the result was the same if she was going to talk to me─and still short of a course of action, I was barely able to react. My hesitation must’ve been one of those things that didn’t matter to Ms. Toé, who continued, “Knowing and not knowing aren’t dualistic. My little sister has pursued knowing by removing any traces of not knowing, and your friend Miss Hanekawa has kept both knowing and not knowing as close parts of herself, but both of them are overlooking a crucial fact. Which is that a lot of knowledge is wrongly known─you think you know but have gotten it wrong. That’s why understanding is so important in matters.”

“…You know Hanekawa?”

Did she mean this world’s Black Hanekawa, or the Tsubasa Hanekawa I knew who’d left the country? Also, she didn’t mention Ogi, who professed not to know anything, but was that because Ms. Toé didn’t know her or─dammit, the more I tried to think, the more I was spinning my wheels.

I was getting too heated and about to blow my top, and not because I was sitting in a bath.

“Can’t say I know her. I understand her a little, that’s all─how about you, Araragi? How well do you understand your friend? Maybe you don’t get a thing about the thinking of your friend who decided to go overseas.”

“…”

That word overseas meant she was talking about the Hanekawa I knew. Okay, so now this lady who shouldn’t have known anything about me when she’d entered the bath grasped my situation perfectly. At what point had she started asking leading questions and gauging my reactions? She was on an altogether different level.

It was counterproductive to act awkward and reserved around her, and I found myself in a state of resignation, which is to say, I decided to stop trying to hide things─my inner thoughts, I mean, not the details of my anatomy. Nor would she be particularly surprised whatever I confessed now.

I shared why I now sat in this bath, what had compelled me to do so. I hadn’t forgotten about the influence I might have─it had forced Ononoki to “change”─but felt like it didn’t really apply to her.

This was only instinct, but she didn’t seem the type to be influenced by me. She wouldn’t come under anyone’s influence, was above influence. She just digested it all.

“Hmm…so you came here believing in this magic charm? What a pure-hearted maiden you are,” Ms. Toé said with a bemused nod after hearing me out. “Reminds me of a student of mine. Liked magic charms, or maybe I should say curses… But you might as well give up on that approach. This bath─”

Splash, she slapped the water’s surface.

“─is nothing but a bath. If anyone ever saw something on its surface, it’s on the person who saw it.”

“Is that so.”

Yeah. I mean, I knew that. Still, I’d been hopeful because I’d heard the story as an episode involving Toé Gaen. Having it denied in person made it sound all the more ridiculous.

“Oh, no, don’t be embarrassed. I feel kind of bad that I was the reason you got your hopes up,” she consoled me, but when I thought about how excited I’d gotten, how Ononoki was locked in battle, my shame wasn’t so easily wiped away.

Also, I was naked. How could I not be embarrassed?

“It sounds like my little sister and Oshino have gone around saying all kinds of things about me, but this is what happens when you meet a legend for yourself. It’s like reading about a great historical figure only to find a slew of scandals or learning about someone else who was a lot greater. Sorry for being such a plain old lady,” Ms. Toé said all too candidly─but the very fact that she could hinted that she wasn’t just anybody.

I had to wonder. She’d declared her lack of interest in butting into this story, so I wasn’t coming clean to get her advice─but having told her everything, I felt like that process had been necessary here. Until now, I’d been explaining stuff so others would understand, but this time it seemed to be for my own sake: a way of straightening out my own thoughts.

“Well, there’s not much I have to say,” Ms. Toé cushioned our conversation. “After having you tell me all that, I’d be terribly cold to do nothing in return, though. All right, Araragi, let me wash your back.”

She stood.

With a sploosh.

Even as I was feeling embarrassed every which way, Ms. Toé continued to show no modesty whatsoever─and walked right over to the shower area.

“C’mon, hurry up. It’s not every day that you get to have your back washed by a Gaen.”

It’s not every day that you get to have your back washed by anyone, a Gaen or not. Still, and even though Ms. Toé was losing no time working up a lather with her towel, I answered, “N-No, I’m fine. I’ve already washed myself down.”

“Hey, it’s fine,” she said, not taking no for an answer. “You can’t do a proper job of washing your own back. Not that you can count on me to do any better. I’ve never even washed my husband’s back.”

“Ma’am, maybe don’t share anything that heavy when we’re meeting for the first time?”

“But we’re not meeting for the first time,” she casually informed me. “My left hand─has met you, hasn’t it?”

“…”

“You haven’t heard about that yet, have you, Araragi─aren’t you curious? About why I gave that wish-granting Monkey’s Paw to my daughter…to Suruga.”