Monogatari Series - Volume 20 - Chapter 1.25

025

Right.

Mirrors reversed right and left, flipped front and back, turned everything inside out─it was probably the same no matter how you described it, but from my point of view, it was all very through a glass, darkly.

I thought this facing the mirror right in front of where I sat outside the tub as Ms. Toé washed my back─yeah, I had that realization because staring into the mirror was all I could do. A practical stranger was washing my back, even if I’d heard her name before, and I was nervous.

You see, I could place my palm against the mirror to high-five my reflected self, but upon closer inspection, there was a looking glass-deep gap between our hands.

We could never come into contact. The reflected me, on the mirror’s surface or not, existed on the other side of that glass─you might even say the mirror image was reflected on its reverse face.

Was the true essence of a mirror just its silver coating and the rest nothing more than a transparent sheet of glass? Was I looking at a mirror, a piece of glass, or myself? What is it that we see when we face a mirror?

Reflected light? Really?

Pondering these ideas wasn’t going to let me escape my predicament, but at least it helped me escape reality, which is to say ignore it, for the time being.

“You’ve got a nice, muscular back. That’s a young man for you.”

“Um, I have no idea what kind of back I have… Plus, the one simple trick behind my physique is that I was a vampire…”

“A vampire? Oh, okay, you did tell me about that just now. What a convenient fitness regimen. You wouldn’t believe how much work I put in to maintain this figure,” Ms. Toé said, scrubbing my back with her towel─it felt more like she was shaving my back than washing it.

Was she really using a towel? Wasn’t it a rough sponge?

What a world I’d gotten myself into─my little sister washing my face in the morning, my junior’s mom washing my back in the afternoon… Who was going to wash what part of me tonight? My instincts told me to be on the lookout for Oikura…

I needed to solve this before night fell.

To protect Sodachi Oikura!

From myself…

“Washing your back almost makes me feel like you’re my grandpa, but I guess the paw you wanted to talk about was a monkey’s.”

“U-Uh huh.”

Of course. That’s why I was submitting myself to this bizarre exercise─but in that case, there was another thing I wanted to ask: yes, I was letting her wash my back so I could hear more about the Monkey’s Paw, a vital item to us, but why was she so eager to wash it that it was what she got out of the bargain? If I were to believe her, it wasn’t because she enjoyed washing young men’s backs… I admit I’ve had my fun playing with the young, little, and tween girls that were Hachikuji, Shinobu, and Ononoki, but it was dawning on me that I too, legally speaking, would be classified as a minor.

“Right, I don’t want to sound out of line,” I said, “but from my perspective…speaking only based on my own values and about the world I came from, I’m not sure leaving Kanbaru the Monkey’s Paw was the best thing for her.”

In fact, that wasn’t limited to my world. Whatever happened─or didn’t happen─beforehand, the ill effects of the Monkey’s Paw had to be responsible for Kanbaru becoming the Rainy Devil here as well…

“Oh, it’s not like I had any clear intention in mind when I gifted it to her. I wasn’t trying to help her, nor was I trying to spite her─I think? The other me, too.”

“…”

A subtle reply. It was unclear whether the Ms. Toé with me now was alive or dead─but one thing was certain.

The mirror embedded in the Kanbarus’ bath wall, the mirror that had occasioned me to ponder its thickness, reflected me and only me.

Ms. Toé─wasn’t behind me.

It didn’t reflect her nude body. How to interpret the unexpected but clear fact facing me now.

Once, when I took a bath with my little sister, I was the one who didn’t appear in the mirror as we washed each other’s hair. That’s how I learned that my transformation into a vampire was progressing past a certain threshold… If Ms. Toé had no reflection either, did it mean she was a vampire?

No, I could rule that out. Vampires didn’t exist in this world─“here” was inside a mirror, and I needed to flip around my interpretation.

This was probably how her absence in what I saw as my original world, what this side saw as the other world, manifested itself─so then, was Toé Gaen dead in the other world but alive in this one?

Maybe she was a ghost who only existed in a mirror. I could imagine that sort of scary story, and if anything, the idea helped calm me down. It was a lot less stressful than my junior’s mom being here in the flesh, alive, and washing my back.

“The Monkey’s Paw, or rather its source the Rainy Devil, is actually my avatar, as you already know─it was my flip side, a flip side attacking myself. That’s the kind of family we Gaens have been for generations…experts at creating monsters.”

“Creating─monsters.”

“You know that my sorry excuse for a sister worked with some of her friends to create a corpse aberration, right? It was a variation on this theme─she’d deny it, but in the end, she’s the true inheritor of the gifts of our lineage. Even if the path she chose, for whatever reason, is to rid the world of monsters.”

On your side too, Ms. Toé added.

Too─so Miss Gaen was an expert yokai exterminator, the big boss of them all, on this side as well?

That was sort of comforting…being one of the few things this world and the other had in common─though it was hardly a feel-good moment when you analyzed Miss Gaen’s reasons for choosing such a path.

“It’s a question of how you face your other side,” Ms. Toé went on. “It might be your flip side, but you shouldn’t stand back to back with it─that’s what I think. How you see your own back.”

She began scrubbing my back even harder, with her bare hands. I didn’t know when, but at some point, she’d stopped using her towel.

A far cry from Tsukihi’s gentle touch, this was more like being scratched─hard. At this rate, I was going to end up as a scratchboard.

“Your own back? Unless you’ve got a real long neck, you’ll need a mirror,” I said.

“Right. Mirrors make you face yourself from various angles─that’s its function as a device, after all, and the Rainy Devil was my mirror.”

“But didn’t you get rid of it by giving it that name? You didn’t just face it, you defeated it…”

“While the Kanbarus took Suruga in, there’s no question that she has Gaen blood in her. She’ll end up facing herself just like my sister and I─maybe I did hope the paw would help. That left hand is just one part of the Rainy Devil, and it’ll simply vanish if there’s no use for it.”

“Now that you mention it, I forget when, but Oshino─Mèmè Oshino was wondering where the rest of the Rainy Devil was. Um, at least in my world, Kanbaru only inherited that left hand…”

“I scattered them all around. They’re safe as long as they’re not together, but it might be dangerous if someone collects them. It’s my avatar, you see.”

“What a casually scary remark.”

“Oh, no. I say that, but they’re mummified. It’s the corpse of an aberration, really─neither poison nor medicine, just a corpse. Don’t be too worried, but if you happen across them, could you dispose of them for me? The sins of the mother are visited upon the daughter, but they also say that kids grow with or without parents… Tell Suruga for me when the time seems right, will you? Tell her there’s no need to cherish it for life, that I really only wanted to tell her one thing─don’t turn out like me.”

“I could never. Not that. As a mother’s words to her daughter?”

“Listen to yourself, an eighteen-year-old boy preaching about motherhood? What exactly do you think you know about being a mother?” Ms. Toé teased me, and I had no reply─I’d never been a mother, I’d never be a mother, I even had a strained relationship with my mother.

“…”

“Keheheh, sorry. You’re right, it’s a heavy message to ask someone else to deliver. I take it back…but if Suruga ends up facing herself and seems stuck, do lend her a hand, will you?”

At this point, Ms. Toé was speaking purely about the other side─what a mysterious person. I was beginning to see why even someone like Miss Gaen chose her words carefully when (and only when) it came to her big sister.

Reaching past my head to grab the showerhead, Ms. Toé began rinsing my back─torture time must’ve come to an end.

My back had been going numb, but now it burned─the hot water stung. Was I bleeding?

“If you can’t be medicine, be poison. Otherwise you’re nothing but water,” Ms. Toé said over the noise the water was making. “That’s what I told her, raising her─I wonder how much of my point got through? Maybe I just thought I was speaking to her, but was actually trying to get through to myself. She saw me as her parent, and my sister saw me as her big sister, but looking back─I was just a crybaby and a devil.”

A weakling, she said. She sounded her usual self, so maybe it was just my impression, but was she whining?

“The best I could manage was to defeat that devil, while you, Araragi─protected your double. In which case, stick to your path. Darkness or light, that’s your partner for sure.”

“Partner?”

I looked behind me at that word.

Partner.

Find one, Black Hanekawa had told me─maybe it was sheer coincidence, but if Ms. Toé was using that word now, I had to ask what she meant.

I had to but didn’t get the chance.

Because when I looked, I found no one there. Just as the mirror had shown, I was alone in this room with a cypress bath.

Since when? Or was it from the beginning?

Toé Gaen was gone, leaving behind just her towel─the showerhead lying on the floor.

“…”

I quietly placed it back on its hook, shut off the running water, and picked up the towel.

Well, at least the towel proved that our conversation wasn’t just a fantasy I concocted once it became clear that Koyomi Araragi wasn’t going to establish comms via any cypress bath─an excuse to give to Ononoki, but hey, while we’re at it, I guess my smarting back was also proof?

It tingled and throbbed to the point that I honestly wondered if I was bleeding… Not to underscore my dialogue with Ms. Toé and needing a mirror to face my back, but I stood up to do just that. Then─

I gasped.

In the reflection I’d twisted my neck to see, my back wasn’t bleeding, but there were welts all across it as if I’d been sentenced to a lashing─and they formed words.

In proper, mirrored characters.

There in the looking glass, they were easy to make out.

“NAOETSUHIGH”

It seemed I had my next destination.