Monogatari Series - Volume 20 - Chapter 1.31

031

Battling on the precipice of death against Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade.

Being saved by Mèmè Oshino.

Facing Tsubasa Hanekawa─Black Hanekawa.

Catching Hitagi Senjogahara at the bottom of the stairs.

Walking Mayoi Hachikuji home.

Competing for a girl’s heart with Suruga Kanbaru.

Freeing Nadeko Sengoku from a charm.

Facing Black Hanekawa again.

Reconciling with Shinobu Oshino.

Banishing Deishu Kaiki.

Fighting Yotsugi Ononoki.

Getting spared by Yozuru Kagenui.

Having Tsubasa Hanekawa confess to me.

Failing to save Mayoi Hachikuji and parting ways.

Confronting Seishiro Shishirui.

Getting reintroduced to Sodachi Oikura.

Failing to save Nadeko Sengoku after all.

Sitting in Tadatsuru Teori’s sights.

And settling it all with Ogi Oshino.

An entire year─our year-long tale, all just a dream? I hadn’t wandered into another world─but only woken up?

Just as many people do every morning.

I simply woke up? All that sorrow, joy, loneliness, frustration, pain, and fun, all the smiles, tears, words, and strength, all the life and death─was all just something I dreamed? This inconsistent, contradictory world was in fact real, was the original world that I always existed in?

Both sides see the other as the counterfeit─Shinobu had told me, but only my world was the counterfeit?

Only I was the counterfeit. The world had always been universal.

Next morning─I’d wake up as always.

“If you’re saying all of it is a dream…” I─Koyomi Araragi, answered. “I’d say I had a wonderful dream, stretch my arms─and know with a smile on my face that an incredible day awaits me.”

“An answer you could only dream of.”

In that case, let me retract my hypothesis, Ogi said with a shrug─excuse me, what?

“I said I take back my hypothetical. It can’t be true. So, why don’t we cut out the small talk and get to the topic at hand?”

“Small talk?!”

Hold on, hold on, hold on! It all seemed pretty serious to me!

We neatly summed up all the previous installments and drummed up a crisis that threatened to turn everything on its head, ruining it all!

“Ha haa. Even I don’t have the courage.”

“I’d say faking me out with something that malicious is pretty brave… Wait, so it’s not true? The entire series of tales so far wasn’t just a dream?”

“I guarantee it. I mean, just how long would you have to be dreaming for that to be true? Speaking of which, did we discuss it the other day─the butterfly dream? Where you can’t tell if you’re a human being dreaming of having become a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of having become a human being─which would be just a dream when you wake up?”

“Oh…if you put it that way, I guess the idea of experiences all being a dream is thought-provoking.”

“But, Araragi-senpai. However thought-provoking, don’t you think there’s an innegligible hole in it?”

“A hole?” Was she claiming to have found one in a famous anecdote that people have been telling for thousands of years? Now, this was big.

“Challenging historical fact is a part of period mysteries. Just because something is written down in an ancient text doesn’t make it indisputable─for example, did the Honnoji Incident really happen?”

“You’re saying the butterfly dream isn’t real? Is that it?”

“My conclusion is that it never happened─it was just a type of thought experiment by an ancient philosopher. That it, if anything, is a hypothesis. A metaphor. In other words, it’s saying, ‘I was dreaming. In my dream, I was a butterfly, floating from flower to flower─and then I woke up. I was a human. But then the thought struck me, could I simply be a butterfly dreaming that I’d become human…’”

“I don’t see that as contradictory. At least, you can’t disprove it in theory.”

“But for an entirely emotional argument against it, I’d say, Who the hell dreams of becoming a butterfly?!”

There’s my double for you. She delivered the quip exactly as I would, in an identical tone─then, a beat later…

“No matter how fantastical a dream, you’re never going to not be you. Or─has that ever happened to you? Have you ever dreamed of being a butterfly? It doesn’t have to be a butterfly. A dream where you’re a dog, say, or a bird.”

No, I couldn’t say I had.

I was pretty sure, too… I’d had a lot of dreams in my life, but they were always from my own point of view─I’d never been anyone other than myself. Even if I budged and pretended that I’d dreamed of being a butterfly, that’d still be a dream about nothing more than me as a butterfly. Plus, I didn’t imagine a butterfly had the mental capacity in the first place to dream of becoming human.

“Indeed. Dreams are always had from the dreamer’s perspective. Butterflies must not be able to recognize themselves in mirrors─but anyway, that’s why it’s a kind of metaphor. He used the example of a butterfly for ease of understanding. In other words, nothing but-a-flight of fancy,” Ogi punned. “It was all just a dream endings are considered off-limits not because they’re cowardly and unfair, but because they aren’t realistic. They aren’t convincing─you couldn’t possibly accept everything so far being a dream, could you?”

“True, but…”

As her senior, and as her partner, I wanted to respond to her big lie, which had felt a little too true-to-life─but I wasn’t going to let Ogi’s mean tricks get to me at this point. Sheesh, what was it that this girl wanted to do? Don’t confuse me as a prank.

“In that case, what is happening to me? You’re saying that this isn’t a dream either, right? This world, that world. Inside a mirror, the land of mirrors─left and right being flipped around, everything being inside out, it’s all so incoherent that my brain can barely handle it. If there’s something you know, tell me, I’d really appreciate it. Ogi, what exactly do you know?”

“I don’t know anything─you’re the one who knows. And the work of understanding falls on you too,” she said. “It’s because you’re so slow to understand that you end up having to cosplay me in an unsightly display.”

“Oh…right.” Calling me unsightly was going too far, but having nothing to say in return, I asked a question to shift the topic, to hide my embarrassment so to speak. “Whatever this world is, if you exist in it, I don’t see any reason for the school uniform in my closet to change into a girl’s uniform─could you start by explaining that?”

“I don’t think that’s where I should begin…and didn’t I explain that already?”

“What? No, I don’t remember ever getting an explanation?”

“I told you that was just a joke too, right at the outset.”

“…”

Had she? Ah, yes, but I hadn’t taken her meaning. Though I certainly remembered thinking that me cosplaying her as she cosplayed me was some sort of sick joke…

“It should go without saying,” averred Ogi, “but let me play the boor and give you the details. You were taking too long sitting back and enjoying your time here flirting with Miss Oikura, so I got annoyed and thought to tease you by swapping my uniform with yours.”

“How does that go without saying?!”

Like I’d ever figure out from a single line that she’d been so proactive!

What was the point of this costume change, then?!

“Please don’t get so upset. Listen, I wasn’t expecting this either. I thought maybe you’d get a little flustered if you saw that your uniform had changed. But you went so far past flustered that you even put on a pair of stockings… I don’t think that’s normal.”

In fact, I ended up being the flustered one, Ogi noted. I panicked and put a barrier around the whole school.

So not encountering anyone or being spotted on campus wasn’t just dumb luck…

In the end, the change in my school uniform─the idea of changes coming from the opposite vector─was only a prank on Ogi’s part.

“Also, while I’m confessing here,” she said, “the smirking face you saw in the bathroom mirror when Tsukihi washed your face was also me.”

“Not the kind of thing you just tack on to a confession…Seriously? You can do that?”

“Yes. It’s hardly impressive, you and I are the same person. Or rather, that was about all I could do, trapped here in this classroom. To fan your sense of crisis, of course.”

“…”

Oh. While I was furious, this gave me some respite. For the time being, the idea of me no longer being me, the loss of Koyomi Araragi, was ruled out. But it only meant that the world exerted no pressure on me, and didn’t do away with the pressure I put on the world.

Ogi trying to make me fret implied that I needed to hurry up and go home. It was a sort of request on her part, in which case I shouldn’t be mad at her─nor would I be awarded any injury time at the end here.

“But even if you’re telling me to go home, I don’t know how,” I grumbled. “Unless you’re able to create a gate to the other world like Shinobu? Actually, which are you anyway? The Ogi who’s my double, or Ogi, this world’s Koyomi Araragi? You could even be both…”

“I’m your double,” she answered with unexpected candor─Ogi never answered a simple question with a simple answer, so I was a bit stunned.

Was she being so forthcoming because of how much laid ahead of us? She’d said no more small talk, but were we already on the main topic? Or were we still on the runup─I did hope this was at least the prologue.

“I’m your Ogi Oshino.”

“Could you not phrase it that way? Our distance is already awkward enough now that I’ve learned your true identity.”

“How cold─you might be surprised to hear this, but I’m grateful to you in my own way, okay? You risked your life to save me from the Darkness’ judgment, and I’d like to pay you back for what you did.”

Her tone was far too hollow for me to believe her, but I couldn’t ignore her if she put it that way. I was surprised though, I’ll admit.

“My double… Does that mean you came into this land of mirrors along with me? I guess you could come to this side as yourself, unlike Shinobu, a vampire… But that does bring back another problem that I thought was solved. In that case, where did the inside-out Koyomi Araragi that should exist in this world go?”

“…”

Oh? Even if it was standard operating procedure for Ogi not to give a straight answer, going silent was unusual─she loved running her mouth just as much as her uncle, or maybe even more than him.

“Ogi?”

“Has anyone talked to you yet…about the reflectivity of mirrors?” she asked, fixing her eyes on me after I called her name─with those black orbs that sucked you in.

“Has anyone… As my double, aren’t you aware of my every deed? Oikura told me.”

“You’re misunderstanding something. It’s not as if I grasped everything about you─there’d be no point in my existence. Overlapping and failing to at the same time is what allows me to be my own critic.”

Miss Oikura, you say? Just the kind of role she’d play, Ogi laughed. “Yes, the reflectivity of the average mirror is about eighty percent─you could say the rest is blurred, but also that the twenty-or-so percent is whittled away in reflection, and sentenced to death.”

“Sentenced to death…”

Right.

We always tend to focus on the larger proportion, on the eighty percent, but if we looked to the remaining twenty percent─well, no, we can’t see it.

Because there’s no light there. It’s absorbed, never reflected back.

“So…Koyomi Araragi never existed in this world to begin with?”

I belonged to the twenty percent that didn’t exist? No wonder I couldn’t find him no matter how hard I looked. Searching for something that exists is simple compared to searching for something that doesn’t─you can seek something that is, but how do you find something that isn’t? I was part of the light absorbed by a mirror and not reflected─no, wait.

That couldn’t be it─I’d seen myself in the mirror before being sucked into it yesterday, and that’s where this whole story began. When I was more vampiric and mirrors didn’t reflect me, you might’ve said that, but not anymore. Even if you ignored that line of reasoning and accepted that I was part of the twenty percent that was left un-reflected, you could still ask, So what?

It wasn’t as if I’d been sucked into the mirror because I was the light it didn’t absorb─because then a lot more than just me would have been sucked in.

“…Is this another hypothesis of yours, Ogi?”

“No, no, you’re jumping to the wrong conclusion. I’m not trying to dredge up hypotheses, nor your emotions for that matter… Well, how should I put it. You’ve jumped to the wrong conclusion, that really is the best way to phrase it.”

Hearing this was vexing─jumping to conclusions. Yes, doing so one too many times might be to blame for my predicament. Hadn’t I jumped from one conclusion to the next throughout high school?

“But it’s not as if I dislike that impatience of yours,” Ogi said. “And your kindness, I suppose, how you sympathize with the excised twenty percent.”

“…”

She then beckoned me over─what a presumptuous girl, summoning her senior, but I couldn’t complain when I was used to Kanbaru doing just that. I stood up and moved over─only now noticing that the seat my double had taken was Oikura’s.

God, she really did like staging every last detail.

“Heyyy!” she called out as I approached, motioning for a high five─what the heck?

“Heyyy,” I complied.

A nice smack filled the room.

“So, what’s this about?”

“Well, you know,” Ogi said. “You and I are mirror images of the same person─flip sides of each other, yes, but we can’t put our hands together like this with a mirror between us, right?”

“…”

I’d had that thought before. When and where?

Strictly speaking, when we talk about a mirror’s face, we’re referring to the silver coating applied to its backside, so there’s always going to be a gap equal to the depth of the glass between your hand and your reflection’s, even if you try to make them touch─

“It was when Ms. Toé washed your back. Could you not pretend something that shocking never happened?”

“Oh, was it? It totally slipped my mind since it was nothing to me… Anyway, is that important?”

“We’re talking about a mirror’s thickness, stop playing thick yourself. What I’m saying is that if you want to enter a mirror─if you want to travel to the land of mirrors─you first need to physically pass through the glass.”

You first need a portable portal like a pass loop, Ogi used one of Doraemon’s secret tools as an example.

I wasn’t so sure about minding physical phenomena in the context of a feat as fantasyish as entering a mirror, though…

“Fine,” I said, “it’d be one thing if I was reflected on water or on polished iron, but with a mirror, the glass acts as a gate I need to pass through first. I get what you’re saying, but…so what?”

“So what? So that’s the answer─don’t you remember what I told you when we were stuck here before?”

“Hm? You told me a whole lot of things. To be specific?”

“Vampires.”

Vampires can’t enter a room without permission.

Right, she’d said that─which is why we’d been trapped, or why we couldn’t get out. And the characteristic meant that as someone with a vampiric aspect, passing through the glass in the first place was much harder than entering a mirror… Even if I could leave my vampiric aspect on the other side in order to do so, it’s not like humans can pass through glass. Then again, that rendered everything moot.

In which case, what was this girl trying to say? It felt like she was still toying around with hypotheses…or were we in fact closing in on the solution?

“It’s not good to overthink things, but you shouldn’t be thoughtless, either─you’re right about that, Araragi-senpai. Also, you’re thinking about this the wrong way around.”

“Hm?”

“You may not be able to pass to the other side of a sheet of glass, but even a vampire can be pulled into it from this side.”

“Hm?”

“You know how we just discussed all of it being a dream? Well─that’s not the case, but what about this? I don’t think you can disprove the idea that this isn’t the real world yet.”

I didn’t follow. Was she switching topics again without me noticing, maybe going back to an old one? “No, Ogi… If this were the real world, the other side would be the counterfeit. Whether I’m in a dream or in a mirror.”

“Don’t think of that side as inside a mirror, think of this one as outside it─now do you understand?”

“I don’t. You’re only making this more confusing─inside, outside, isn’t it all the same?”

If we were outside a mirror, didn’t that place my previous world inside a mirror, after all? Actually, no─there was one last possibility I had to consider.

It would never come from me, but had been prompted by Ogi─the opposite of it all being a dream.

If I’d always lived in this land of mirrors but been expelled from it─but no, wasn’t that only a matter of perspective? It wouldn’t change the fact of me being me and barely functioned as an answer to Ogi’s question.

So long as I couldn’t pass through a sheet of glass, I couldn’t enter or exit any land of mirrors─pulled into it? Like pulling up a drowning man grasping at straws?

Sure, I couldn’t swim, but splashing around in bathwater and checking its temperature wasn’t beyond me─no.

Even if you could pull something in through its surface, or that of a mirror across a pane of glass, from the other side─what exactly had I offered a hand to?

“The twenty percent, that’s what,” Ogi said. “The light that should’ve been absorbed and never reflected─you scooped it up and rescued it. You opened the gate and brought it to this side for safety. You ended up making this world into the land of mirrors. You haven’t come to it─you pulled it in. Almost like they say the ancient gods pulled all of Japan together as one.”