Monogatari Series - Volume 22 - Chapter 1.01

Zenka Mermaid

001

Suou Zenka became a mermaid in her first year of high school, or so I’ve heard. According to her, she “wasn’t a mermaid, but a half-fish person”—but for now, let’s just say she was a mermaid. For someone like her who gave off such a dignified atmosphere, it certainly felt more appropriate to call her as such over something that sounded like it could come from the Cthulhu Mythos.

Apparently, a truck had made a sharp turn onto a pedestrian-only street in order to avoid a child who hadn’t waited for the signal to cross, and she was met with the misfortune of being hit by that truck and falling into an irrigation canal on the verge of death. She only managed to escape death by eating the miraculous “mermaid flesh”.

Between her, who had become immortal by eating, and me, who had become immortal by being eaten, we made for a pretty good contrast. But in terms of the inconvenient lives we would lead afterwards, we were exactly the same.

We would never gain back any compensation for that.

There were times where what you gain is what you lose, and there were times where you lose what you gain, but there would never be a time where you can gain back what you lose.

And that was even more true when it came to life and immortality.

Despite having been a promising swimming athlete, she was no longer able to swim after that happened—and it wasn’t because of any injuries lingering after the accident. After all, the “mermaid flesh” allowed her to completely recover from any injuries without leaving a single scar.

And it wasn’t due to any psychological trauma from falling into the irrigation canal.

What was more traumatic was—after the accident.

Whether you called it a punishment for consuming the miraculous “mermaid flesh” or just an extreme case of food poisoning—after recovery, whenever she entered the water, her body would transform into that of a mermaid. And you may think that a “mermaid transformation” sounds rather romantic, but I urge you to listen until the end.

In short, it was like the retrogression of evolution.

Just spilling some juice on her skin would turn it into scales, just washing her hands would turn them into cod, and taking a bath would mean the loss of her legs—and she couldn’t even go out on rainy days, for fear of being unable to breathe and suffocating on the side of the road.

Dying was better than this.

Apparently, she’d thought as such a countless number of times—just as I had.

But after coming to terms with it (which I’d heard had taken quite some time), and then ten years after that, it seems that her approach to her constitution had turned to, “This was better than dying.”

“‘It would’ve been better if the truck had run over the child instead’, and such thoughts, I’ve finally managed to leave behind—and eventually, I’d like to become someone who’s able to think, ‘I’m happy I’m alive.’”

…In the first place, you may think that it took quite some time to get a twenty-six-year-old woman like her to open up about a topic so private and sensitive, but in actuality, she had told me all of the above on our very first meeting.

Of course, while it wasn’t simply as a return gift, I told her about the spring break between my second and third years of high school, about how I’d had my blood sucked by as well as sucked the blood of a vampire, about how I had become—or had been reduced into being—a vampire.

The place that I, twenty-three-year-old Araragi Koyomi, had come to work at was that open of a workplace. And its name was the Naoetsu Police Department, Rumors Squad.