Monogatari Series - Volume 22 - Chapter 2.01

Nozomi Golem

001

When I was told that Kizashima Nozomi was a golem, it wasn’t something that I could immediately accept. At that point in time, I was being informed of what sorts of talented people had been assembled for the Rumors Squad, but when I was told that the true identity of the short girl in front of me was a golem, I could only think that it was some sort of inside joke. But it was not.

Her rank was Inspector, her age was twenty-nine, and her true identity was a golem.

I hadn’t been sure whether I was supposed to laugh or not, so it was good that I didn’t laugh.

If I had to describe her, I would say she had a kind of dreamy atmosphere almost like a fairy, but it seemed that that was just a result of her creators’ preferences, and it wasn’t something I should bring up—her creators, in this case, meant her grandparents.

In actuality, she apparently came down with a serious illness when she was in elementary school, and soon after lost her life. She hadn’t been “close to dying”, and she hadn’t been “on the verge of death”—she had actually died. Her organs ceased functioning, her pupils dilated, her muscles stiffened, her blood stopped flowing, and her brain cells withered away.

She died.

No matter how optimistically a medical examiner looked at her, she had completely lost her life.

However, before her soul could be destroyed, her grandparents grabbed ahold of it by its tail—and mixed it in with the mud that they had prepared in advance. They thoroughly mixed and scrambled it until it became firmly attached, until it was impossible to separate her consciousness from the mud, and then they finally shaped it into human form.

Into the form of their granddaughter.

They even made each and every strand of hair out of mud.

And the final result was, believe it or not, the golem, Kizashima Nozomi.

“Yes. Therefore, even though I look like a person on the outside, I’m really more like a figurine—the inside of me is completely and thoroughly packed with mud. I’m just a lump of dirt that isn’t what she looks like. Although they occasionally remade me here and there to match my age, my grandparents eventually passed away when I was in middle school—they hadn’t prepared mud dolls for themselves, you see. Or perhaps they had completely been exhausted from making me. As such, my appearance has stayed the same since then, which is what you see now.”

Although I’d often be seen as mature for my age—said Kizashima Nozomi innocently.

“Well, it does make me immortal, in a sense. It’s not guaranteed that my soul will stay affixed to this mud doll forever, but I’m sure it will last through your training period, Assistant Inspector Araragi, so I’ll be in your care for now. Please don’t look down on me because of my baby face, okay? Because even if my appearance hasn’t followed suit, I’ve properly grown up mentally.”

She drove that nail into me on our first meeting.

Since I myself knew a young girl that had lived for about six hundred years, there was really no need to worry about that front, but the association I had made at the time was not to the young vampire girl but to a little doll girl—yes, the girl named Ononoki Yotsugi that had once stayed as a freeloader at the Araragi household.

Although, in her case, she was a doll that didn’t contain a soul.

Far from being a mud doll, she was actually a corpse doll.

Therefore, it was hard for me to really understand what it meant for a doll to contain a soul—and I would probably finish my training period without becoming able to understand.

A four-month period was much too short for us to reach a mutual understanding.

No, it would probably be hard even if we had our entire lives.

Even if we happened to both be immortal, and even if we both happened to be burdened by similar pasts, it wouldn’t exactly be easy to share those pasts with one another.

The same as it was with any two people.