Monogatari Series - Volume 24 - Chapter 3.4

Mayoi Snake - Chapter 4

From Yoimonogatari by Nisioisin

From what I’ve heard, North Shirahebi Shrine was previously located in Shirohebi Park—despite the long-running controversy about whether the name was read as “Rouhaku Park” or “Namishiro Park”, neither turned out to be correct; “Shirohebi” is the park’s official name.(1)

Although the water radical on the left(2) makes it seem like the name is referring to a sea snake, well, there are quite a few aquatic snakes around here, and if I were told it came from ancient folklore then that would make a lot of sense. After all, folklore is kind of like a game of telephone.

However, when I heard about it, I thought that, for my part, I preferred the name “Namishiro Park”.

That’s because there’s a type of snake called namihebi—sea snakes; the famous Japanese rat snake is one of them.

And albino rat snakes are commonly referred to as “white snakes”, it seems—North Shirahebi Shrine… North White Snake Shrine.

But as you might expect of snakes that were worshiped religiously, finding them is no easy task—let alone finding ninety of them.

“I’m sorry that this turned out differently from what I told you. And that I can’t help you. The ritual can’t be completed if you don’t do it yourself, apparently.”

Ononoki-chan called out to me, not from atop my head, but from atop a tree. I had left the shrine grounds, and had gone into a grove to look for snakes.

From that angle, her panties were in full view.

I don’t derive any pleasure from looking at little girls’ panties, but after hearing her apologize, I couldn’t complain—I had nothing to complain about in the first place.

It was a bit humiliating to get punched and stepped on, but I’ll soon be going out into the world and trying to become an artist, so those are things I’ll just have to accept.

There are people who don’t like me.

Indeed.

“Onee-chan said she was pissed, but she didn’t say she disliked you. Actually, I think she likes kids who have guts.”

“I don’t have any guts… Aha!”

As I was talking to Ononoki-chan, I noticed something darting in the corner of my eye and swiftly reached out my hand—although I succeeded in grabbing it by the scuff of its neck, it was, unfortunately, not a white snake.

Just an ordinary snake.

It wasn’t even a Japanese rat snake.

It was a shiromadara—an Oriental odd-tooth.

Despite the name,(3) it couldn’t be called a white snake.

The Oriental odd-tooth was baring its fangs, twisting its tail and body around in an attempt to escape from my grip—hey, it’s okay; I’m not going to chop you up with a chisel.

I’m going to let you go.

Since it would be dangerous to drop it nearby, I hurled it a fair distance away. Forgive me for being rough; I didn’t want to get bitten.

“…You didn’t just casually grab a snake, did you? Carelessly, with your hand?”

“Huh? Yeah. Was because I could reach it.”

“That’s the same exact thing Onee-chan said! Verbatim!”

Ononoki-chan followed me from the treetops as I walked further up the mountain. She wasn’t jumping like Kagenui-san, she was striding steadily along the branches.

“There are treetop snakes too—let me know if you find one, Ononoki-chan. For now, I’m going to be catching whatever snakes I find, regardless of color, so I can get a feel for this again.”

“You some kind of snake-catching master?”

I grew up in the countryside, you know.

I understand why snakes can be scary, but if you prepare yourself, they’re not so bad; just watch out for the fangs, and there’s not much they can do.

“I don’t have to worry about getting killed this time, so I feel a lot more comfortable now than when I was failing the countercurse.”

“You should go to Amami Ooshima.(4) I heard you can get three thousand yen if you catch a yellow-spotted viper.”

Really?

That’s fascinating.

However, as a would-be manga artist and apprentice specialist, if I started aiming to be a snake-catching master too, then my plans for the future would stop making sense—

Got one.

One in each hand.

I wonder if they’re parent and child?

“Yikes. These are pit vipers.”

“Don’t just say ‘yikes’. At least use an exclamation point instead of a period.”

Even I’m scared of pit vipers.

Just to be safe, I threw them further than before—in the opposite direction I was walking, of course.

“…Couldn’t we have exterminated those vipers?”

“Well, I did used to be a snake goddess, after all.”

And my repulsion to snakes now might be less than it ever was. About a year ago, when I had wandered this mountain trying to catch snakes just like I’m doing now, I remember trembling in fear, despite growing up in the countryside.

Well, even though I don’t have guts, I might have become tough.

“Everyone’s perfectly fine with goldfish scooping, but if you told people they had to dissect the goldfish they catch, they’d hesitate to scoop any, right? It’s like that.”

“Is it…?”

“That said, back when Tsukihi-chan and I were in elementary school, there was a competition to see who could catch the most fish at the goldfish scooping stall, and the losers would buy the winner cotton candy. Tsukihi-chan beat the goldfish within an inch of their lives with the frame of the scoop before catching them.”

“Don’t bring up stuff from your friend’s dark past like it’s an anecdote. Within an inch of their lives?”

If that’s what your childhood was like, I can understand why you became a snake-catching middle schooler, said Ononoki-chan.

Her dark past, huh.

I think all kids have had experiences like that, though… And if we take that discussion deeper, I wonder what we’d think of goldfish scooping itself.

The brutality of life.

Some people are fine with fishing but don’t like cutting and trimming the fish; some people are fine touching fish, but are scared of touching the live bait—everyone has different ways of looking at life.

I clearly went too far back then, but to be overly regretful would be another form of taking things too far. I had used my regret to portray myself as a frail but virtuous person… That is to say, I couldn’t help feeling like I was using my guilt as a justification for trying to live at ease with myself.

Kuchinawa-san was the personification of that.

“You can actually use a Y-shaped branch to press the snake’s neck into the ground like a sasumata,(5) but I’m a follower of the school of grabbing with your bare hands.”

“That’s not a real faction.”

“You don’t get the same grasping sensation with a branch. It’s awkward.”

“If it’s awkward, then it’s snakes you won’t grasp, not sensation… You know, if you’d played up this master snake-catcher persona, I doubt you’d get ostracized at school.”

Ostriches eat snakes.(6)

I mean, I’m not getting ostracized!

“If you don’t catch them with your hands, you don’t get that feeling of holding a life in your hands.”

“That’s something an expert would say. Or maybe something a psycho would say.”

Probably more on the psycho side.

I chopped up a huge number of snakes a year ago… All together, I chopped up at least eighty-nine, didn’t I?

No, I think it was around twenty or thirty at most.

I wonder what the proportion of albinism is. If it’s one in every hundred, then I’ll have to gather a total of eight thousand nine hundred snakes… And it might even be one in every thousand.

Or one in a million.

“In that case, isn’t it unreasonable to ask me to find eighty-nine white snakes before dawn? I’ll be lucky if I manage to find a couple.”

“This isn’t the first time Onee-chan has made unreasonable demands. …By the way, the North Pole, where Onee-chan was staying until recently, is one of the few places on Earth not inhabited by snakes.”

So it’s quite possible that she gave you this task without knowing much about snakes—Ononoki-chan said.

She was at the North Pole?

What kind of life does she lead?

Surely there’s no reason to stay in a place like that.

“The Arctic isn’t a continent, so it’s not technically ground—Onee-chan was able to walk around freely, so it seems she found it rather pleasant. But after the appearance of the legendary vampire’s creator, she had no choice but to come back to Japan.”

“…It’s a strange curse, isn’t it, not being able to walk on the ground.”

The curse I’d been afflicted with a year ago was for my body to be squeezed by giant snakes, but in a sense it was typical, or rather, very straightforward.

After all, there are snakes that squeeze their prey to kill it.

But to not be able to walk on the ground…

“The five of them were afflicted with curses when they brought my corpse back to life. Onee-chan and Mr. Teori worked on my lower half, so their lower halves were cursed, and so on.”

“Mr. Teori is… if I recall correctly…”

“The dollmaster. One of Gaen-san’s four direct underclassmen. His role as a specialist is currently a bit different from Mr. Oshino and Mr. Kaiki’s, but in college they were very alike.”

“Hmm. Their lower halves were cursed because they worked on your lower half… So, who worked on your upper half? Oshino-san and Kaiki-san?”

“Yes. Although, technically, it’s my torso they worked on, not my upper half. It was Gaen-san who worked on my head.”

“Gaen-san—”

That’s the one who had urgent business and couldn’t come.

I wonder what kind of task she would have assigned me… I certainly don’t think it would be something as arbitrary as finding eighty-nine white snakes in one night.

“Yes, Gaen-san. She knows everything—that’s her curse.”

“……”

Oh?

Did I just become privy to highly classified information?

Ononoki-chan, surely you’re spilling too much.

Just because I listened to her complaints about Tsukihi-chan doesn’t mean she should be so frank with  the likes of me.

“If you intend to walk the path of a specialist, this is stuff you ought to know. You don’t have to know everything—just things like this. And of course, there are things it’s better not to know. Like Around, for example, which is what Gaen-san is currently dealing with.”

“Around?”

“Her urgent business. 'Critical business’ might be a better term. I heard about it earlier from Onee-chan. That’s the effect of her curse; Gaen-san has no choice but to know about stuff like that—she might look easy-going and omniscient from a first impression, but she’s not. She’s been punished. In this world, there are some taboos that you mustn’t break.”

“…But if Gaen-san and the others hadn’t broken that taboo, you wouldn’t be here, right, Ononoki-chan?”

“I suppose so. I see; the fact that you and I could become friends means that Gaen-san and the rest getting cursed was worth it.”

No, no, no, no.

I’m happy to hear that, but the price they paid is way out of proportion… Another snake.

This time, I couldn’t catch it.

Well, it clearly wasn’t a white one, so that’s alright—no catch, no release.

“What about Oshino-san and Kaiki-san? They worked on your torso, so what kind of curse did they get?”

“Their curses aren’t as straightforward as the other three. I could tell you now, but it’d be boring if everything got spoiled, wouldn’t it? Try figuring it out yourself.”

Oh, my.

The flow of information suddenly stopped.

Ononoki-chan is intent on bringing me up properly—she might be dangerous, but she’s a good friend.

Well, I would think their curses have something to do with the way they ordinarily behave… Like not being able to stay in one place for a long time, or not being able to say goodbye, or having to continually deceive people, or becoming a miser…?

I don’t know how those relate to creating a torso, but it’s probably something like that… I’ll think about this properly tomorrow, after I’ve calmed down.

…Tomorrow, huh.

“Let me ask a different question, Ononoki-chan. I readily agreed to this because I was frightened of your Onee-chan, but what happens if I’m unable to complete the ritual of abdication? That is, if I can’t capture eighty-nine white snakes?”

I should have made sure of that first.

I wanted Kagenui-san to get off my head as soon as possible, so I agreed immediately and started searching, but… if I can’t do it tonight, could I finish tomorrow?

I wonder. My impression was that she thought it up on the spot, but she must have decided on this process using her knowledge as a specialist, so now that I’ve started, I feel like it would be bad if I failed or quit halfway through…

Since this isn’t a ritual to remove a curse, it shouldn’t result in a curse backfiring or something along those lines, but as someone who’s been through that already, I can’t help but say that it’s rather too late for these misgivings.

“I’m not sure. This is outside my area of expertise, so I can’t say for certain… But since you’d be failing to complete the ritual of abdication, whereby you turn over godhood to the next god, it would follow that…”

Ononoki-chan thought for a moment, then stated her hypothesis.

“…You’d become a god again, I suppose.”

Footnotes:

(1) An unconventional reading of the kanji; I think Nisio explains it in Owari 3 or Zoku Owari.

(2) On the left-hand side of the character read “shiro” here is the radical (kanji component) that means “water”.

(3) Shirohebi (white snake) and shiromadara (Oriental odd-tooth snake).

(4) An island in southwest Japan with a lot of yellow-spotted pit vipers.

(5) A two-pronged spear-like weapon used for catching criminals or in self-defense.

(6) The original has a pun with the two meanings of habu—1) yellow-spotted pit viper and 2) being ostracized.