Monogatari Series - Volume 25 - Chapter 4.02

002 

With Tanabata coming up, I was steadily doing some mountain climbing, aiming for the Kitashirahebi Shrine—however, my goal wasn’t a simple shrine visit. That shrine had already been destroyed, and no god resided there anymore. It was totally empty in terms of a shrine and in terms of a plot of land, and the main shrine had halfcollapsed, with only the torii remaining standing. 

It had been so empty that there had been a risk of it becoming a source for trouble, so this Hawaiian-shirt-wearing old man named Oshino Meme who had visited this town had even gone out of his way to place a “seal” here. That was the kind of place it was, and even I had played a part in the placing of that seal, but in this particular case, I wasn’t climbing the mountain for any oddity-related reason. 

In short, it was for a preliminary inspection. 

After the hellish spring break I experienced alongside the neardeath vampire and after the nightmarish Golden Week I’d experienced alongside a classmate named Hanekawa Tsubasa, the girl that I had met by some strange twist of fate—the girl named Senjougahara 

Hitagi—had her birthday on July 7th, or, in other words, Tanabata.  

So it was to make the preliminary arrangements to celebrate that birthday that I decided to go mountain climbing on this very day. 

Since she was someone who loved the stars, and the day was none other than Tanabata, I’d figured, why don’t we all go stargazing together? 

Celebrating the birthday of a girl born on July 7th by going stargazing was such a special idea, unparalleled in its originality, that I trembled at my extremely unique creativity. 

In the first place, trying to celebrate the birthday of a classmate was behavior that would be completely unheard-of for the me before spring break, who would say stuff like “I don’t need friends, because they lower my intensity as a human”… But anyway, this was about the present me. 

Be that as it may, even if we wanted to go stargazing, July 7th fell on a weekday this year, so we didn’t have the luxury to go as far as visiting an observatory—we needed to settle on a closer location. 

At first, I’d thought it would be fine to do it on the roof of our school, but unfortunately, Naoetsu High’s rooftop was not free to access. 

And we wouldn’t dare try to sneak up there. 

And so, because it was the tallest point in our town, and because it was a place that people rarely went despite its wide range of vision, I decided to look into the Kitashirahebi Shrine, a good, little-known observation site. 

After all, Oshino had called the Kitashirahebi Shrine an “air spot”, so it didn’t feel wrong at all to interpret that as a spot to view the skies. 

However, as I laboriously climbed this mountain trail, I felt that this location hunting wouldn’t bring about any favorable results—first of all, I had calmly begun to think that there was no girl in this world that would want to celebrate their birthday at a dilapidated shrine, but even before that, as if I were being cursed by my past self, the most important thing—the weather—was not looking too good. 

The clouds had started to look menacing. 

It hadn’t been that way when I’d left my house, but once I’d arrived at the foot of the mountain and started climbing uphill, the sky had started to become cloudier and cloudier. 

Far from the Summer Triangle, I couldn’t even see the moon! 

It was a dark night. 

And it wasn’t just cloudy—it actually seemed like it would start to rain. At this rate, if rain started to fall when I was on a mountain with no umbrella, it would just be a dreadful state of affairs. 

If this really was a curse from my past self, then my past self must have really been carrying a profound darkness within him. 

Well, considering I’d actually turned into a vampire and become a minion of darkness for those two weeks, perhaps that was actually the case, but I wanted him to at least be considerate on the day of Tanabata—but, fortunately enough, that was just needless anxiety. 

Well, no, it wasn’t needless in that there was suddenly a gap of sunny weather (even though it was night) that peeked through, but needless in that, even if this awful weather was indeed a curse, it wasn’t a curse from my past self—at the summit, on the steps of the half-collapsed shrine. 

There sat a pretty boy looking gloomy enough to be almost depressed, his head in his hands. 

“……” 

He looked like a boy in his second year of middle school. 

However, there was so little of the liveliness or cheerfulness befitting such an age that I could even say I felt none at all—or rather, it felt like only the air around him had completely stagnated. 

It was a gloom dreadful enough to make me think I’d met yet another oddity on the verge of death, just like during spring break. He seemed so much like a black hole that absorbed all light, that I was sure he even had a negative lux value. 

I couldn’t help but come to the conclusion that the reason for these dark clouds hanging above us was due to this kid—just what exactly was this pretty boy that contained so much grief? 

I felt compelled to say that the way he hid his beauty seemed like some sort of youkai in itself, but, as a former vampire, and as someone who was not a specialist but an amateur who had come across various oddity stories—as someone with that level of experience, I could say for certain that he was definitely human. 

Well, there had even been a half-vampire that wore a white uniform, this wasn’t something that I could make a sweeping statement about, but—which school was that uniform from? 

The blazer didn’t seem like anything I’d seen around here… 

“Ah… Waah….” 

The pretty boy, not having noticed me after I stopped underneath the torii, began to shake his head in his hands. 

“Oh no oh no oh no oh no… What do I do what do I do what do I do… I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know… Why do I have these eyes why do I have these eyes why do I have these eyes…” 

“……” 

I’d faced off against a number of people with their own troubles, the near-death vampire being the number one example, but this could be the first time I saw someone being so blatantly troubled like this… It was like he was making his surroundings even gloomier, with no sign of stopping. 

By now, even the sky had been completely covered in clouds without a crack, with not a star in sight. 

Far from making this an advance look, at this rate, I wouldn’t even be able to see an inch ahead of me. 

“Leader, you said it would absolutely be all right… You’re really all talk, aren’t you… Why did I fall for this…” He was muttering stuff like that. 

Leader? 

Was he talking about heartbreak?  

It was true that, if I just left him like this, he could even be at risk of committing seppuku—at any rate, it was no longer the atmosphere of doing a test run for a classmate’s birthday celebration. 

I couldn’t just ignore someone so blatantly troubled. 

Also, it seems that recently, there have been rumors out in the world (although they were mainly rumors spread by my friend Hachikuji) that I was being called, not a “storyteller that helped girls in trouble”, but a “storyteller that helped only girls in trouble”. 

It was an impressive way to circulate rumors. 

It almost made me want to ask her if she was playing the stock market. 

My attitude was that gender didn’t matter when it came to people in trouble, and I’d learned that from my second mother, Hanekawa— it was simply a coincidence that, up until now, no worried boy had ever appeared before me. It was quite the coincidence for a series that spanned over twenty volumes, but it certainly was not the case that I was just ignoring boys. 

As evidence, wasn’t there a troubled middle school boy right in front of me at this very moment? It might be a bit imprudent of me to say it like this, but in order to prove that I wasn’t a storyteller that only offered my help to girls, I wasn’t going to leave this poor, perplexed boy on his own. 

Well, even if not for that, if I just left this boy emanating darkness as he was, then it felt like it would end up never being possible to go stargazing at this shrine, so I had my own circumstances… “Now then…” 

The question was, how was I going to call out to him? 

I didn’t exactly have a bright disposition myself, so if I multiplied that darkness of his with my own darkness, then I had no idea how things would end up turning out. 

In that case, I had no choice but to force myself into constructing a bright personality. It wouldn’t do if I made a worried middle school boy overly cautious about me, either. I needed to act like a cool older brother that he could speak to candidly. After all, I even had two little sisters that were in middle school—compared to those two, even a middle school boy would seem cute. 

“Yo! Why are you feeling so down, kid?” 

“Kyaah!” 

When I said that energetic line that I thought I would never say in my entire life and abruptly embraced him from behind, that “kid” let out a very girlish scream—the tone of voice was so girlish that I figured that maybe his voice hadn’t changed yet. 

“Wh—who!? What!?” 

The panic of suddenly being hugged from behind was able to temporarily drown out the darkness that surrounded him—my strategy of sneaking up on him and surprising him was a success. 

First impressions were important. 

With this, I had surely influenced his impression of me into being a familiar, brotherly character that he could open up to even if it was our first meeting. 

At the same time, I felt a certain delight in being able to say, “Hachikuji, I’m not just hugging you because you’re a girl—I’ll hug anyone indiscriminately, even middle school boys, because I’m just someone that loves hugging people.” 

Together with that feeling of delight, I took that boy that was still in a state of confusion and hugged him a second time, this time from the front. 

“Hey. I’m Araragi Koyomi, a high school third-year,” I said, whispering my self-introduction into his ear. 

“The, the criminal revealed his own name… Does that mean he’s not planning on letting me live…?” 

“A criminal? What are you talking about? I’m your savior.” 

Was it a generation gap? Or maybe regional differences? Either way, the incomprehensible things that the boy said made me surprised. 

And when he looked at me, it was as if he suddenly realized something. 

“Ah, that’s right, the way I, er, the way I look right now…”  he muttered. 

It made even less sense. 

I came to the conclusion that it meant that his worries actually ran that deep, so I continued. 

“If there’s something that’s bothering you, then let me help!” As I said that, I placed an encouraging hand around his shoulders. And—were middle schoolers really like this?—his shoulders were awfully slender, like the shoulders of a girl.