Monogatari Series - Volume 26 - Chapter 1.02

002

“I’m abusing my three-year-old daughter. I just can’t seem to bring myself to think of her as cute, so I can’t raise her properly. Please, will you save me? Araragi-kun.”

When Associate Professor Iesumi consulted me in such a way, my honest thought was, “I’m the one who wants saving here”—at the very least, I couldn’t respond with something pretentious like, “People can only be saved on their own”.

We were in a building at Manase University.

When I was summoned by email to the office of Associate Professor Iesumi, who was in charge of teaching Swiss German, I thought I was going to receive a stern lecture about the first midterm exam I had taken the other day—to put it bluntly, I thought I would receive a notice about a makeup exam or something before my first exciting university summer vacation. After all, I wasn’t exactly a capable student.

I’d always had a problem with being a student.

It was like I wasn’t equipped with learning functions.

Preparing myself for the possibility that I’d have to call off my Hokkaido crab-eating trip that I had planned to take with my girlfriend, Senjougahara Hitagi—for the first time since I entered the university, I nervously stepped into her office… Mm, I thought it would be like being summoned to a high school staff room, but it was more like a guidance counselor’s office. As a professional of being called to the staff room in high school, I was well-versed in the subtle nuances of these matters.

I was the often-called-out Araragi.

In other words, the often-called-out Araragi was only familiar with things like the staff room, the guidance counselor’s office, the mysterious classroom that shouldn’t exist, and the girls’ locker room—he most certainly wasn’t familiar with child abuse.

I was kidding about the girls’ locker room. For the record.

If I had to say it, then this consultation, if true, was something that should quite literally be brought to a children’s welfare center—so why was Associate Professor Iesumi confessing such a private matter to me, just one student, who you could even call a zero student? Even though he was now a university student, Araragi-kun himself was still a child mentally… Should I confess on my end that I’m into roleplaying as a baby with my girlfriend?

I wasn’t kidding about the baby roleplaying. For the record.

“Ah,”

said Associate Professor Iesumi, as if concerned for me, who’d been left rather confused.

“My words may have come off a bit too strong. In that respect, I’m not very good with the nuances of Japanese… Let me correct myself. I can’t bring myself to think of my three-year-old daughter as cute, so I feel like I’m about to abuse her.”

Save me, Araragi-kun.

That was what she said—but even if she said that.

According to the handbook I used as a reference when choosing my classes, Associate Professor Iesumi’s full name was Iesumi Hagoromo, and she was born and raised in Switzerland—to tell you the truth, I only took this class to match with my new university friend, Hamukai Meniko, and, as an unenlightened fellow, I hadn’t known until I took the course that there were four languages spoken simultaneously in Switzerland.

Four? Really?

Naturally, among those four, the Japanese language wasn’t included… To Associate Professor Iesumi, who moved to Japan when she got married, Japanese was, in the end, still a foreign language.

Well, the nuance certainly did change when she corrected herself… But my impressions hadn’t changed.

My feelings and thoughts hadn’t wavered.

I was the one who wanted saving here.

Er, I didn’t mean in the sense of “please give me credits so I can play with my girlfriend during summer vacation”.

A three-year-old daughter…?

It was the first time I’d heard that she had a daughter.

Honestly, she didn’t look like she would have a child at all. I had only gotten the impression that she was the intellectual type, a young university professor—if I had to guess, I would say that I vaguely thought that she must be a nice person because she had the kanji for “hane” in her name1 (that’s enough of that, me!), but I didn’t think that she was the “mother” type.

Mother…

Well, that was just my bias, I suppose. “Motherliness”, or motherhood, was really an old-fashioned imposition… Considering my own mother. However, when I was in high school, I’d had quite a few opportunities to interact with adults who were lax, self-defeating, and not fully grown up. Based on those experiences, I would say that Associate Professor Iesumi seemed to be a “decent person”.

The email she had sent me had been rather polite, and she even offered me a cup of coffee when I arrived… At least, she didn’t look like someone who would abuse her own daughter.

Was it that people weren’t always what they seemed?

I’d heard so many stories about husbands that were violent at home who acted like reputable fathers on the outside—it was disgusting, truly disgusting…

“Should I be more specific? Should I go into the details? You seem like a specialist, Araragi-kun, so I figured this would be enough… It’s not exactly something I’m willing to talk about, either.”

“A—a specialist?”

I flinched.

To me, that term was something that applied to the lax, self-defeating, and not fully grown-up adults that I had just recalled… Though I hadn’t necessarily been proactive about it, I used to help them with their work when I was in high school.

No, that wasn’t just in the past tense. I’d been helping them out even in university, too. Had I been found out? If that was the case, it wasn’t exactly something I wanted—I’d panicked for a moment, but it didn’t seem like that was the kind of “specialist” Associate Professor Iesumi was talking about.

Basically, I should have been panicking even more.

“Araragi-kun, I heard you were a specialist of child abuse… That’s what Oikura-san told me. It’s true, right?”