Monogatari Series - Volume 26 - Chapter 1.03

003

I had shuddered from the bottom of my heart, worried that she had somehow discovered the golden-haired loli slave in my shadow, but that wasn’t it, either… Apparently, Associate Professor Iesumi had heard about my extracurricular activities in high school from my beloved childhood friend, the lovely Oikura Sodachi-chan.

At this point, there were enough mistakes to create a spot-the-mistakes puzzle.

Since we had casually cut ties at present, I hadn’t seen the face of that fiendish girl for a while now, but apparently, Oikura had come into contact with Associate Professor Iesumi in another class… Was it Swiss Italian, Swiss German, or even Romansh? It wasn’t like she knew anything about loli slaves or other oddities, so I was sure she was just saying bad things about me to Associate Professor Iesumi in the same way she always did to everyone she met, in a rather distorted and brazenly untrue way—but from there, it finally became clear to me, just a little bit. Really, it was just a little…

A specialist of child abuse.

I was very reluctant to be crowned with such a title, but it was true that I’d often witnessed such scenes in the past… In particular, I had to say that my senior year of high school had been quite eventful.

Hanekawa Tsubasa, who’d practically been abandoned after being tossed around. Senjougahara Hitagi, who was a fathercon who’d messed up her relationship with her mother. Hachikuji Mayoi, who’d gotten lost forever on her way to see her divorced mother without telling her father. Kanbaru Suruga, who was still chasing after—still taking responsibility for—her mother’s “legacy” after her death. Sengoku Nadeko, who’d been overly pampered and spoiled. And, of course, it was difficult to say that Associate Professor Iesumi’s source of information, Oikura Sodachi, whose reason for living was to hate me like a scorpion, had been nurtured in a wholesome and faultless manner.

And, well, there were a few other cases.

Too many to count.

I myself hadn’t always maintained a good relationship with my parents—in fact, for a while, things had been seriously tense.

I can admit now, without being stubborn, that if it hadn’t been for my two younger sisters, I might have left home before I graduated from high school… And that delinquent son (me) was now a college student still living with his parents, so the world is truly a complex and bizarre place.

Going back to the main topic. In that sense, it was quite accurate to describe me as a specialist of child abuse. It felt like she’d hit me in my weak point. However, even taking that into account, I felt like I had to tell Associate Professor Iesumi that she was consulting the wrong person.

After all, while I may have witnessed a lot of child abuse, it wasn’t as if I’d resolved them all one after another—though I may have stirred the pot, there was not a single case that I could have resolved.

Instead of the Extraordinary Zorro, I was Resolutions: Zero.2

See? I’m a zero that can say such unfunny things without batting an eye… A zero student. In the first place, with regards to Associate Professor Iesumi’s source of information, my sweetheart Oikura—her case was the family situation that I’d been the most incapable of solving.

She was a real piece of work, that childhood friend of mine.

Making a career out of spreading urban legends about me, whether they were true or not… Don’t badmouth me to a professor. It’s that kind of thing about you—oh well, I’ll take my frustrations out on my sweetheart over some okonomiyaki at her lodgings. Although we’d cut ties.

Right now, there was a professor in front of me.

Mm, this was a problem.

It was true that, for argument’s sake, I was pretty well-versed in these sorts of things for a nineteen-year-old, but since I was a child myself (and still am), I had always been involved in those horrific scenes from the perspective of the abused children.

Even with the incident with Benikujaku-chan the other day.

So I never thought I’d be consulted by the abusive parent herself… What could I say? To be honest, I was avoiding looking at things directly. So far, I’d only ever thought of abusive parents—the perpetrators—as a mere concept—but that was a scant difference from only being able to see a mother as nothing but a “mom”.

They weren’t concepts, they were people. They weren’t even oddities.

They were living people. Hard as it was to believe.

Perhaps it was time for me to face the truth that, whether it was the case of Oikura or the case of Hitagi or the case of Hanekawa, people were abused by other people.

I’d already figured that one thing out.

I learned it pretty early.

But meeting the parent herself face-to-face like this, it was actually pretty hard to come up with any words of criticism or lines of condemnation—of course, the strong word “abuse” brought up a lot of animosity, but I wasn’t able to express those feelings properly.

It would be pretty shameful if I were a performer.

But I couldn’t respond quickly. That was partially because I didn’t know the details yet, but also because it was difficult to interfere in other people’s family matters. In Benikujaku-chan’s case, there had been no room for hesitation, and no room to make a decision, and the result of such a reflexive move was that we just barely made it in time—just barely in time, not just thanks to my intervention but also divine intervention.

The problem was also that she was a university professor, and I was her student who’d been taking her lecture for three months, so that power dynamic was something to keep in mind… Was it called the normalcy bias? I also couldn’t deny that I was trying to maintain a sense of normalcy, giving her the consideration that “there may be some unavoidable circumstances” or “she’s just exaggerating and being self-deprecating”.

Her hairstyle and her clothes, as well as the interior of the office, were all fairly clean, so she certainly didn’t seem like a wicked person… Based on her rational behavior, she didn’t seem like the greatest villain of the century. Or did that simply mean that I’d grown up, even though I was still acting like a child? If I were still a high school third-year, would I have kicked the table and left the room as soon as I heard the phrase, “abusing my three-year-old daughter”?

A three-year-old-daughter, huh…

I suddenly started to examine myself.

Even before I was a high school third-year, I had a bad (or even heinous) habit of only being able to see what was right in front of me, whether it was reality or illusion–right now, I needed to not only think about the university professor right in front of me, but also about her “three-year-old daughter”.

Just as an abusive parent was not just a concept, an abused daughter was also not just a concept—she was solidly real.

A specialist—one specialist of oddities had had the slogan “people can only save themselves”, but how should that be applied when there were two people to save?

“Araragi-kun, about that… What do you think?”

“…? What do you mean by ‘that’?”

When I returned the vague question asked by Associate Professor Iesumi in order to fill the slightly (or perhaps more than slightly) awkward silence, she said,

“What do you think about the theory that abused children will become parents who abuse their own children?”

She added on.

Ah… “That”, huh.

“Well, I didn’t exactly grow up in a happy family, and to tell you the truth, I got married and came to Japan in order to escape my family… It’s something that’s hard to immediately deny if I’m accused of it, but I don’t like being told that my only characteristic is that I didn’t have a happy childhood… It makes me sick to think that my life is still under the influence of those parents… It’s extremely vexing… On the other hand, when I’m tired of being selfish, I want to end up leaning on such a theory, so is this perhaps just me immaturely blaming my parents for my own inadequacies?”

What a difficult question.

I’d certainly heard the theory before… Thinking about it now, it’s interesting that that class representative, who fell under the spell of a cat after being subjected to violence by her father, was still pro-corporal punishment in spite of being such a serious and conscientious human rights advocate.

Thinking about it really hard, I’d come to the conclusion that Associate Professor Iesumi Hagoromo was a good person because of the kanji for “hane” in her name, but the surname of the person who hit Hanekawa was also “Hanekawa”…

To tell you the truth, I wanted to respond with a straightforward argument that there were many parents who grew up with abuse that didn’t go on to abuse their own children, but it wasn’t like I’d actually met or talked to any of those parents… I felt like, for this specific situation where the person concerned was right in front of me, it wasn’t quite fair to bring up the mere concept of “respectable people” as a model.

After all, saying something like, “There are people who can do it right, so why can’t you do it right?”—those words were practically the same as the words that had once made me want to die.

“Well… If you’re a parent who has a good relationship with your own parents, you’d probably get a reasonable amount of help raising your child, so you’d simply have an advantage over parents who can’t ask for help, wouldn’t you?”

“That’s a specialist for you.”

To my theoretical answer, which I had strained to come up with, Associate Professor Iesumi nodded her head—but, really, I’m not a specialist at all.

That was just superficial knowledge.

“A child is a handful, and yet there aren’t enough hands to take care of her… Especially now, since I’m separated.”

“Separated…?”

“Things just weren’t going well with my husband… I suppose you could say we’re out of touch. You could say that the cause was that I couldn’t bring myself to love my child.”

They say that children hold marriages together, but perhaps there were opposite cases as well. Well, of course there would be… However, the keyword “separated” raised two questions.

The first was a question of her citizenship.

From what I’d heard, Associate Professor Iesumi, who was apparently born in Switzerland and was a Swiss citizen, obtained her residency status by marrying a Japanese citizen… If it came to the point that she were to officially divorce her estranged husband, what would happen?

Would it still be possible to keep her residency status even after divorcing? Though I’d heard that you could keep your family name at the time of divorce, if you wanted to.

No, it was because my brain was still a child’s that I immediately associated the word “separated” with divorce, but there were many circumstances in the world of marriage… She could be separated because her husband had been transferred for work, right?

And sometimes it was necessary to keep one’s distance in order to maintain a relationship, just like me and Oikura (with whom I’d currently cut ties).

However, if we pile hypothesis upon hypothesis, as though building a roof on top of another roof, then if Associate Professor Iesumi were to divorce… If that were to happen, and she had to go back to Switzerland regardless of her citizenship or residency status, would it be possible that she would be reunited with her parents, whom she thought she’d gotten away from?

Was that why Associate Professor Iesumi was asking me for advice… Well, that was just the incomprehensible suspicion of a lowlife.

To think that, in order to avoid meeting her parents, she was trying to solve her own abuse problem to avoid divorce—at the very least, I wanted her motive to be out of worry for her three-year-old daughter.

Well, let’s go with that. That should be good.

The mindset of a criminal wanting to be stopped before they committed an even bigger crime was a common one, without even needing to look up a social awareness mystery novel—even the advance notice that a phantom thief sends out can be interpreted as a sufferer of kleptomania asking for help from the police.

The case where you should stop and you want to stop, but you can’t. I’d also had a fair amount of trouble stopping myself from playing with the ribs of my golden-haired loli slave—I’d managed to stop when it led to discussing breaking up with my girlfriend. I’d stopped, but not because I’d wanted to—I only stopped because I’d been forced into an untenable situation where I had no choice but to stop.

If that same mindset—though it was a bit imprudent to compare those mindsets—was currently what that university professor had, then it would be unreasonable for me to blame her for it.

She asked me for advice with the same serious and dignified expression that she wore in class, so I couldn’t quite read her inner thoughts… But let’s just believe that Associate Professor Iesumi was serious about asking for help.

However, that was from a more long-term perspective.

The second question that arose from the word “separated” was a more short-term perspective—it could be said that this was only the perspective of someone like me, who could only see what was right in front of me, but whatever the reason, Associate Professor Iesumi said that she was separated from her husband.

Then, right now.

Currently, at this time, at this very moment—where exactly was Associate Professor Iesumi’s “three-year-old” daughter?

If her husband wasn’t at home taking care of her… A babysitter…? No, no, she can’t have hired one, considering her earlier words. She’d said that there weren’t enough hands to take care of her… Then, nursery school? Would Associate Professor Iesumi, who had half-admitted to abusing her child, go through what I’d heard was an extremely difficult process to leave her child at a nursery school?

“That’s exactly it. That was the specific request I had for you. You sure are quick on the uptake. It really does feel like I’ve come to a specialist for advice. So Oikura-san, who introduced you to me, wasn’t crazy after all.”

I wanted to tell her that there was nothing but madness in that girl’s eyes, but I found myself staying silent, beset by an ominous premonition that rivaled that of a con man.

“Lately, I’ve been so busy grading exams. In fact, I haven’t been back to my apartment for the past three days.”

“Th—three days?”

“So, after locking her in a cage in her room, I haven’t the slightest idea how things are anymore… I’ll give you the key, Araragi-kun, so can you go and check on her for me?”

Rather than specific.

It was an incredibly incomprehensible request.