Monogatari Series - Volume 26 - Chapter 1.05

005

An oddity story that I’d heard somewhere before.

Or rather, it was an oddity story that I’d heard specifically with regards to the Araragi family—of course, the particulars were different. Actually, they were completely different. To the point that it’d be harder to find the points in common—however, the two cases did faintly resemble each other.

My little sister. Ononoki Yotsugi’s current owner.

It was similar to the case of Araragi Tsukihi.

“Ah, ah, ah. That’s right, she had those initial settings. I just remembered about Araragi Tsukihi. I’d completely forgotten.”

“Don’t play dumb. I haven’t forgotten or forgiven you for blowing up my sister’s upper body, you know?”

And it wasn’t her initial settings; she still had those settings presently.

It was due to that oddity story in the first place that Ononoki-chan came to our town, together with her master, Kagenui Yozuru—considering how we’d met at that time, the fact that we were going for a drive together like this seemed like an unbelievable miracle.

It wasn’t that we were destined to make up. We found ourselves slowly but surely building up a cooperative attitude, not to mention that even now, Ononoki-chan tried to kill me whenever she saw an opening… I’d called her a freeloader, but in fact she was responsible for my and Shinobu’s surveillance.

Well, thinking about it, my reconciliation with Shinobu was like that, too—and, with that, I gave a sidelong glance at the currently empty child seat in my passenger seat.

Anyway, about Araragi Tsukihi.

Her true identity was a phoenix—a cuckoo that took the place of a life in the womb. An immortal oddity that was able to seamlessly blend into society… That was why it had caught the attention of Kagenui Yozuru and Ononoki Yotsugi.

As an evil to be exterminated.

My smaller little sister was a fiend.

“In Tsukihi-chan’s case, she’s the type of cuckoo that completely blends in with the family… Or rather, the type that assimilates with the unborn child. So I’ve spent fourteen years not suspecting a thing, but there have to be oddities that don’t do that, right?”

“It would be more correct to say the shide-no-dori hijacks, instead of assimilates… Well, it’s up to you however you want to interpret it. Do as you like.”

Despite being Ononoki-chan, it seemed she wasn’t feeling like reheating an older argument, as she shrugged her shoulders in her laid-down position—her back was pointed at me (my back mirror) just then, so the movement of her shoulder blades was rather suggestive.

“To think that you’re unhealthy despite your shoulder blades.”6

“Shut up.”

It was a monotone yet violent retort.

“But, you’re pretty sensitive.”

“About your shoulder blades?”

“You’re the only one bringing up my shoulder blades, oni onii-chan.”

“Sorry, sorry, I was clavicle, I mean, careless.7 So what was I sensitive about?”

“From just a brief comment from that professor, you came upon the possibility of a ‘replacement child’. I have to praise you for your sensitivity. It’s like I don’t even have to kill you anymore. Congratulations.”

“……”

I’d thought she was a tsukumogami, but was I possessed by a shinigami instead?

Also, “replacement child”?

There had to be a cooler name for it.

“Well, that just shows how concerned you were for Araragi Tsukihi. I guess you didn’t forget or forgive the problem that had been put off last summer vacation.”

“That’s not… really it.”

Or was it?

It was still fresh in my mind that, as if to make up for my past of running away from Hanekawa Tsubasa’s family problems, I got completely absorbed into Benikujaku-chan’s case, but was I now trying to make up for Tsukihi with Iie-chan? Was that why I didn’t call the police, and why I was single-mindedly driving my car to the apartment—

“No, even so, I think you made the right decision. I’m serious. To put it in your terms, as serious as my thigh bone.”

“I haven’t said anything about your thigh bone yet. That’s the ace up my sleeve.”

“I’m as serious as the ace up your sleeve. Although I’m sure there are about ten billion people who think that’s just normalcy bias, for the sake of protecting the professor who can provide you with the credits you want so much.”

“With a calculation like that, you’d have to include Martians. Do I look like a diligent enough dude to do something like this just for credits?”

“After all, oni onii-chan, you’re the former thrall of Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade—you may not be the iron-blooded, hot-blooded, cold-blooded vampire, I think you still have the intuition of, say, the low-blooded, slow-blooded, paper-plated vampire.”

“The low-blooded, slow-blooded, paper-plated vampire? That last one turned into a plate instead of blood, though.”8

“You may not have been the King of Oddities, but you were once the Slave of Oddities, so if there’s something bothering you, we should investigate it properly.”

There’s no need to place the false accusation of being an abusive parent onto one of your prized educators—said Ononoki-chan.

Although I wasn’t so obliged to her that I would call her a prized educator… Today was the first time we had conversed properly, and of course, I wasn’t going to get any credits for smoothly completing this mission.

“If everything goes according to plan, onii-chan, you’ll be the first to discover the dried corpse of a child in the apartment of your professor, but I guess that’s life.”

“That would be even more traumatic than when I went to hell.”

“So you’d end up discovering a corpse while carrying a corpse doll, huh. How thrilling. Although I was planning on warmly watching over you if you were going to extend your clutches to that three-year-old daughter, oni onii-chan.”

“Kill me immediately. There would be no better time than that.”

“If that happens, I’ll stand by you. We’re in the same boat, after all.”

For someone being so mean, she was surprisingly cooperative… I wondered if that was her pride as a tool.

If I started to get along with Ononoki-chan like this, then I opened myself up to getting mocked by the likes of Ougi-chan, but then again, what was I supposed to do in order to “officially” reconcile with Ononoki-chan?… There was no law that said the victim had to hate the perpetrator for the rest of their life.

Just as abused children did not have to bear the fate of being tied to their abusive parents forever…

Continuously holding a grudge against someone consumes a lot of energy.

“But apparently such a law did exist in the past. Onee-chan taught me about it before. A law relating to revenge… What was it again? A child whose parents are killed is not allowed to come back to his hometown until he kills the culprits, or something like that.”

“That’s kind of a crazy law… Although it sounds like something Kagenui-san would like. No, but, maybe that was what they thought was normal at the time. If that’s the case, the laws that we take for granted now may be considered absurd and unreasonable in the future.”

“I dunno about that. I bet there were people at the time who thought it was an absurd and unreasonable rule. That’s why, little by little, it would get revised. The system didn’t get to where it is by accident… The tireless efforts of those oppressed are what overturned it.”

The same goes for the family system, said Ononoki-chan.

It seemed she had a thing or two to say about that.

Well, I hadn’t heard the details about it, and I probably would end up feeling bad if I did, but Ononoki-chan was a corpse doll with a history of being used as a “tool” for a hundred years.

“Anyway, if we do assume that the professor stopped thinking of her child as cute because the ‘replacement child’ phenomenon took place, then even if she was abusive, I’m sure her charges can be reduced. Although it wouldn’t be completely false charges. But since it’s not her own child, she doesn’t have any duty to support her.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s okay to be abusive, though.”

She’d ambiguously stated that she felt like she was about to abuse her, but locking her in a cage and leaving her there for three days was clearly not just a failed attempt… She’d abused her after all.

It wasn’t just a failed attempt but willful negligence, to the point that it wouldn’t be strange if it was judged as a murder attempt.

However, if that reason was an oddity phenomenon…

“Was it a variation on spiriting away? A small child goes missing, and after searching around for a while, they come back as a completely different person, or something like that…”

“It’s hard to generalize because there are many different patterns of the ‘replacement child’, but you know, they say that children belong to the gods until they are seven years old. There’s nothing to be done if they’re exchanged one after another under the orders of the gods—but you don’t need to quote any old ghost stories to know that mothers raising other mothers’ children is a common occurrence in nature.”

It didn’t seem like she was just talking about Tsukihi—since Tsukihi’s case was a ghost story, after all.

The brood parasitism of real-life cuckoos would be a prime example… On the other hand, in the insect world, there was the case of the samurai ant that kidnapped ants from other nests and raised them as slaves under their control.

“That also happened in the human world, right? Plenty of times.”

Ononoki-chan was saying something pretty intense.

It was certainly a shock to hear something like that come from a tween girl’s mouth—what if I made a mistake while driving?

“Don’t fall for any outrageous delusions, oni onii-chan. I was referring to the foster care system.”

“You weren’t at all. That’s a cop-out.”

“But speaking of sensitivity, that professor’s intuition is pretty impressive if she noticed the ‘replacement child’ immediately. Although there are a lot of cases where they just end up raising a monstrous apparition without noticing, like you.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

In the case of the Araragi family, it could be that my parents simply had no qualms about inviting a stranger’s child into their home… And Oikura Sodachi had been one of them.

Hmm.

If you asked me, I’d say my parents were pretty philanthropic—though that may have been frustrating for me as a child—but if Associate Professor Iesumi had noticed that her child had been replaced, then…

“It’s what they call, a mother’s love, right? To be honest, that’s not really a term I understand.”

“How can you say that when you begged your mom to buy you a car? Or did you beg your dad?”

“Both. It was a scheme to potentially get two cars if I was lucky.”

“Oni onii-chan, you’re the one who should get swapped out. At least your brains. Don’t get greedy for a second car. …By the way, I’m not trying to compete with you, but there’s something about that professor’s words that I found curious.”

“Hm?”

“How did she end up becoming separated from her husband? I’m guessing it wasn’t particularly amicable.”

Right.

I never asked, but that was what I figured, too. If her no longer finding Iie-chan cute was the reason they separated—

“Right there. What did the husband—the ‘father’—think? Did he also no longer find his child cute… That she wasn’t his own child? Basically, the question is, why did the professor still try to raise her own child, instead of trying to push her onto her husband?”

What a shrewd question.

Perhaps I should’ve thought of the husband’s side of the story right then and there and asked her about it… I guess I still only saw what was right in front of me. I probably wouldn’t be able to enter a third-party panel without thinking a little more about a third party’s opinions…

The wording of “pushing her onto him” was a little bad, but if she had decided that she was physically and emotionally incapable of raising the child, she could have left it to the other party who was living separately. Surely the couple had to have discussed it—children held marriages together.

“Maybe it was for the sake of appearances. In Japanese divorce settlements, mothers are more likely to take the children, right?”

Unless, of course, there was a plain-as-white and dark-as-black problem with the mother’s behavior, like in the Senjougahara family… The notion that “children should live with their mothers” was still strong.

“That’s true. And it’s not good for both the father and the mother. As a countermeasure, how about starting with putting Mother’s Day and Father’s Day on the same day?”

“I almost was about to snap at you not to come up with such a stupid idea, but then again, maybe that’s what it’s all about…”

“Since it’s the mother who has the ability to breastfeed, it’s instinctively natural for babies to miss their mothers, and therefore the mother should raise the child—is the theory that some commentators have.”

“If we expanded on that a little further, wouldn’t it affirm infidelity as an instinct to preserve a variety of offspring…?”

Also, how was weaning taken into account… That only applied to when the child was just a baby, right?

“Just like me, I’m sure the child will lose interest in her mother’s boobs by the time they’re ten.”

“You’re too in your element, oni onii-chan.”

“By that point, my two little sisters were in their growth period, after all.”

“The shide-no-dori reincarnated in an outrageous family, didn’t it.”

Depending on the case—specifically, the case when I was overthinking it and it had nothing to do with oddities—it was probably better to get in touch with Associate Professor Iesumi’s husband and ask him to take Iie-chan into custody.

Even if I were to play a role in this case, it would only be as a temporary measure—if there was one thing I learned at Naoetsu High, which was beyond my position, it was that “There are limits to what you can do in the moment.”

And so, I stepped on the brakes.

We’d arrived at the address that I’d been told.

“We’re here, nice badi. This is Associate Professor Iesumi’s apartment.”

“I see. It looks like it’s just been renovated, so it doesn’t look like hell, at least. …By ‘nice badi‘, are you saying ‘nice body’? Or ‘nice buddy’?”

As she said that, Ononoki-chan finally sprang up from the backseat, where she’d been laying down until we arrived, in a breakdancing motion—even though she had changed into a maxi dress that stretched all the way down to her ankles, it seemed that her mobility, her biggest selling point as a corpse doll, had not diminished at all.

“Let’s go, oni onii-chan. Follow my shoulder blades.”

“I’m glad you’re coming along with me, but there’s no need to take initiative, nice badi.”

Not just because I’d been asked to.

I was going to take both initiative and those shoulder blades with my own two hands.