Monogatari Series - Volume 26 - Chapter 1.20

020

Even though I should’ve been extremely (painfully?) used to being in an ambiguous environment where I didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t—when Ononoki-chan asked me those questions, I felt as if the ground was crumbling beneath my feet.

The ground beneath my feet, and the experience I’d built up so far.

I’d been to the mirror world. I’d been to a parallel world—I’d been to hell, and more recently, I’d even been to heaven.

But this feeling of being lost in someone else’s delusion was a trip I’d never experienced before—it was a very different kind of fear than that of oddity phenomena.

It was a little late for it now, but I went to check out the interior of this third room of Room 333… I had only been focusing on the bed that was front and center, but I shouldn’t forget that the reason I had flown here, to the point of becoming deprived of oxygen, was to look around the bedroom in the first place.

For the sake of searching for the husband’s personal information.

The husband, the spouse, the partner, the father—for the sake of identifying this anonymous person, whom we didn’t even know the name of yet.

But whether it was the magnificent writing desk, the small bookshelf next to it, the built-in closet, or the stereo set in the corner… Perhaps it was due to the way I was looking at it, but I couldn’t sense any sort of individuality. It was like the concept of a “perfect workplace” taken too far.

Individuality. Or perhaps, humanity.

It was like I was looking at the set of a television drama… There were no hints of a life spent in this room. Although, since the couple was separated, the husband would no longer be spending his life in this room, so of course there wouldn’t be anything like that…

Immediately after entering this room, I had gotten the impression that it was a simulation, like a car accident test or a crime scene investigation, but perhaps this was why? Not only due to the stabbed doll on the bed, but because the whole room formed such an image… In that sense, it differed from the nursery.

In the neighboring room, I felt the remnants of affection.

Though they were remnants, affection was still affection.

However, as a marked contrast, there was nothing like that in this room, not even a hint of time—yes.

It felt heartless.

Just like what Ononoki-chan had mentioned.

I wasn’t sure how reliable my impressions were… But the second room had a lock while the third room did not. Even before opening the doors from the hallway, the difference was already apparent… And heartless.

“If we’re talking about Les Misérables21, I did see the musical in London,”

said Ononoki-chan.

This time, she was giving off a rather British impression, but had this girl actually taken part in the Battle of Waterloo?

That was much longer than a hundred years ago.

“I would add that the lack of the room giving off the sense of ‘remnants’ is probably due to the fact that every nook and cranny of this room has been thoroughly cleaned—while the nursery was also in order, it was dusty. I would say that the lack of clutter in the nursery was probably due to the fact that the room was normally left alone—meanwhile, in this room, I get the impression that it was cleaned on a regular basis.”

I’d heard that homes quickly fall into disrepair when people don’t live in them, but… A bedroom where care is regularly taken, and a nursery where it isn’t?

Though there was no sense of life, there was a sense of cleanliness?

The first room—that is, Associate Professor Iesumi’s room—gave me no impression of resembling either. It felt just like an extension of “someone else’s house”, just like the hallway and the living room.

“Could she be employing a housekeeper? Anyway, I don’t think I’ll be able to find any personal information. The books on the shelves just look like they were picked from a bookstore’s ranking, and I can’t tell what the owner of this room does for a living!”

What he does, and what he doesn’t do.

If he even exists or not.

I’d said it was like a television drama set, but if that was the case, the setting wasn’t as well done as it could be… It was finished superficially, but it seemed to be done arbitrarily and sloppily. I couldn’t think they were trying to establish a character. Even though it felt like they spent a lot of money on the furniture, that oversight weighed on my mind.

Like a scratch mark.22

“If I had to describe it, I’d say it looks like a spy’s hideout. I wonder if the father is, not a detective, but a spy. Like, this is where the confidence trick begins.”23

“Ononoki-chan, are you being serious?”

“Not at all.”

The height of anonymity—it wasn’t about that at all.

However, what if Associate Professor Iesumi’s husband was not anonymous, but a completely fictitious character?

There were many differences between the second and third rooms, but since the daughter was fictitious, it wouldn’t be strange if the father was fictitious as well.

No, it was still strange, but for the sake of taking a mathematical approach and using a proof by contradiction to prove that strangeness, let’s first assume that it wasn’t strange… In her personal history that Associate Professor Iesumi told me about, where did the lies begin?

This late in the game, I didn’t feel comfortable throwing everything out as a lie… But it was probably a lie that she was separated.

After all, her husband was sleeping right here. Even if he was a doll. Even if he was stabbed to death. Even if he was stabbed to death by his three-year-old daughter… Even if that three-year-old daughter was a doll… Was it myself that had made that picky observation that “living separate lives under the same roof” was also a form of separation?

But would saying “I didn’t lie” like some sort of narrative trick be accepted with open arms in the real world…? No.

The remnants of affection that was the nursery.

At the very least, there were traces that her daughter, up until a year old, or maybe two, was “living” in that room… As Ononoki-chan said, we didn’t know for sure what happened to her after that, though there was some validity to the idea that the Iie-chan doll was made because she died in some way.

“…But, no matter how old she was, living or dead, if there was a daughter, there had to be a father, right? Biologically speaking.”

“There had to be a father, but he won’t necessarily be a husband.”

What a realistic tween girl—but of course. Biologically speaking.

It was more likely than cloning.

But in the case of Associate Professor Iesumi, who was a Swiss citizen, she got her residency status by marrying her Japanese husband when she moved to Japan… Ah, but, I guess that wasn’t necessarily true.

If the truth of the university professor’s disappearance was actually that she was deported after it was exposed that she was an illegal immigrant, it would be a tragic truth that I would be deeply disappointed in… But, if that was the case, I didn’t think the university that hired her would have bothered to publicize it…

As a large organization, it seemed more likely they would handle things privately.

“If this were a situation for the immigration authorities to step in, this Room 333 would’ve been broken into long ago. The fact that this stabbed doll is still lying around here means they haven’t.”

However, even so, the possibility remained that Associate Professor Iesumi was not married, and thus didn’t have residency status and was in Japan illegally—and perhaps the possibility that she escaped before her illegal residence was discovered.

I wasn’t a law student, so I didn’t exactly know the laws in that respect—ah, if only I were back in high school. Then I could ask that bundle of intelligence, Hanekawa, to perform a legal interpretation for me.

I could tell you for a fact that, as far as I could tell from my nervous looking around when I broke in from the balcony, the investigative authorities had yet to act, even in the case of the mass flat tire incident in the parking lot.

“Even though I’d said that making a stuffed doll out of your dead child and carrying it around was a cliché sob story…”

“Did you go that far? Aren’t you pretending too hard to sound evil, Ononoki-chan?”

“Making a stuffed doll out of your absent husband and living together with it is not something you can keep doing. Suggesting therapy might already be a weak step to take.”

“That’s true… There was a time when I was so lonely after that bundle of intelligence, Hanekawa, left for her overseas travels, that I used to use her braids, which I’d cut off myself a while back, as a stand-in to consult about my problems… But I think there was something wrong with me back then.”

“Don’t ever talk to me again. That wasn’t that long ago, right? That wasn’t ‘back then’ but right now.”

I’m more afraid of you having those braids than I am of you using them as a stand-in, said Ononoki-chan—but wait, what about that?There was something I’d overlooked.

Or rather, there was something I hadn’t thought about until now… Whether it was the Iie-chan doll or the father doll, why were they made out of bedding?

A blanket. A quilt and a padded mattress.

There were too many other questions, and I was vaguely persuaded by the balloon-art-like effect, but normally, you wouldn’t make a stuffed doll out of a futon, right?

Unlike Teori Tadatsuru, I wasn’t a puppeteer, so I couldn’t say for sure—but at the very least, it surely wasn’t a common style…

Just as the braids that I held a strong attachment to were a stand-in for Hanekawa, was the bedding a key item for Associate Professor Iesumi to connect with her family?

“Can you not go from an uncomfortable confession to an important realization? Is it really true that you’re old enough to vote, oni onii-chan? …Considering that the blanket was lurking in the crib, I don’t think the realization itself is too off the mark.”

Strong attachment… Feelings.

I’d assumed that the Iie-chan doll started to move because it had been abused and then killed, but—what if the blanket itself was the reason that oddity was born…? In that case, what about the father doll?

What about the quilt and the padded mattress?

“For now, I may as well kill.”

Ononoki-chan said so in her monotone, so I braced myself—I thought that my execution, which was supposed to be postponed, would suddenly be carried out due to the confession of a new (disgusting) crime, but the one who was to be executed was not me.

“For now, it’s just a stuffed doll… But if this stabbed doll starts to move too, it’ll be chaos. Just in case, I’ll smash it to bits, fruit knife and all, using ‘Unlimited Rulebook’. Any objections?”

“No…”

To be honest, I had a visceral reaction to the decision to destroy something that took on a human form… But when I thought of the Iie-chan doll that attacked me as a fluttering blanket, it didn’t seem like we could settle things simply by unraveling the quilt and the padded mattress.

The situation of the Iesumi residence remained a mystery, but as long as the reason for the stuffed dolls turning into oddities was unknown, it was definitely better to make the first move with regards to the father doll.

I did feel that using Ononoki-chan’s super-special move, the “Unlimited Rulebook” that led me to my oxygen deficiency, was a bit much (was it even a skill that was okay to use indoors?), but it seemed the stance of my nice badi was to do things thoroughly.

Although I expected she would destroy the whole bed… From breaking windows to kicking down doors, Ononoki-chan’s god of destruction act knew no bounds.

“But is it really okay? It’s still fine if it breaks the bed, but if you penetrate through the floor, that would definitely be bad. There’s probably someone living downstairs… Someone who isn’t a stuffed doll.”

“It’s fine. I figured I’d try out the new move that I thought of recently.”

“New move?”

“It’s a variation. To minimize the range of destruction… This was originally supposed to be used on Araragi Tsukihi, but, well, that’s just the way things go.”

“Is that so… If you have a move like that, then… Hold on a second, Ononoki-chan. Are you telling me you still plan on killing my sister?”

Instead of answering my question, Ononoki-chan pointed her fist at the father doll with the fruit knife.

In the past, she would raise her index finger as if she were pointing at something, but this time, she raised her pinky finger, which was shorter than her index finger.

“‘Unlimited Rulebook’—Pinky Edition.”