Monogatari Series - Volume 27 - Chapter 1.03

003

“When it comes to stories—”

After she began to speak, Meniko quickly followed up with a, “Whoooops, I didn’t mean to say ‘stories’,” correcting herself.

“When it comes to all things,2 they say that there are two siiides, the front side and the back side3, but I wonder how things really aaare? Is the front side a part of the back side? Or is the back side a part of the front side?”

I felt that she didn’t especially need to correct herself when posing that riddle, and that it would have worked just fine if “all things” was left as “stories” instead, but either way, it was most likely the case that Meniko did not intend to raise any profound philosophical questions. Because Hamukai Meniko, my only friend on the campus of Manase National University, was not that kind of girl.

She was completely disconnected from any sort of profound meaning.

That said, she wasn’t exactly the shallow sort, either... To put it how she would put it, I would say that she enjoyed a profound lack of meaning.

In any case, for those that knew me, Araragi Koyomi, as a high schooler, the idea that I’d made a friend may be almost as shocking as the idea that I’d given birth to a baby, but even I am shocked at myself.

I won’t make friends, because my strength as a human would decrease—though I’d been the kind of guy that would stubbornly insist on such a thing, I’d shamefully reformed myself and been reborn anew. Or so it should have been, but with nine months having passed since entering university, I’d still only managed to make a single friend... Normally, you could make more friends just from playing a smartphone game.

I’d signed the treaty of friendship with Meniko right after entering university, so I’d started thinking, whoa, things might be a bit different for me in university. But, against my expectations, there wasn’t the slightest of differences. A slight increase was just a slight increase, and depending on your point of view, it could even be a sharp decrease. Stubbornly holding onto traditions, my isolationism remained unchanged.

For the record, if we’re talking about friends I would meet only on campus, then I could include Kujaku-chan, who wasn’t on the school register, but if I decided to count her among my friends, the signs of my growth would be even less visible.

You might even say I’m regressing.

Incidentally, when it came to my childhood friend, Oikura-chan, I’d currently cut ties with her. Seriously, she was as hot-tempered as always, that troublesome girl. Just because I’d moved into the apartment next to hers.

Something needed to be done about that temper of hers. That is, I needed to do something.

Putting that aside, let’s answer the question that came from my only friend. She’s my only friend, after all.

I had to cherish my friends. As a human being.

The philosophy that I held ended up turning into an extremely common slogan, but anyway, let’s respond to the riddling question that had been posed to me while I had been studying in the cafeteria for second-semester exams—of course, it was obvious that the question was a riddle.

“The front and the back? Ah—”

As I faintly recalled a high school junior of mine whose livelihood was to be puzzling, I ruminated over her words... What had she said? Is the front a part of the back, or is the back a part of the front? Aha, I bet the key point behind these two options is that she didn’t ask, “Is the front in front of the back, or is the back behind the front?”

I could feel the gears in my brain turning.

“The front side is a part of the back side, right?”

That was my answer. If only I could exchange this answer for credits, so that I didn’t have to keep studying for my exams... Although, I suppose my life has been full of girls teaching me how to study.

“Mhm, mhm. And the reason iiis?”

“The reason is, how you write the kanji. Inside the kanji for ‘back side’ [裏], there’s the kanji for ‘front side’ [表].”

Basically, “the front side [表] is a part of the back side [裏]”.

[亠] + [口] + [表] = [裏].

The stroke order was completely different, but that’s the idea.

If you put a cover on the front door [表口]—it becomes a back door [裏].

“Correeect. Woohoooo!”

With a generous round of applause, Meniko cheered.

Personally, I wanted to send those cheers right back at her for noticing such a thing in the first place, but considering she was the kind of eccentric that enrolled in the mathematics department in order to major in cryptography, a question like this might be the basics of the basics for her. In terms of mysteries, it was like Edogawa Shoho.4

I felt like that was the sort of thing that made my only friend the kind of girl she was, but at the same time, I couldn’t help but feel that she was testing me. Though I was in the middle of studying for tests.

Was this some kind of psychology test?

“No, no, I’m really impressed. You did a good job figuring that out without even writing it down, Koyomi-chaaan. You must have a whiteboard in your head.”

“Heh. In elementary school, this Koyomi-chan wasn’t called Gonsuke the sweet-potato-digging robot just for show.”

Perhaps it would land for a vampire that lived for six hundred years, but it was a risky gamble to think that a 21 Emon reference would land for a university student from my own generation, but Meniko laughed with an “Ahahahahaaa.”

Well, she’d laugh at anything I said.

As a result, I became a bit of a thrill-seeker.

“It’s an emoji, huuuh. The kanji for Koyomi [暦] does look like a robot. I’m envious.”

“Although I’ve never felt happy about my name looking like a robot.”

“It’s fiiine. ‘Meniko’ has the kanji for ‘deathday’, after all. I’m living my life thinking about how everyday is somebody’s deathday. Deathdays all the tiiime.”

That’s too many.5

Personally, rather than Meniko, her family name of Hamukai seemed more peculiar, but when I’d asked her about it before, it seemed she was partial to it because it reminded her of hamsters. Apparently, she’d kept a hamster in the past… Though I couldn’t shake off the suspicion that it was because her family name was Hamukai that she kept a hamster instead of a dog or cat.

It was like, which came first, the egg [卵] or the egg [玉子]?6

Her attention to detail when it came to the impressions of the written characters was really something.

In fact, I’d written the characters for “front side” and “back side” countless times over the course of my life, but I had not once thought about something like that until this very day. I probably wouldn’t be able to write those kanji again without being conscious of it… It may not be an exaggeration to say that it changed my outlook on life itself.

Well, no, it would be an exaggeration. But in that sense, despite Japanese being one of my weaker subjects, it was pretty amazing that Meniko still got along with me… Then again, in Meniko’s case, it wasn’t as if her group of friends was limited to only me. She boasted rather thick bonds of friendship.

She was supposedly a member of twenty-five clubs.

It was already a surprise to me that there were as many as twenty-five clubs.

Did everyone really have things they wanted to do that much?

It was the kind of character you couldn’t really find amongst my friends from high school… Hanekawa, the honor student, was never the kind of person to have many friends, and even the communication demon named Kanbaru was still specialized in her particular field.

And that girls’ basketball club may have looked refreshing on the outside, but inside it had been surprisingly murky. So filled with mud that if it got on your clothes, it wouldn’t come off.

However, the fact that this “front and back” question was not necessarily restricted to the appearances of the written characters showed off the depths of Hamukai Meniko.

Her deep-rootedness… A deep-rooted meaninglessness.

“In stories, I mean, in all things, they say there’s a front side and the back side, but reeeally, the front side is a part of the back side, riiight?”

That was how Meniko continued.

Instead of giving me an explanation on the abc conjecture.

“Recentlyyy, I’ve been thinking about the asymmetry of antonyms. The opposite of up isn’t necessarily down, the opposite of right isn’t necessarily left, the opposite of front isn’t necessarily back, and the opposite of aloud isn't necessarily forbidden, riiight?”7

“Isn’t there something wrong with that last one?”

“And the opposite of receiving harm isn’t necessarily causing harm.”

With that, her eyes flicked towards me, giving me a meaningful gaze. Or, rather than a gaze, she was making eye contact with me. As though she were saying, “Here’s the fundamental point!” As her friend, it was difficult to ignore her looking at me like that.

It was time to test my fundamentals.8

Fortunately, when it came to “victim” and “perpetrator” and other related words, I’d been blessed with the opportunity to deepen my reflections of them for nineteen years. Or perhaps it was more apt to say that I’d suffered through those reflections, but regardless, that Hawaiian-shirt guy had scolded me pretty harshly about this.

That he hated those who played the victim—but anyway, the asymmetry of receiving and causing harm? Meniko sure made it sound complicated.

Just by not using the words “victim” and “perpetrator”.9

It was easy to see that concepts like up and down and right and left were relative, and that they could be completely flipped around when reflected in a mirror, but weren’t “receiving harm” and “causing harm” perfectly symmetrical?

Depending on how you looked at it, a perpetrator could actually be a victim, so perhaps she meant it in that way by including the “person” component… It was a negative cycle. And in that case, it was no longer a matter of the written characters but a problem of society.

Behind the front was the back, but behind the back was… the back?

They say things are two sides of the same coin, but the fact that the front and the back of a coin are fixed is what makes a coin toss possible… If “heads” and “tails” were entangled like some sort of ouroboros, then a game of American football would never begin.

Not that I’d ever played American football. But regardless, the conversation would never begin. Neither the conversation, nor all things, nor stories.

All right, now to respond to her eye contact.

Although it could easily have been a no-look pass.

“Meniko, what happened? If it’s advice you need, I’m always here for you. That’s the kind of guy I am.”

“That’s riiight. That’s the kind of guy you are, Koyomi-chaaan. How reliable.”

It was a bit hard to follow up when she took my attempt at humor so seriously. It was like I was one beat off. And the fact that she thought that I was the kind of guy that thought that he was that kind of guy was also off. In the first place, these sorts of careless promises had cornered me one too many times when I was in high school, and it seemed that wouldn’t change now that I was in university. I really didn’t learn my lesson. If anything, that was the kind of guy I was.

With a frivolous answer, I’d destroy myself.

With a frivolous answer, I’d dig two graves.10

Like digging a grave at the bottom of another grave.

“Weeell, if something happened… I guess I became a victim…? Although in my case, it was more like I suddenly ran into, liiike, a ghost or an apparition.”

“A victim—”

A ghost. An apparition?

Urban legends. Street gossip. Secondhand rumors.

Even allowing for exaggeration—it had a familiar ring to it.

But I couldn’t just remain nostalgic.

“...What do you mean, specifically?”

“Rather than specifically… I guess it was more like physically…? You see, it was liiike…”

As Meniko began spinning her pen, she began responding to my question… Well, she was actually spinning a stylus pen, very much appropriate for a modern university student, but the words she spoke were very much words that a future expert of cryptography would come up with. Those words were severely old-fashioned, severely captivating, and just plain severe.

“Before I realized iiit… Apparently, I was night-crawled upooon.”11