Monogatari Series - Volume 27 - Chapter 1.04

004

“If you do something wrong, you say ‘sorry’.

“That’s basic manners. It’s not like I wasn’t taught as much during my childhood—I didn’t remember if it was my school teacher, or my parents, or my grandparents, or some old man I didn’t know, but I was properly taught by that person.

“But at the same time, I was taught this.

“If everything could be resolved simply by saying ‘sorry’, there’d be no need for the police.

“...Of course, seeing as you’re the eldest son of a family of police officers, you’d probably erupt with objections to such a slogan.

“If everything could be resolved simply by saying ‘sorry’, then your family would lose their jobs—of course, the idea that a police officer’s job only involves cracking down on bad guys is also quite prejudiced.

“It’s something you might occasionally see in police dramas, the threat of one’s boss saying, ‘I’ll send you off to the driving test center!’... Even I can’t help but think that that deserves an apology.

“After all, it’s an extremely important job, isn’t it?

“If it was a society where all ten million police officers in the country had only the job of granting driver’s licenses, wouldn’t that be such a peaceful utopia—hm?

“There aren’t even ten million police officers in Japan?

“‘One person in ten being a police officer, this ain’t the Principality of Monaco,’ you say?

“What’s wrong with Monaco? It’s much more peaceful than Japan.

“Although, their excellent public order is in no small part due to the security cameras installed throughout the country—yes, security.

“The prevention of crime is also a job of police officers, isn’t it—the topic has digressed12 in an international direction, but since I’ve reached my desired conclusion, I suppose there’s no need for an apology.

“There’s no need to say ‘sorry’.

“A pardon for that permit13—is it called a ‘license’ because you'll 'allow' it 'for their sake'?14

“Anyway, even though I said it was a utopia, that’s just being idealistic—in reality, if someone were to tell me something like, ‘If everything could be resolved simply by saying “sorry”, there’d be no need for the police,’ then I would want to be defiant and say that I wouldn’t apologize.

“Even now, I don’t want to apologize.

“So that makes me want to apologize even less.

“After all, things wouldn’t be resolved just because I said ‘sorry’, right? Then apologizing is meaningless, isn’t it—no, really, this is a pretty common topic of conversation.

“There are plenty of cases where, rather than having things be resolved with an apology, the apology can actually make things worse—I’m sure you’ve experienced cases like that, too.

“Cases that weren’t case-by-case.

“There’s apologizing because you believe you’re in the wrong, and there’s apologizing because you seek forgiveness, but actually, it’s probably always precisely in between the two—because you believe you’re in the wrong, you seek forgiveness and thus apologize.

“Things wouldn’t be resolved with a ‘sorry’, so I’ll say, ‘excuse me’.15

“But, if it weren’t possible to make such a deal, then wouldn’t you say it’s human nature to think that there would be no merits to giving in and apologizing?

“If you think calculations like ‘merits’ and ‘deals’ are not appropriate for the act of apology, then I suppose the reflexive ‘ah, sorry’ that you might say when you bump into someone in the hallway or step on someone’s foot is really the most sincere kind of apology.

“Nevertheless, that is also the truth.

“An apology made without reserve is the easiest to forgive without reserve—a formal apology ends up begging for a formal forgiveness.

“Even if you wanted to just let it go, that wouldn’t be forgiven.

“Forgiving a person is just as hard as apologizing to a person, isn’t it?

“So I won’t apologize.

“And I won’t forgive.”