Monogatari Series - Volume 27 - Chapter 1.10

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“There happens to exist the technique of avoiding giving an actual apology by simply expressing a desire to apologize—looking back, it does seem as though humanity has honed their wisdom in order to figure out the best way to effectively apologize without actually apologizing.

“I’m impressed.

“We’ve taken steps to admit defeat without surrendering—the phrase, ‘I apologize if anyone was hurt,’ is a prime example with its questionable usage of the subjunctive mood.

“‘If’, they say.

“Perhaps my excuse of not apologizing because things wouldn’t be resolved with an apology wasn’t so bad after all… However, my mother, whom I’d ‘never asked to give birth to’, was not one to make use of such roundabout wording.

“She was the kind to apologize directly.

“Moreover, she was the kind to apologize relentlessly.

“She was stubborn.

“Even when told that she’d be forgiven, even when told that it was fine, even when told to stop apologizing. She wouldn’t be satisfied with just that, and would continue to hound the other party and keep apologizing—and, as a sickly young girl, I would have to endure apologies from my mother day and night.

“‘I’m sorry I couldn’t give birth to you as a healthy child,’ she’d say—and, under her constant nursing and caregiving, every apology she gave made me feel as though my poor health was being engraved into my mind and body.

“Those wounds hurt more than my illness.

“It was like I was being told that I was the bare minimum for a human, of poor health and culturally unrefined.

“So, one day, I couldn’t stand it any longer and said this in response—’Stop saying that.’

“‘I never asked for you to give birth to me as a healthy child’—yes, I agree with you. It was poorly conveyed. I’d lost my temper, so I can’t deny that my wording had become a bit rough—but I wonder if my mother had not heard the full sentence.

“She’d received that much of a shock.

“Was that the appropriate way to describe it? I’m not a mother myself, so I wouldn’t know… As a daughter, if I had to guess at her feelings, then it must have been completely unexpected for her to be condemned out of the blue after I’d silently endured her countless apologies regarding my illness.

“‘To think you’d condemn an apologetic person,’ she may have thought.

“It might be reading too much into it to say that she’d held those feelings of remorse to avoid being condemned… But that’s why she herself read too much into my unclear conveyance.

“Should I call it a victim complex? Or a perpetrator complex?

“It was unconscionable.37

“Dear me. To say the least, I would like to apologize ‘if’ my words invited any misunderstanding.

“Summing things up, she’d kept on apologizing as though she was trying to beat me to the punch, but my counterattack had ended up being surprisingly effective—after that, my mother stopped apologizing to me.

“As soon as she realized that I might get mad at her, she stopped apologizing.

“She gallantly kept up her nursing and caregiving as she’d always done, but since then, to this very day, she has never once apologized—the idea of, ‘I won’t apologize if it means I’ll be condemned’? Ah, yes, that does make it apparent that we share the same blood.

“‘I’ll apologize properly, so promise me you won’t get mad’—we’d even made an awful promise like that.”