Monogatari Series - Volume 27 - Chapter 1.11

011

In the end, well, a promise was a promise, so we did end up visiting the Kitashirahebi Shrine together, but, as if she’d sensed the strained atmosphere between us, the fifth-grader god did not cheerfully appear before us. And with that, our first date of the new year, and our first shrine visit since we started dating, came to an end in a languid manner—it was a pretty big deal that it managed to end at all, even languidly. I’d at the very least managed to delay the conclusion, but since I hadn’t been able to get her to retract her statement on that day, it essentially meant that our breakup had been established.

Well, damn.

How did it get like this?

I’d been so flustered that day that I’d been unable to understand her—my ex-girlfriend’s?—intentions, but to sum things up, I’d come to the tentative conclusion that the most realistic explanation was that she’d fallen out of love with me because of my constant concern for Oikura.

Or rather, there wasn’t anything else it could be but that…

The fact that, instead of getting angry at me like the first time around, she tried to end our relationship by being the one to apologize… That didn’t really seem like something I expected out of Senjougahara Hitagi, but when it came to breaking up, it was cruel to assume that people would do what was expected of them.

Expectations could be coercive.

Perhaps that was what was wrong with me, that I always wanted people, no matter whom, to be what I expected of them… On the other hand, if a girl who once wielded stationery were to show consideration towards the partner she was breaking up with, then she really couldn’t be called a mere girl anymore.

It was very mature of her.

Though her stubbornness was still childish.

Of course, even if I wanted to sugarcoat it, I was still a young boy at heart who wanted to continue clinging to her. But for the time being, I’d managed to earn a cooling-off period, so I decided to retreat from the warfront momentarily—even if what waited for me was just a war of attrition.

I also thought that I needed to cool my head… I needed to consider this carefully. Instead of just taking her at her word about all those past things that were dragged back up, I needed to change my stance and show remorse for the things that I needed to show remorse for… I didn’t think that I’d made any mistakes, but I couldn’t take Hitagi seriously about all the things she mentioned, either. At any rate, for something as private as this, I couldn’t even ask my sisters’ advice, and certainly not Oikura, so I’d been carrying this weight alone for the past few days—however.

However, after classes restarted and after I heard that anecdote from Meniko, my private love life situation ended up no longer being private. It was no longer a private matter of low priority. It was not simply an individual case that could not be commented on.

Rather than individuality, it had acquired generality.

Even a member of the general public could comment on it.

It was almost as shocking as thinking that I had a unique, original idea and then learning that there was actually a precedent—of course, the romantic troubles of Araragi Koyomi and the romantic troubles of Hamukai Meniko were hardly compared… The fact that I could sympathize with something between a soap opera and slapstick comedy could surely be attributed to the cocktail party effect.

Maybe I just wanted to believe that it would be all right, because there was a precedent.

Maybe it was just like, “Why are you feeling like this was destiny, all by yourself?”

Even if I felt an affinity with her, it was possible that after I recounted my experiences to Meniko, she’d go, “That’s completely differeeent. Don’t lump us together with a lame feeling like thaaat.”

But even so, I couldn’t turn a blind eye to the few points in common we had.

Even though we didn’t consider ourselves victims, the other party considered themselves perpetrators, and they apologized excessively—and, completely ignoring how we felt, they’d repeat those extreme apologies, to the point of ruining their present relationship. They’d perpetuate a cycle of rebirth with their ruinous apologies.

Victims and perpetrators.

The front and the back—they weren’t in harmony.

It was a distorted kind of asymmetry, like some bizarre object that looked like a triangle from the front but an X-mark from the back.

Of course, that Hawaiian-shirt guy had once told me, as well as Senjougahara Hitagi, that he “hated those who played the victim”, but he also had this to say—don’t blame anything and everything on oddities.

And so, to avoid having to defend my claims, and to prevent myself from falling into a distorted interpretation of the facts, I had to perform analysis on top of analysis… Was this really a normal situation?

Was it common for university students to run rampant?

According to one theory, it’s said that a couple breaks up every twenty seconds somewhere in the world. And in that case, perhaps the fact that my troubles and Meniko’s troubles coincided was not even worth considering as a problem—but if you take “one couple every twenty seconds” literally, then you could interpret it as meaning that there will never be two couples breaking up within twenty seconds. And in that case, there could be a hidden meaning behind the simultaneous nature of my and Meniko’s troubles.

This was nothing but distorted, though.

I didn’t know how it was for Meniko and Boyfie-kun, but at least in the case of me and Hitagi, it was true that our horizons had broadened much more than when we’d been in high school… Hitagi, in particular, was living in a women’s dormitory that was full of international students, and she was steadily expanding her friendships with a wide variety of people of her age, so to be honest, it was not at all inevitable for her to remain tied down to me, who’d just happened to go to the same high school as her.

Putting it that way, you might say that it hadn’t been inevitable for me to be the one that caught her when she fell down the stairs, but I couldn’t help but be haunted by an inferiority complex ever since “that day”... As such, I’d always been vaguely imagining that, if I were to be dumped by my girlfriend, it would be for such a reason… The truth was that the complete opposite was happening now.

It was like Hitagi was apologizing because I caught her at that time… Like she was saying sorry for putting me on this collision course.

A collision course that led to a stapler, verbal abuse, abduction, and confinement… Well, strictly speaking, that was all true, and looking at it objectively, Senjougahara Hitagi back then had definitely been excessive. To the point that it made me want to combine excessive and extraordinary to make a clever pun.38

It may have been out of self-defense, but it was excessive self-defense.

Perhaps, then, it was natural to apologize excessively for excessive self-defense… But I expect most people would not accept an apology from someone who did those same things.

It was definitely rare to forgive someone who stapled your cheek—however, that was just from an objective standpoint.

Subjectively speaking, from my own personal thoughts on the matter, all those things from back then are things I would consider having long since passed. And just between us, I might even call them good memories.

After all, it was the beginning of our love.

But referring to the memory of getting my cheek stapled as a “good memory” made me seem like a pervert, so I’d kept my mouth closed39 about it, but when she came and prostrated herself to apologize for it, I had no idea how to respond.

It was like my perversion would be brought to the forefront.

Without caring about inviting any weird misunderstandings, I would say that it felt like the “good memories” I’d finally made were being rudely insulted. Wasn’t it basically the same as her saying that it would have been better if our love hadn’t begun at all?

Not to mention, I’d assumed that those feelings were a shared sentiment, so when she suddenly went on the offensive with her apologies, I just couldn’t shake off a feeling of discomfort. Whether you wanted to call that escaping from reality or avoiding responsibility.

It felt like the rug was pulled out from under me.

In that respect, I was probably in step with Meniko… Even though they were supposed to have mutually “made love”, Boyfie-kun had become obsessed with the idea that he one-sidedly “night-crawled” upon her, overcome with incomprehensible feelings of guilt, or possibly even feelings of guilty pleasure… Well, taking into account Boyfie-kun’s nuisance level with his tour of apologies made to everyone around him, Meniko was in much more of a concerning predicament than I was, so it was better to evaluate this fairly.

For now, I was still better off.

It was fortunate that, after entering university, I hadn’t made a single friend that would spread such rumors.

…To digress from the topic for a moment, university gave off the impression of being easier to make friends there than in high school, but I would like to report that had absolutely not been the case for me.

I guess it did feel like, in high school, I was being pressured from all directions to “make friends” within the classroom, among my classmates—it’s the usual, “All right, split off into pairs”—but in university, or at least in the mathematics department of Manase University which I attend, I didn’t feel that pressure.

The air pressure was as low as on top of Mount Fuji.

It was close to the sensation of free fall.

Thinking about it, it was because I was receiving that pressure that I formed the counter-thesis of “I won’t make friends, because my strength as a human would decrease”, but now that I was placed in a situation where I would not have any difficulty with my studies, or perhaps living my life, even if I didn’t make any friends, I was no longer an opposing force against the concept of community. I was just a guy with no friends.

I couldn’t join a club, either, without any determination.

Oikura was on this side, too.

If I were to categorize everyone, then Hitagi and Meniko would be on the other side—that is, they would form pairs, or even groups, of their own accord even without needing to be told, “All right, split off into pairs.”

I guess the final form of such a person would be Gaen-san. Yes, that person whose list of friends was too large to fit in a single address book that she needed to carry as many as five cell phones around.

As for which side was good or which side was better, that wasn’t really the point of those categories, but now that my nature was exposed like this, I couldn’t help but simply feel envious. Hitagi had told me, “I’m simply re-entering the world of human relations that I’d used my ‘illness’ as an excuse to skip out on,” so she might hold a different opinion—even Kanbaru, who I considered the embodiment of communication ability, claimed to be extremely gloomy in the past.

I just didn’t get it.

Be that as it may, it wasn’t like I could rest easy because I didn’t have any friends. Even if I didn’t have any friends, I did have a childhood friend (though we were in the middle of cutting ties), and at the rate things were going, Hitagi might actually write a letter of introduction to Oikura for me.

I wished she would stop.

We were about to form a horrifying love triangle, an ugly development beyond what you would expect from a soap opera… When it came to Meniko, she shouldn’t have any points of contact with Hitagi, so I could probably keep her out of it… In the same way Meniko had let me know about her circumstances in the form of asking for advice or giving me a quiz, perhaps it was better for me to go on ahead and let Meniko know about my circumstances. That is, if I could think of a good quiz.

But, you know.

I’d wanted to keep Meniko away from Senjougahara Hitagi from the beginning, but I especially wanted to keep her away from anything that was actually oddity-related… Though I had to put that on hold for now.

Turning to those that were off-campus, then Kanbaru Suruga was a concern—or rather, I’d had a complaint well up in my throat about how if she was going to apologize to me, then she should apologize to Kanbaru first. Why was only Kanbaru fine…? But that could be a very possible development and not just a joke. Assuming that this was something other than my girlfriend simply hating me.

A slight upside was that when it came to Hanekawa, whom Hitagi had lined up alongside Oikura as one of the candidates I would be released to, our communication with her had stopped entirely, so I didn’t have to worry that some strange apology would be sent to “Tsubasa-chan”—it wasn’t exactly an upside that we’d lost communication with our benefactor who was overseas, but let’s leave it at that for now.

What a relief.

At the very least, I didn’t want to bother Hanekawa.

In any case, it would be pretty rough if a rumor that I was physically and mentally abused for over a year spread to one of our mutual acquaintances… I wouldn’t necessarily say that I was thinking in the same way as Meniko was, but there was no doubt that an apology tour would be a nuisance to others. To others, and to me.

But even so, I couldn’t exactly go around claiming that I didn’t consider any of that abuse to be bad… Like how Meniko couldn’t go around explaining to each of her clubs, “That’s not iiit, we were actually making looove.”

Especially if her feelings were already gone.

Unlike her, I was miserably clinging to my relationship, but anyway, I couldn’t make any careless conclusions. If I compared my case with Meniko’s case, then I could make any number of hypotheses, but a hypothesis was nothing more than a hypothesis.

I needed to establish a theory.

There was not a shred of physical evidence that this was an oddity phenomenon—of course, it was unusual for there to be an oddity phenomenon that came with physical evidence, but there was no doubt that my thought process was, at the moment, falling into an emotion-based vector.

There was that glimmer of hope that I might be able to restore my relationship with Hitagi, and even if I didn’t wish for that, if I believed that I could ease my friend’s worries even a little bit, it would be easy for me to lapse into forgetting that Hawaiian-shirt guy’s teachings and blaming everything on oddities.

It was time to return to my lodgings, take a break, and then spend the night to go over the case one more time, or maybe two or three more times—after making that careful decision, I returned to my apartment that was within walking distance of the university, only to find my neighbor lying in wait.

My neighbor.

In other words, the girl who lived at such a close distance that soup would still stay warm, Oikura-san herself… Compared to that, our quarrels could stay heated for a far longer distance, but oh dear, was she sounding the gong of war?

“Araragi…”

Surely she hadn’t come to borrow fire from the flames of hell—or rather, borrow soy sauce from my kitchen. But after loitering for a bit, my childhood friend looked at me with her usual madness-filled gaze and then began her curse-like declarations.

“I’m sorry… I don’t know why, but I feel extreme regret for everything I’ve done to you… For that class meeting in high school, for that study group in middle school, for my freeloading in elementary school, it’s always been one hundred percent my responsibility and one hundred percent my fault… Araragi, you’ve done nothing wrong. Even after we entered university, you moved next door to me because you were thinking about me, and yet I treated you harshly. It’s my fault that your life is a mess! I won’t ever show myself before you again, so please forgive me! Oh god, oh god, oh god, I hate myself, with hate yet hate for hate to hate in hate at hate by hate of hate!”

“...Yeah, yeah.”

It was an oddity phenomenon.

All right, let’s settle this.