Monogatari Series - Volume 29 - Chapter 1.03

003

During what I’d assumed to be mid-flight idle chatter, which would be referred to as yuntaku in the Okinawan dialect, an incredible bomb had been tossed in—what did he just say?

Araundo Uroko was Gaen-san’s real daughter?

She was really her daughter?

“Wh—what in the world?”

“Five hundred yen.”

“Here.”

I paid the amount he asked for.

It was like the way Captain America paid up in the first Avengers film… Though it would’ve been better if there were a five hundred yen bill. But was it true that two thousand yen bills were still used in Okinawa?

It was something I wanted to see.

Those were bills from before I was born, after all.

Anyway, though it had nothing to do with me placing the five hundred yen coin in the palm of his hand, the con man totally had me in the palm of his hand—it was a small price to pay, hardly even amounting to sales tax, compared to the price of the first class seats, but as a school dropout supporting herself financially, it was a massive coin to part with.

Two thousand yen bills would be pretty hard for me to see in that sense, too.

But, if the conversation were to end here, it would be like leaving a snake only half-dead43—perhaps that information had been well-known by Kaiki-san and Ononoki-chan, who were part of the same organization, so they didn’t see a need to explain it, but—

“Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeh?”

…On my lap, Ononoki-chan trembled. In a monotone. With a blank look. However, like less of a zombie and more of a catfish, she trembled.

With the fact that she was clinging onto me, she was like a machine that worked the abdominal muscles.

As though a hand had been stuck down her throat (I wasn’t certain, but she’d probably had that done to her by Kagenui-san before), she was rattled.

“Ga, ga, ga, ga, Gaen-san’s daughter? What the hell? I haven’t heard that before…”

So it was possible for Ononoki-chan to be agitated, too.

Though we’d known each other for quite a while now, it was the first time I was seeing that reaction from this corpse doll.

Because her expression was as blank as ever, it made her seem even more panicked.

“I don’t think onee-chan knows, either… Don’t sell information like that for five hundred yen, Kaiki onii-chan.”

“Ah, but, maybe it’s the usual?”

“Don’t just call my lies ‘the usual’. This is, in fact, the genuine ‘truth’... And it’s information that neither Kagenui nor Oshino know.”

It’s just by chance that I happen to know about it, said Kaiki-san.

By chance.

That part sounded like a lie, though.

“This is something that Yotsugi also knows, but I’ve known Gaen-senpai for just a tiny bit longer than Kagenui or Oshino, you see—well, rather than Gaen-senpai, it would be Gaen-senpai’s older sister.”

Gaen-senpai’s older sister—Gaen Tooe-san, I believe. It was her maiden name, and she would later become Kanbaru-san’s mother, Kanbaru Tooe-san—and if I remember correctly, she had already passed away.

But I was by no means completely unconnected to her.

She was someone who possessed that much influence, even in death—however.

“Eh, but, we talked about this earlier. Gaen-san isn’t at that age, right? She’s an ‘onee-san’, an older sister, so she never seemed like a mom—”

“She certainly doesn’t seem like a mom. That’s true. That’s something she says herself—that she’s not a mother at all.”

I hadn’t meant for what I said to carry such heavy implications. I was simply talking about her age… From my perspective as a middle schooler (though I was a dropout), of course she was a splendid adult, but still. Perhaps I could wrap my head around it if she had a child with a single-digit age, but she simply didn’t seem like someone with a child of fifteen years.

“That’s right, Kaiki onii-chan. Though it’s true that, like Nadekou said, she’s always dressed in fashion to make herself look younger than she really is.”

“I didn’t say that. Don’t make me responsible for your words.”

“It’s possible that that crazy hip-hop fashion sense of hers is a way of admonishing herself that she’s unqualified to be a mother. As Sengoku guessed.”

Everyone was pushing the responsibility of bad-mouthing Gaen-san onto me… How much were they afraid of her?

I’d thought it was a pretty candid organization, but perhaps it was surprisingly a group with a clear top-down hierarchy.

Dressing younger than she really was was actually an unconscious expression of her rejection of parenthood… Wasn’t that actually forced foreshadowing? It was hard to agree with it, or even give any response at all.

The fact that she didn’t seem like a mother…

Was because she herself was rejecting it?

“The result of being her own producer… But anyway, how old is Gaen-san exactly?”

The idea that it was bad manners to ask about a woman’s age could ironically be more divisive in the age of gender equality, but even when taking her fashion out of the equation, Gaen-san still seemed pretty ageless.

That said, it would be a lie to say that Oshino-san or Kaiki-san or even Kagenui-san seemed more mature than my own parents or teachers.

“As far as I’m aware, all specialists look pretty young, as though they’re immortal oddities,” said Ononoki-chan. “Maybe because they’re always playing with oddities, each and every one of them end up seeming ageless—I guess freelancing really is free of stress.”

“That bias is like the primary cause of stress to freelancers, coming from a corpse doll… Kaiki-san, how old are you?”

“Fifty thousand yen.”

Expensive!

Why was the disclosure fee for Kaiki-san’s age more expensive than for Gaen-san’s mysterious parent-child relationship? A hundred times more expensive, at that.

It was a first-class fee.

I’d been thinking that, if Kaiki-san’s age came to light, I would be able to work out Gaen-senpai’s age as well, with her being his upperclassman when they were in university…

My scheme failed.

Since you could attend university for up to four years… Perhaps she was up to three years older than Kaiki-san?

“You can’t say that for sure. This is irrelevant to you, considering you dropped out of middle school partway, but for the university we attended, it was possible to repeat years, for as much as eight years.”

That was certainly a matter which I hoped would remain irrelevant to me… Then, was it okay to assume that she was up to seven years older? I think it was called the Fermi problem, the quiz where you tried to estimate how many piano tuners there were in Japan, so if I were to think in that way… If Kaiki-san was in the same year as Oshino-san and Kagenui-san (even if they didn’t enter university immediately), he was probably around thirty, and taking the average of three and seven years to get five years and using that as a basis, could I assume Gaen-san’s age was somewhere in the mid-thirties?

Mid-thirties…

Now that I was thinking about it, it wasn’t completely impossible to see her that way… Though they weren’t freelancers, it was possible for celebrities and athletes to look that young at the same age.

Beauty and health was not defined by numbers.

But, regardless of her age, it was still hard for me to see her as someone with a child. Especially a child who was fifteen years old—it wasn’t a matter of her appearance, but her personality. It was hard to believe that the notorious Araundo-san was the same age as me, but even before that, it was harder to believe that she was Gaen-san’s daughter.

“For one thing, that means there’s a good chance she gave birth in her teens.”

“My, my. Are you saying that’s a bad thing?”

“No, of course there’s nothing bad about that…”

Well, perhaps I was a bit too caught up by common sense… While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that my own parents were like children that had had a child, it was true that they didn’t really give off the feeling of being parents, either… What was it that made parents, parents, anyway?

What were parents?

As someone who’d failed at being a child, it was not something I could easily speak of.

“If we consider the possibility that she skipped grades, then we can’t deny the possibility that she was the same age as you, at fifteen years old, when she became a mother. But there’s nothing bad about that, either.”

It wasn’t bad, but it probably wasn’t particularly recommended in present-day Japan.

…Had things been different, fifteen years ago?

“Values can change surprisingly quickly over a short period of time,”

said Ononoki-chan.

She’d stopped trembling at some point, but somehow, her arms wrapped around my torso seemed to be in a tighter hold than before. No need for a seat belt.

This corpse doll, who appeared to never be fazed by anything, had rescued me from crises time after time, but after hearing that her enemy was Gaen-san’s daughter, it seemed that even Ononoki-chan couldn’t keep herself from shuddering in fear.44

“But, it’s not actually like that, right? Kaiki onii-chan. When you say that Araundo Uroko is Gaen-san’s real daughter, you’re just saying that she just gives the impression of being her real daughter, and they’re not actually related by blood, right?”

She was trying to negotiate a reduction to her shock.

However, that suggestion was something I could get behind.

Why don’t I join in on that, too?

“Basically, it’s the parental love shown by an adult, and in the same way she sees me as her daughter, Gaen-san sees Araundo-san as a daughter, as well… Right, Kaiki onii-chan?”

“Who are you calling Kaiki onii-chan. I don’t want to hear that from you. And I don’t want to hear Yotsugi calling me that, either.”

Oops, I’d accidentally undergone a reversion.

Well, it wasn’t so far back to call it a reversion, but I’d gone back to the era where I’d been a little sister character—though, as I’d mentioned earlier, I was by no means a daughter character.

To repeat, Sengoku Nadeko had failed at being a child.

“There’s no way such a convenient explanation exists, but it’s likely true that Gaen-san is projecting her real daughter, Araundo, onto you—the both of you are snakes, after all, and you might surprisingly resemble each other.”

Well, I didn’t want to be compared to an evil boss.

But, we were linked by snakes…

Don’t tell me this would turn into a development where I would have to confront my inner self—it felt like “the last boss is actually yourself” had really been done to death with every possible pattern from every possible angle.

There was a limit to how often I could go on a journey of self-discovery.

“The last boss actually being your real parent is a development you often see in dramas and the like, but the opposite development of the last boss actually being your real child is something I don’t think I’ve ever heard of… Good for you, Nadekou. In the future, you can make it into a manga.”

“I don’t think it’ll be well-received…”

It seemed inevitable that it would be frowned upon.

However, the theme of a parent-child showdown had appeared in works as far back as Shakespeare’s, and regardless of good or evil, the storylines tended to end with the parent being killed by their child.

In other words, parricide.

A story where a parent-child showdown ended with the parent being the winner was also something I didn’t think I’d ever heard of—it didn’t sound like it would be cathartic or interesting or even surprising. Really, who would ever want to see a parent kill their child?

“Well, it is something that’s been seen in the natural world. A culture in which lions throw their cubs off cliffs—I wonder if a lion cub that managed to survive ever went and got revenge on their parent.”

“If that’s the case, I can see why Gaen-san wouldn’t want to set out for Iriomote Island herself… She definitely wouldn’t want her fated showdown to turn into a scripted loss.”

Well, I wanted to believe that it was something other than her simply wanting to avoid facing her daughter after being estranged for so long… If this fifteen-year feud was the result of Gaen-san’s child abandonment, it was really something I did not want to get involved in.

According to the principle of civil non-intervention.

Please apply the Civil Rehabilitation Law.

“In regards to that, I’d like to hear the thoughts of Hanekawa Tsubasa or Oikura Sodachi. The wise counsel of those wise counselors on the topic of neglect. Someone like oni onii-chan, who’s been pampered by his parents, isn’t allowed to take part.”

“I’ve mostly been pampered by my parents, too…”

“In your case, it’s more like you’ve been spoiled, Sengoku. And the backlash to that resulted in your independent spirit today… That should be an extremely good thing for your parents, too.”

He was making it sound like he’d met my parents personally, this con man. The Sengoku couple was not yet at an age where they could be considered elderly, but they would fall prey to a professional in the blink of an eye.

“But this is like the hardest level of parent-child relationships… Oh, so that’s why we shouldn’t actually be exterminating her. That’s why we’re just there to scout out her hideout… There’s no way that, as a parent, Gaen-san actually wants her real daughter to be defeated by a band of rogues like us.”

“I don’t know if she’s thinking as a parent. When Gaen-senpai doesn’t consider herself a mother, it’s not out of humility or self-deprecation, but because she’s truly unqualified to be a mother… This fifteen-year feud is likely not based on any sentiments between parent and child, but rather based on a desire to clean up her past misbehavior.”

You’re better off thinking that she’s lighting a fire under us by saying that we should just try and beat her daughter if we can—said Kaiki-san.

It would’ve been nice if we had a proper briefing session about this, rather than her trying to play it cool.

Instead of this tacit understanding between senior and junior.

After hinting at all these mysterious circumstances, it had gotten somewhat unclear as to what the actual conditions for completing the mission were—to begin with, it seemed to me that whatever the conditions were, they would be extremely difficult to achieve simply because the opponent was Gaen-san’s real daughter.

“If you’re that curious, you should go and ask Gaen-senpai herself. Try asking her in perfect harmony. ‘I’ve heard that Araundo is your daughter, so what’s the right way to deal with her?’”

“I can’t just ask something like that!”

Scary, scary, scary. It was scary just imagining it.

I was cowering even more than Ononoki-chan.

For my current lifestyle as a school dropout, I was almost entirely reliant on that person both financially and psychologically, and even if not for that, I couldn’t just bring up such a private matter so bluntly.

I found myself realizing the strength of not knowing.

In fact, I was desperately trying to think of a way to pretend that I didn’t know that I’d ended up knowing something that I shouldn’t know.

“How many times are you going to say ‘that’?45 Instead of switching clauses in your sentence, let’s turn back at Naha Airport and go home, Nadekou. When new information keeps being piled on one after another, that’s nothing but the usual practices of fraud.”

At Ononoki-chan’s extremely tempting invite, I could not find within me the dignity necessary to immediately turn it down—however, indecisive as I was, if I were to consider that, by falling for that temptation, I could get away with not experiencing the developments that awaited me on that southern island with a harshness that would be no match for the minor errands I’d run as a trainee up until now, then perhaps what I should be regretting was not that I’d become a purveyor of superficial knowledge, but that I’d lost the mental weakness to immediately flee at the first sign of danger.

But even so, I couldn’t go back now. Not to those days when I was just the cute Sengoku Nadeko.

Like how Gaen-san could not return to fifteen years ago.

Or perhaps, like how Araundo Uroko could not return to before she was born.