Monogatari Series - Volume 29 - Chapter 1.05

005

Now hold on, out of all the documentaries about escaping from uninhabited islands, wasn’t this the most extreme?—dropping me on this island empty-handed and naked.

It was a reality TV show that would never be approved in Japan.

Not to mention, I didn’t even have any fellow competitors or allies… Right now, I was thinking from the bottom of my heart that anyone was fine, whether it was that con man or Tsukihi-chan or even Nakuna-chan. Aah, I should’ve been the one to cling firmly to Ononoki-chan… Were Ononoki-chan and Kaiki-san all right?

It would feel extremely wrong if I was the only one to survive while the two of them had not… Well, if I were to perform another Fermi estimate about what happened after I lost consciousness, then I could imagine that the warped airplane broke apart in midair, falling to pieces—it wouldn’t have been strange if the plane had exploded, but if that was true, it would raise some serious doubts about my own survival.

I wasn’t a ghost, right?

It wasn’t the case that I hadn’t realized I was dead, right?

In that case, if the plane did break apart in midair, then the pieces falling headlong into the ocean was just about the only way the passengers in an airplane crash would be able to survive—and after that, the clothes I’d worn especially for this trip must have been torn away by the waves, with even my socks and shoes being removed, and naturally, with no way of recovering the trunk I’d gotten from Ougi-san, I’d drifted onto this uninhabited island with nothing but my own body… If that was the case, then it was just as possible for Kaiki-san, Ononoki-chan, and the other passengers and crew members to have survived in a similar manner.

At least, I could only pray that it was possible.

Because if the tail of the massive serpent that I’d seen outside the window at the very end was not a hallucination born from a state of panic—that meant that it was not an accident, but the work of sabotage by a snake charmer to prevent the landing of the search-and-destroy unit sent by Gaen-san (namely, us) on Iriomote Island.

That meant that even ordinary people had gotten wrapped up in this mess.

Wrapped up, like a snake.

…I myself could basically still be considered an ordinary person, but now that things had come to this, the whereabouts of those two professionals had become all the more important… From experience, as Ononoki-chan was already a corpse, she may have only broken apart into pieces like the plane we were in, but I didn’t think she was dead. Well, that wasn’t necessarily a guarantee if she’d been sent to a watery grave—perhaps she’d become food for the fishes—but Kaiki-san made me more concerned… He’d been resting quite peacefully in spite of all that shaking, but what if he’d been laid to rest in peace forever…? No, thinking about it now, there was a chance even his sleeping was a ploy by the enemy.

Unfortunately, the enemy was one step, two steps, a thousand steps ahead of us.

Given that the source was a con man, the new information that our enemy was Gaen-san’s daughter had been something I wanted to take with a grain of salt, but with what had just happened, it now had a certain credibility to it—but to think she wouldn’t even let us get close to her hideout.

It seemed her style was to take the first move.

Conversely, it meant that Gaen-san’s foresight in not making any movements herself had also been splendid… It had been spot-on to send the three of us out as a probe instead. This parent-child showdown must have already begun long ago, perhaps even fifteen years ago.

But weren’t the pieces that she’d chosen to use in her first move a little unbelievable?

It was like she’d sacrificed both her rooks and a pawn for the sake of capturing the king.

So we seriously were sacrificial pieces, huh.

But at the same time, in a sense, it wasn’t hard to say that the outlaw alliance of Kaiki-san, Ononoki-chan, and myself—Hypocrisy Co., Ltd., as Kaiki-san called it—had perfectly completed our assigned task at the very outset.

Our work was done, in two different meanings.

The enemy was on such high alert that just by getting close to Iriomote Island—in fact, we hadn’t even gotten that close, as we hadn’t even arrived at Naha for our transfer—the plane had been brought down.

Even the sky was her territory.

It was essentially a confirmation that Iriomote Island was in fact Araundo-san’s stronghold, and after Gaen-san analyzed the way we were attacked, it would be possible for her to regroup and mobilize the main force.

Perhaps she herself would set out for this.

We hadn’t managed to ascertain why she’d made Iriomote Island her stronghold, let alone even attempted to exterminate her, but regardless, this result was outstanding even for us—and after having survived by the skin of my teeth, if I could report on the “massive serpent’s tail” that I’d seen, then it would be a done deal.

But even so, where in the world was I?

According to Ononoki-chan, Okinawa Prefecture was dotted with tons of islands, but after thinking about the crazy trajectory that the aircraft had traced towards the end, it was hard to make the judgment that this island was in the Kyushu region… There was a chance I’d been blown away by air currents all the way to the Ogasawara Islands, and it was still possible that I’d floated to a different country entirely, like Taiwan or India (though probably not as far as Europe).

Basically, with a formal dismissal, I’d been joyously relieved of my duties, but my path forward seemed to have become darker than dusk. At the very least, I was sure that what I should be doing was not simply to get a nice, golden-brown tan on this sandy beach.

It was preposterous to go on vacation after completing a single job.

I needed to look for other survivors.

And I needed to send out an SOS signal—though I figured it would be too heavy of a task to attempt escaping from the island by building a raft, like what they did on those reality TV programs.

Never in my wildest dreams did I expect to be acting out the story of Robinson Crusoe (not that I’d ever read the book), but I wasn’t about to stay put and allow myself to dry out in the sun—for now, it was time to look for some shade.

I was a little too late in that I’d already gotten sunburned, but regardless, I figured it was worth looking into the mountain forest as well. If I could find any apple trees, I would at least be able to discover gravity or fill my empty stomach… Er, let’s go over things in order.

If I wanted to look for survivors, then first, I needed to survive.

What were the most important factors for survival on an uninhabited island?

Though Robinson Crusoe had been left unread, I was aware of various tidbits of information that I’d gleaned through reading various manga… I needed to secure water, food, and fire.

And a safe place to sleep.

If possible, I wanted something to wear, too.

It clearly wasn’t the time to be embarrassed about being stark naked, but I had the feeling it wasn’t very safe to enter the forest with nothing but my own body…

I’d frequently made my way onto a mountain before, at one point to lift a curse and at one point to cast a curse, but not only that, I’d also made the summit of that mountain my place of residence for a short time. So I was well aware that bare skin was easy prey for nature, such as bug bites and leech bites. When taking into account the incredibly dangerous organisms known as bees, I should really be wearing full protective clothing, so the idea of going stark naked… Not to mention, if I were to trip over the root of a tree and fall, there’d be a huge difference in the damage received between being naked and wearing clothes.

I could get injured from the mere act of exploring.

I could get cuts from the leaves and branches of overgrown trees.

Perhaps I should be trying to put up with a couple of scratches on an occasion like this, but without any bandages or antiseptics here, even the smallest of injuries could prove to be deadly. Though I wasn’t sure exactly what the symptoms were, I knew that the disease called tetanus was something extremely terrifying.

However… They may say that people can only afford manners when their basic needs of clothing and food are met,50 but no matter what, it should be food that comes first. Like how they list the common fears as “earthquakes, thunder, fires, and fathers”,51 the correct order for basic needs should not be “clothing, food, shelter”, but “food, shelter, clothing”.52

While I’d been unconscious, the rays of the sun had harshly beaten down upon me, and my throat had grown rather parched, but there was no way I could simply drink the seawater as is… Right? Something about the osmotic pressure caused by the salt content… It would most likely just make me even thirstier, I think? Well, no, if all I did was boil it, then the most important component, the water, would end up evaporating, and only the salt would be left, right? And, thinking about hygiene, I shouldn’t only boil the water, but also use some kind of filtration system… Oh dear.

I’d been trying to concentrate, but as a result of trying to think about everything all at once, I’d exceeded the capacity of my brain. Because my head would always get full to the brim like this, I would end up being incapable of doing anything, or end up turning into a god, or stuff like that.

Around the point where the sandy beach underfoot started to become somewhat more earthy, I found a large leaf reminiscent of a southern country to use as shade and sat down using a craggy boulder as a chair—since the boulder had been in the shade, it fortunately hadn’t heated up very much, and retained a temperature much like the heated seats of a winter train. Also, “a large leaf reminiscent of a southern country” was just my own personal opinion without any basis. It could just as well be a leaf from a northern country.

But, that was probably fine.

I just needed to take things step by step.

Even if this was a southern country, or even if I’d washed ashore on the island of Kauai in Hawaii, or even if this was Iceland, pinpointing my coordinates could be postponed until after I’d solved the matter of my clothes—even food wasn’t a problem for now.

I wasn’t sure for how long I’d been unconscious, but it felt to me as though it was immediately after I’d gotten to partake in that first class cuisine, so my stomach didn’t feel too empty just yet. Since there was no chance of me regurgitating any of it from airsickness, either, I probably wouldn’t feel any hunger for the next few hours.

In the meantime—I needed to secure water and fire.

In terms of survival skills, the process of sharpening a stone to make a knife would probably be indispensable later on, but if I performed such a fun-sounding recreational activity in advance, I would probably use up all my stamina and end up in a terrible state… Then, between water and fire, which of them did I need to prioritize?

Unlike Ononoki-chan’s remote islands quiz, this was more of a death game where getting a single question wrong could directly lead to my death… But my instincts led me to think it was water. Humans could live up to three days without food, but they couldn’t even last a whole day without water. At least, that was what I’d often heard, from sources other than just manga—therefore, I needed either a boiling device or a filtration device, as mentioned previously…

Filtration… I wouldn’t be able to write the kanji for that word.

Because I didn’t know how to build either of them, I found myself briefly thinking that I should look it up on the Internet, but even if this island was within range of a 5G network, I was not in possession of the proper telecommunications equipment. By now, my smartphone had most likely sunk to the ocean floor, bestowing civilization to the deep-sea fish. I’d never thought of myself as being addicted to the Internet, but it was clear that I’d been completely poisoned by the information society, wasn’t it?

It made me want to watch some videos on some streaming site for a change of pace.

Conversely, building a fire seemed only vaguely useful to my survival, and at the very least, I wasn’t in any particular hurry to warm myself, to cook some food, to ward off wild animals, or to heat up a bath, so I could probably put it off until after I secured a source of water—to heat up a bath?

Oh, that’s right. Whether it was seawater or spring water or dirty water, if I was going to sterilize it, I would need to boil it first. And that meant I needed to start a fire.

Haste makes waste.

Because water was the most important, it made it necessary to prepare fire first—it didn’t immediately click for me how to build a filtration device (all I had was the faint image of a diagram with layers of rocks and sand), but when it came to starting a fire, there were several plans that were standard.

They were on the level of common sense.

I could put a stick up against a flat plank and rotate it with the palms of my hands in a drilling motion—perhaps because of my recent trauma, I could describe it as rotating the stick like how an aircraft enters into a tailspin. I didn’t know what the official name for this method was, but it was a scene that often showed up in manga. But was this method of fire-starting really something that could be done with the arm strength of a middle school girl? And not just any middle school girl, but a middle school girl with slender arms who was bad at physical activity and liked staying indoors?

After digging a little deeper into my memory, I remembered the more advanced method of wrapping a rope around the stick (like a snake?) and then spinning the stick like a top, but with my intellect, I couldn’t understand how such a mechanism would work.

I didn’t even think I described it correctly just now.

If Hanekawa-san, famed for her extensive knowledge, had washed up on an uninhabited island like this, she probably wouldn’t have any problems at all… I was tormenting myself with an inferiority complex even in a place with no one around, but no, I couldn’t start getting depressed here.

Or rather, it would be extremely idiotic of me to get depressed while stark naked on an uninhabited island—I had to remind myself, I was a person who had lived alone on a mountaintop for several months.

Well, at the time, I hadn’t exactly been a person, but compared to the extreme tedium of that stretch of time, surviving on an uninhabited island for a few days would surely be a piece of cake!—it would only be a few days, right?

This wouldn’t last any longer than seventy-two hours?

I wasn’t going to end up like Nobita-kun when he ran away from home to an uninhabited island, surely?

Anyway, while I still had the energy to do so, which in other words meant before I got any more depressed and anxious than this, I began looking around for some tools to start a fire—and I was easily able to find a dry wooden stick.

But, as for the flat planks I would apply friction to, I couldn’t find anything close no matter how much I looked.

"............?”

Ah, so that was it.

This wasn’t some sort of hardware store where I could find planks on a shelf… There weren’t any shelves to begin with, and a wooden plank was basically lumber that had already been processed.

Like the planks of a shelf.

In the Okinawa region, I was pretty sure there were trees with plank roots, or roots that were shaped like plants… But even if I were to recklessly head into the mountains and find a tree with such roots, I definitely didn’t have the skill (or, at the current moment, a knife) needed to dig up those half-covered roots or cut them out.

Plus, unlike the dry stick I’d just picked up, a living tree was going to be somewhat damp, making it hard to start a fire with… But maybe that was just half-baked knowledge?

I remembered that, when it came to eucalyptus trees, they could start forest fires while they were still growing out of the ground because of their high oil content… They were dangerous trees that could produce conflagrations just from their leaves rubbing against each other due to a strong wind. At the same time, those trees were poisonous, so those cute koalas were taking on quite the risk by clinging onto them.

Eucalyptus…

Well, there didn’t seem to be any of those trees here in this forest.

I’d forgotten about this earlier, but the highest priority reason I needed to start a fire was for the important objective of emitting an SOS signal. Though, I had no intention to start a whole forest fire just for that purpose. That did seem like something Hanekawa-san would do… No, if it came down to it, maybe it was necessary to do something that audacious in order for help to arrive.

Preservation of nature was important, but I’d be mixing up my priorities if I died for the sake of preserving nature—there wasn’t a need to allow myself to be eaten by Iriomote cats for the sake of their protection. Probably.

I was getting really tired of my own smallness, making me live with diffidence even on a deserted island—to think I’d be conscious of the public eye where no one was around. But here, there wasn’t any strong person that I could curry favor with. It truly made me nostalgic for those days where I used to be Nakuna-chan’s or Tsukihi-chan’s underling.

Even now, I’d probably swear my allegiance to those two… If it were those two, they’d probably be able to start a fire in no time at all, somehow or other.

Tsukihi-chan’s name had “fire” in it, after all.53

She could probably start fires just by getting mad.

Now, to come back from my escape from reality… While there was a stick, there were no planks, which left me stranded when it came to my plan of starting a fire using frictional heat… Saying that I was stranded was an unfortunate metaphor to use on an uninhabited island,54 but rather than attempt to manufacture my own plank-like object somehow, it would probably be faster for me to attempt a different method.

In terms of “science experiments” that a fifteen-year-old could easily think of…

(1) Focusing light onto black paper using a magnifying glass.

(2) Striking flint for the ignition.

(3) Setting off sparks with a light bulb.

It was those three options, I suppose.

If this were actually Hawaii,

(4) Seeking out the crater of a volcano.

Would also be an option, but at this point, I didn’t get any indication that I was on a volcanic island.

As such, while I didn’t have a magnifying glass or black paper, if I could find some sort of natural alternatives for those, (1) seemed like the easiest method. If Ononoki-chan were here with me, she’d probably scold me, saying that being so quick to go down the easy route is what made me Hyakkoku, but right now, preserving my stamina was important. Before that, if Ononoki-chan were here, we’d be able to escape in an instant with “Unlimited Rulebook”.

I needed to do what I could do, of course while I still had my stamina and a full stomach, but also in terms of my mood, with my adrenaline pumping from the extraordinary nature of having washed up on an uninhabited island… There was no doubt that I would lose all motivation to do anything once I came to my senses.

Besides, even if I didn’t take the easy route, and even if I’d found some dead wood in the shape of a board, I wouldn’t have been able to start a fire through friction with my arm strength.

I’d probably be able to work something out even without black paper… But a magnifying glass, hmm.

If I’d been a glasses girl, I could’ve used my glasses as an alternative, so this was yet another difference I found between me and Hanekawa-san—or was Hanekawa-san no longer a glasses girl anymore? Was it possible to achieve the same result with contact lenses?

Since I wasn’t a glasses girl myself, I wasn’t too certain about this, but I recalled there being something about glasses having either convex or concave lenses… It really showed how shallow my relationship with Hanekawa-san was.

I didn’t think that contact lenses could be used to start fires, but if there was anything that could be used as an alternative to glasses which were an alternative to a magnifying glass… Maybe… A goldfish bowl, perhaps?

This form of ignition, dependent on the concentration of the sun’s rays, was something I’d heard of happening with goldfish bowls or snow globes placed by a window—it’s much too ironic that water is what causes a fire to start in those cases, but for me, it would be very good news.

Because, while it wasn’t drinkable, there was so much water right before my very eyes, so much that I could even sell it… However, there weren’t any goldfish bowls. If there were any, I’d buy one for any price. Which now made me realize how my classmates were feeling when they let themselves be scammed by a con man… Surely, if you were someone in love with love, then you would normally find yourself with a feeling of longing on the level that I was feeling now.

However, even if there weren’t any goldfish bowls, there had to be some sea glass around here, right? After all, this was the sea.

I decided to postpone figuring out how I would turn sea glass into a magnifying glass for later, and I set forth my comfortable resting spot with an improvised sunroof to go beachcombing… If I were lucky, perhaps I might even find an actual magnifying glass that had washed ashore.

Of course, a lighter or matches would be even better.

Although, I was scared of matches, so those wouldn’t work.

But perhaps it was wrong of me to adopt this wait-and-see (at the sea)55 approach, as not only were there obviously no lighters or matches or magnifying glasses, but I was also unable to find a single piece of sea glass.

The only thing I gained from marching stark naked towards the shoreline was the feeling of being in some sort of avant-garde film, and I dejectedly returned to my original position under the leaves—I had only wasted my energy beneath the sun.

My motivation would easily drop with a simple setback like this.

Well, there was something I’d gained.

This felt like I was saying that I had bad news and bad news… While it may have been too lofty a goal to find sea glass in this situation, I’d been hoping that there might be anything useful that had washed ashore, but even that expectation had been betrayed.

Even though we lived in a world where the problem of microplastics was so controversial—couldn’t there have been at least one or two plastic bottles that drifted ashore?

Or a wooden plank.

If some kind of plank that was nothing but marine debris had washed ashore, it would’ve been possible for the dead proposal of using frictional heat to be revived… However, as far as I’d steadily (and later, trudgingly) walked around, this beach was completely clean and free of debris.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t just find what I wanted.

There were no beach sandals or empty cans, no styrofoam or buoys or fishing gear, no bottles with messages inside, and not even any parts of the plane that had fallen apart—of course, it was fine for a beach to be clean, but for a beach to have absolutely no debris washed ashore seemed a little unusual to me.

To put it in a way that might sound misleading, a beach was supposed to be the ultimate destination where marine debris ended up—any debris lighter than water would constantly be floating along with the waves, so it was probabilistically inevitable for the debris to end up drifting onto a sandy beach (as long as it didn’t drift anywhere else) after weathering the stormy seas.

The mechanism behind trash littering a beach was not solely due to beachgoers’ lack of manners, and part of the problem was in fact due to how this planet called Earth was structured—but despite all that, on this uninhabited island’s beach, not a single man-made object could be seen.

As if the island had been surrounded by a barrier.

"............”

And so, the second bit of bad news was that, despite all that, it was a fact that I myself had drifted ashore onto this beach—and this wasn’t meant to be some self-deprecating way of calling myself trash.

That was more like something Doujima Mayumi-san would say.

If there was something about the ocean currents that made it difficult for driftwood to end up at this cove, then it was quite the wonder how the disaster (I may as well call it an airplane crash) had thrown me like a sea cucumber all the way here.

Perhaps it was possible for a miracle like that to occur, but I was averse to simply accepting this as “it just happened to end up like this”, even more than I was averse to the words, “just happened to be cute”—it was causing friction, so much so that it could even start a fire.

I wanted to search for other survivors as soon as possible once my most pressing agenda items were resolved, but at this point, the idea that I might be the only one here was not particularly reassuring—wasn’t there something off about this island itself?

I’d been thinking that I’d miraculously survived by drifting onto one of the many uninhabited islands in the ocean, but what if—what if I’d been trapped inside this barrier?

What if I’d been sealed?

Such baseless delusions had sprung forth from within me. It was just the imagination of an aspiring mangaka running wild… But was it really okay to dismiss it in that way? Maybe it was paranoia stemming from a victim mentality?

If there was some strict regulation imposed on this island that prevented man-made objects from drifting ashore, then it would explain why I was stark naked, though it was an unpleasant detail—if this were a manga, isn’t it normal for there to be a rule that says, “clothes that are being worn are safe”?

If so, then if I had been a glasses girl, it would have been highly likely for my glasses to get lost amidst the waves, too… My eyesight was surprisingly good for someone who read manga and played video games all the time, but I guess I could thank my parents for that, though all they did was spoil me, according to Kaiki-san. Because eyesight is mostly hereditary.

Parents and children…

No, I needed to stop thinking about those things for now. About my relationship with my parents, of course, but also the mystery of why I couldn’t find a single man-made object—whether or not there was a barrier was also a question that could be put on hold. There were no shelves in which I could shelve those ideas, but there was probably some reason that my ignorant self simply couldn’t think of.

I had to take my meager reasoning and deductive skills and focus them onto a single point, as though concentrating the sun’s rays.

I had to fire up my synapses.

Right now, I didn’t have a choice but to abandon plan (1) of the various incendiary devices I’d thought of—meanwhile, something like plan (3) was so foolish that it couldn’t even serve as the caricature of an idea. Expecting to use electricity in an environment with no man-made objects, especially in an era where LED was the norm… It was the same as making a plan to wait for lightning to strike.

Well, with how many sins I’d committed, it wouldn’t be that surprising if I was suddenly struck by a bolt of lightning…

So my only path to take was plan (2) of using flint…

It was no longer a multiple-choice question.

It was now like a yes-no question.

What was the difference between flint and any other stone? If I broke the boulder I’d sat down on, would its pieces be able to start a fire…? From my vague recollections, flint was also called flintstone,56 and was really a special kind of stone… In that case, I might as well be searching for the philosopher’s stone.

It felt like the factors needed for survival were only getting stronger. While I was only getting weaker.

However, it wasn’t as though the stone itself would burn, so I could imagine that any harder stone could be used as a substitute. Basically, all I needed was to set off some sparks—so if I had some firewood that could be set alight by those sparks… Well, rather than firewood, wood chips from when a tree gets sawed down would be easier to burn… Right?

Not that I had a saw to begin with, but even if I couldn’t fell a tree with brute force, I was pretty sure I could get my hands on some wood chips. What could I do, if I couldn’t even do that much?

Ultimately, after thinking around in circles, my first plan of action had ended up with neither fire nor water, but the idea of making a stone knife, which I had previously dismissed as a mere recreational activity. It made me dizzy thinking about how shallow my initial armchair reasoning had been, but in any case, my life on this uninhabited island had turned the rudder in that direction—if there was no ship, then there wasn’t a rudder to turn, but in order for me to not be shipwrecked any further, I needed to act.

If I failed, then I’d just have to make the most out of that failure.