Monogatari Series - Volume 31 - Chapter 13

Nadeko Mirror

Let’s talk about Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll & Hyde. Why yes, I did read it just to make myself look good, sorry. Whenever a junior high student like me (I’m Nadeko Sengoku, by the way, hello) reads a book, especially foreign literature, they’re almost always doing it just to show off (100% fact). To tell you the truth, this book is one of the ones I added to my shelf to make myself look smarter back when Koyomi-onii-chan came over to play. Sometime after that, I picked it off the bookshelf while I was cleaning up my room. I’m not used to reading, so the very manageable page count was probably the biggest reason I chose this one. But, in any case, reading is an encounter. I thought it was a very interesting book. It’s a very famous work, so I already knew some of the details, but it turned out to be a masterpiece that differed from my expectations in a good way.

Alrighty then. It’s human nature to want to brag a little after you read a classic. So after finishing it, the first thing I do is call up my friend, Tsukihi-chan.

“Jekyll & Hyde? Oh, are you talking about The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? Yeah, I read that, too! That really takes me back… I read it back when I was in elementary school, so I’m a little hazy on the details, but the premise was pretty interesting. Hmm, so you just finished reading it, Nadeko-chan?”

…She’s already read it.

When you read something beyond your level, but it turns out the person you’re bragging to about it has already read it, the blow to your pride is nothing to shake a stick at. Tsukihi-chan’s perfect pronunciation of the English title was nothing to shake a stick at, either.

It feels like the wind has been taken out of my sails, but the fighter in me won’t let me quit here. If she’s already read it, then that’s that. There are still things we can discuss about it. So I ask her opinion.

“What did you think about it, Tsukihi-chan? Err, I mean… you know, about Dr. Henry Jekyll and Mr. Edward Hyde’s relationship. I guess they were kinda symmetrical, like mirrored reflections of each other…”

I choose my words carefully. It would be embarrassing to say something off the mark, after all. Saying something stupid would give Tsukihi-chan a reason to get all excited. I’m a total beginner when it comes to reading, so there’s a very good chance that I misread or misinterpreted something.

“Mr. Hyde, who’s ‘only’ wicked, might seem like a totally different personality… the complete opposite of Dr. Jekyll, who’s ‘only’ upright, but they didn’t hate each other at all. If anything, they really needed each other…”

I sound like I’m reciting a crummy book report, more of a summary than an analysis, but Tsukihi-chan seems to understand what I’m getting at.

“That’s true. While you couldn’t really call them friends, they certainly made something of an odd couple. Just like how the north and south poles of a magnet attract each other, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were drawn to one another. It’s comparatively easy to see why Mr. Hyde needed Dr. Jekyll, but looking at it from an outside perspective, it might be harder to understand why Dr. Jekyll needed Mr. Hyde,” she says, agreeing with me.

Tsukihi-chan seems to be in a good mood today. I hit the jackpot (days where I go broke are more common).

“Dr. Jekyll’s friends couldn’t understand why he tried to defend Mr. Hyde, either. And when he left the lawyer, Gabriel John Utterson, a will that entrusted everything he had to Mr. Hyde, it went past strange and straight into suspicious. It was a complete mystery why he would want to do that.”

Even though she said that she was the hazy on the details, she’s able to touch pretty deeply on the content of the story. That’s Tsukihi-chan for you. It’s enough to leave me the one feeling overwhelmed, since I’ve only just finished reading it. But I have to fight on. I have to keep trying until it’s obvious how hard I’m trying.

“If you think about it that way, Dr. Jekyll might have relied on Mr. Hyde more than the other way around… I guess it’s hard to follow the logic that pure good could seek out evil, though.”

But even if it doesn’t make sense logically, I can understand it on an emotional level. At the very least, in the context of the story, I think it’s very convincing that Dr. Jekyll would be fascinated by his bad friend.

Good hates evil, and evil hates good… That’s a very one-sided way of looking at it. There’s room for the perspective that good can envy evil, and evil can envy good, too.

“Well, when it comes down to it, people tend to seek out the things they don’t have within other people. See, for example, you may look up to me, but it’s not like I don’t have anything at all to learn from you, either.”

Tsukihi-chan went and decided that I look up to her… Well, she isn’t wrong. As someone who tends towards self-hatred, I really respect the way Tsukihi-chan loves herself so much.

“I’d never want to be like that myself, but your earnest, one-track mind can seem almost stunning to me.”

“So you’d never want to be like me…”

The first part is so depressing that it’s hard to hear the compliment.

“But,” Tsukihi-chan speaks, suddenly changing the mood. “To answer your question of what I thought of their relationship, I’d have to say that I don’t think it was a very healthy one. Being together with their polar opposite made them both go bad. It hardly seemed like a very constructive relationship. It was a destructive bond, in which neither of them could become happy…”

A destructive bond, in which neither of them could become happy. A destructive bond that the people around them couldn’t understand.

Still, looking at the world around us, I don’t think that sort of relationship is so uncommon. You could end the argument by saying that relationships between people can’t be clearly explained, and that only the people in question can really understand them, but Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde had some reason that they didn’t want to put an end to things between them. From her blunt criticism of the two, Tsukihi-chan probably had a similar impression after reading it… I think.

“What about you, Nadeko-chan? If a girl who was your complete opposite suddenly showed up, do you think you could grow to like her?”

“Huh…? What do you mean?”

“Exactly what I said. If you met your polar opposite—if you met Anti-Nadeko-chan, do you think you’d get along with her? Do you think you could see eye-to-eye?”

“Hmmm…”

I’m a little taken with the clever nickname of “Anti-Nadeko,” but it’s hard for me to picture a girl with a personality the exact opposite of mine. A cheerful, lively, sociable girl who reads lots of books, looks people straight in the eye, and works hard… maybe? Thinking about it that way, she sounds totally flawless, and I’m sure I couldn’t help but like her… Still, no matter how I might feel about her, I bet someone like that would hate me. She’d hate me, or maybe I’d just make her mad…

“We might not get along… and we might not see eye-to-eye, but I’d still like to meet her.”

“Even if she hates you? Even if she gets mad at you?”

“Yeah.”

I want to meet her, and I want to see what she’s like. It feels like, through meeting her, I’d be able to encounter a brand new “Nadeko Sengoku.” It’s sort of like the reason you’d look in a mirror—but I’m sure she’d reflect my image even more vividly than a mirror, so I’d have to be careful not to turn to stone upon seeing her.

“If she gets mad at me,” I say, while thinking to myself that Anti-Nadeko-chan would probably hate this about me, too, “then she’ll get mad, and that’ll be that.”