Monogatari Series - Volume 5 - Chapter 6.18

018

The wood-and-mortar Tamikura Apartments, Room 201. Hitagi Senjogahara’s place of residence.

I hadn’t called in advance, deliberately showing up without an appointment. Proof of my resolve.

There was no fancy device like an intercom for these apartments. I made a backward fist and knocked on Senjogahara’s door.

No answer─I knocked again.

Still no answer.

This time I gave the knob a try. It was unlocked.

How careless could you be?

While Hitagi Senjogahara was a wall of iron when it came to her up-close and personal defenses, in general her long-range defense had more holes than a block of Swiss cheese.

As for the woman herself─

“……”

She was sitting in the modest apartment room─sharpening pencils.

She seemed to be absorbed in the task.

A state of perfect Zen.

She didn’t even notice me.

Obviously there was nothing particularly odd about a high-school senior sharpening pencils─it was a normal part of keeping one’s stationery in order. But a glance at the massive pile (of about a hundred?) next to the newspaper she was working over made it clear that something was amiss.

If I were to make a comparison…she resembled a warrior preparing her weapons for battle.

“Err…Miss ’Gahara?”

“Araragi, I want to know…”

I was wrong about not having been noticed. She just hadn’t bothered to look in my direction─my visit, it seemed, was less pressing than sharpening those pencils.

Still gazing at the tip of the one she’d just sharpened, she said, “If a hundred sharpened pencils that you happened to have on you impaled a third party, that would qualify as an accident, yes?”

“It would be an incident!”

And how!

The local news section would be all over the Pencil Murder!

“Heh,” she said. “Then I’ll use that very sheet of newspaper to sharpen my next batch of pencils.”

“Calm down, Senjogahara! Despite the smug look on your face, that wasn’t such a clever joke!”

Don’t waste your precious store of smiles on it!

You only crack a smile an average of five times per day!

The box-cutter─probably the same one she’d thrust into my mouth─had turned pitch-black with lead. She turned it slowly in my direction, the blade glittering in the light.

A black sheen.

“Take your shoes off and come in, Araragi. Don’t worry, I won’t kidnap you again.”

“All right…”

Closing the door behind me and turning the lock, which Senjogahara had left undone, I took off my shoes and stepped into the tatami room. Since it was only six mats, I didn’t even have to take a look around to see that she was alone.

“Where’s your dad?”

Senjogahara lived together with her father, just the two of them. He didn’t seem to be in the bathroom (I’d overhear the water running), so he wasn’t home.

He was a bigwig at some foreign multinational. I already knew he hardly made it home most days, but today was Sunday─I guess with the massive debt he was shouldering, weekends were not a luxury he could afford.

“My father’s at work,” confirmed Senjogahara. “He’s on-site right now…well, posted overseas. But the timing works out great. I wouldn’t want to kidnap him too.”

“……”

But she’d kidnap her boyfriend.

You latent criminal.

“Well, I guess you became an actual criminal the moment you kidnapped me… Anyway, if I asked you why you were arming yourself, would you tell me?”

“Ask away. Like they say, there’s no such thing as a stupid question, and it would be more stupid to be Araragi.”

“Don’t paste my name into an adage! Especially not like that! It’s stupid to ‘be Araragi’?!”

“I was just telling you not to be shy.”

“I can tell you’re lying!”

Anyway.

I sat across from Senjogahara on the other side of the newspaper. It was piled high with pencil shavings.

“I’m going to settle things with Kaiki,” she said. “Since you refused my protection, the only option remaining is to go on the offensive.”

“Abducting isn’t protecting.” Well, I did know that she’d been protecting me, in her own way─and I might have never refused if it hadn’t been for Tsukihi’s text. “If that’s what it was, though, want to give kidnapping another try?”

“I already told you that I wouldn’t do it again.”

“All right. By the way, I talked to Hanekawa after that─”

“Huh? Did Mistress Hane… No, uh, did she say anything about me?”

“Were you just about to call her Mistress Hanekawa?”

“I-I wasn’t! There is no bullying at our school.”

“You’re being bullied?! You?!”

Well, the “model student prone to illness” façade that camouflaged Senjogahara’s wall of iron worked on our other classmates but no longer meant anything to Hanekawa… She wouldn’t just be understanding with Senjogahara all the time.

Hanekawa was a good person, but that meant she was willing to forgive wickedness, not overlook it.

“Senjogahara, you’ve shown your true colors so she’s going to get on your case, but don’t call it bullying, it makes her look bad.”

“When did I ever call it that? It’s because I like doing it that she lets me polish her shoes every morning!”

“Why are you so servile with her?!”

One hundredth! Show me just a hundredth of that deference!

“Anyway…so you’re going to meet Kaiki?” I asked.

“Yes. But don’t worry. I plan to settle this with words, if at all possible.”

“Says the lady with the full arsenal of pencils… Thank goodness I showed up. But Senjogahara? Does that mean you know where Kaiki is?”

“I had a business card.” Senjogahara reached into her bag and pulled out an aged scrap of paper. “He gave this to me a long time ago. It’s a miracle that I hadn’t torn it up and thrown it away. It’s only got a cell phone number listed…but luckily he still uses the same number.”

“Hmm… Let me see that for a second.”

It was a simple business card. The only things on it were the name Deishu Kaiki, its reading in phonetic letters, and, as Senjogahara said, a cell phone number.

Wait, no. There was one more thing, a job title.

─Ghostbuster.

“Senjogahara, I know it’s one of the worst things I could say, but wasn’t it your own fault if you were taken in by this?”

“That’s the trap. It’s hard to believe that someone who’d go for such a silly title is actually a fraud.”

“Maybe…”

True, I actually heard somewhere that one of the techniques used in cons was to intentionally come off as phony.

Appearing overtly phony made the target assume the opposite─since anything that sounded so fake couldn’t actually be fake. Usually, it would just arouse suspicion, but maybe the tactic did work better on overcautious marks.

“If you’re going to say that, Mister Oshino was about as suspicious as they come,” Senjogahara pointed out. “Compared to him, even Kaiki is a respectable adult.”

“Yeah, a Hawaiian shirt versus a suit…”

They did have a few points in common. It’s not like Oshino was just volunteering his services, either… In fact, in my case, he asked for five million yen.

Not that I thought the price was high, considering.

“So then, Senjogahara, you called this number─and spoke to Kaiki?”

“Yes. He doesn’t seem to have changed at all─dreary as a swamp. I haven’t just been twiddling my thumbs since your release. Sure, I was in a bit of a funk after Hanekawa scolded me, but that only lasted for about five hours.”

“Five hours?!”

Senjogahara could be skittish about the strangest things. Hanekawa really was her nemesis.

Having been lured out by Karen’s fake message (which actually must have been Hanekawa’s doing), Kaiki would be wary of using his cell phone for business purposes. But it seemed he hadn’t disposed of the phone, itself, so far. Taking into account the age of the business card as well, it was more than mere luck but a miracle that Senjogahara had been able to contact him.

But did the miracle favor us?

“Then by my calculation,” I said, “you made the call not long before I got here.”

“Very astute. Not everyone can perform single-digit addition in their heads.”

“Do you have to make fun of me all the time?!”

“When does it get difficult for you? Multiplication?”

“I’m good all around at math!”

“Wow. Are you bragging?”

“Nkk…”

Maybe I was! So?!

“Hah,” snorted Senjogahara. “Says the man who latched on to Fleming’s left-hand rule so hard he didn’t even know Fleming’s right-hand rule existed until just the other day. You, brag? That’s preposterous. Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to use such a big word.”

“Hey, I might be especially bad at physics and modern Japanese, but what’s so wrong with knowing what I’m good at?!”

“Yes, yes, of course, of course. You’re blameless, and I’m always to blame.”

“But you are! You totally are.”

“And? What did you want to ask me based on the conclusion you derived from your differential and integral calculus? You came here motivated by a mathematical understanding that the roots are inverse and absolute, didn’t you?”

“There’s something seriously wrong with you as a person!”

“As a person, perhaps, but not as a beautiful woman.”

“As anything!”

Geez. Sometimes I had to wonder why I was dating her.

Um, I loved her, didn’t I… Remind me, what exactly about her?

Since she’d prompted me─I seized the opportunity and did ask her. “Is it all right if I come with you? If you’re going to settle things with Kaiki─I want to join you.”

“I’m willing to pretend I didn’t hear anything.” I know I should have seen it coming, but her response was as cold as ice, her tone even drier than usual. “This is what they mean by a dog that licks the hand that feeds it…”

“I know I should be angry that you’re comparing your boyfriend to a dog, but I’m such a comedian I can’t help but quip: That just means it likes you.”

Not even biting the hand that feeds it.

I was the one getting licked here.

How confusing.

“If you don’t want to die,” Senjogahara warned, “take back what you just said.”

“It’s my sister. Kaiki has done something to her.” I didn’t take back my words and instead buttressed them. “He hit her with some kind of weird aberration, the Cinderswarm Bee, and she’s got a burning fever. I managed to neutralize it somewhat by absorbing half of it, but there’s no saying how it might progress.”

“You absorbed half of the aberration? Are you all right?”

Senjogahara’s face remained expressionless, but she seemed to be showing genuine concern for my wellbeing. One of the occasional displays of humanity from my girlfriend.

I’ve rarely seen her direct such feelings to anyone but myself. It was a limited-offer humanity, conditions may apply.

“Yeah,” I answered, “thanks to my vampiric healing. I wouldn’t say I’m in tip-top shape, though.”

I felt a little sluggish─hot.

I was hardly burning up, but I might be standing too close to a heated brand.

“I see,” Senjogahara noted. “Then it’s too late for you to turn back─not that I suppose you would if your sister is involved.”

“It’s not just my sister.”

“Huh?”

“You are, too,” I said, looking straight at Senjogahara. “You were about to do something stupid for my sake─like face Kaiki alone. Right?”

“It’s not only for your sake. Kaiki is…just something that I need to settle.”

Senjogahara─had once lost something dear to her.

“I can’t forget about it, can’t just leave it alone─I need to bring it to an end. If I don’t, I won’t be able to move forward. So much so that if Kaiki hadn’t returned to this town─I’d have gone looking for him instead.”

“It’s that important to you?” I was intimidated by her determination, but I had to ask. “Wasn’t it supposed to be─trivial?”

“I was just tsundering.”

“Tsundering…”

Now it was even functioning as a verb… Honestly, it sounded scarily German to me.

“So, what… Are you planning to get revenge on all five of the frauds?” I asked. “That’s over now─isn’t it? Aren’t there other things you need to settle?”

“Don’t be silly. They might have been con artists, but I’m not interested in playing the victim, as Mister Oshino would put it. They betrayed me, but it’s not like they forced me to rely on them, and I wouldn’t hold such an unreasonable grudge. I’m not that kind of…that kind of… Okay, let’s put my personality aside, but I don’t plan on getting it all wrong.”

“……”

So there was a problem with her personality.

She was aware of it.

“But Kaiki is different,” she said.

“How so?”

“He ushered my parents’ divorce,” Senjogahara remarked without feeling. If she’d put any in her voice─it wasn’t hard to imagine how it might have sounded. “Obviously, I can’t lay all the blame at his feet, and I won’t─but he made a plaything out of my family. I can’t forgive him for that. If I forgave him for it─I wouldn’t be myself anymore.”

“……”

Senjogahara’s father and mother divorced by mutual agreement─late last year, I believe. It was around that time that she moved out of the house she’d lived in for many years and into these ramshackle apartments.

Since then…she hadn’t seen her mother─not even once.

“Even if it weren’t for Kaiki, I’m pretty sure my parents would have gotten divorced. Our family would have split up. My mother leaving─that was my fault, I think. But, Araragi, just because the outcome might have been the same, do you think I can forgive someone causing it out of malice? Just because it would have happened sooner or later anyways, is malice forgivable?”

“Malice…”

“I should have a monopoly on malice.”

“Well, I dunno about that, but…”

The charms that Kaiki was circulating must have affected the relationships of other people in Sengoku’s life.

Either for better or for worse.

It would be simple to say that any relationship that ended up crumbling thanks to such hocus-pocus would have crumbled anyway. But there was something wrong with that simplification.

By that logic, what else could you say? If a person was dying, was it all right to kill that person? If a thing was going to disappear─you could eradicate it?

If it was fake, it had no right to exist?

Where did it end?

“Out of greed─Kaiki used my encounter with the crab to make my family fall apart. Since it was going to anyway.”

“……”

“Maybe you were secondary to me in all this. Protecting you was a convenient pretext─it’s really just my resentment for Kaiki that’s driving me.”

“Pretext…”

“I was tsundering,” Senjogahara said─very quietly. “Don’t misunderstand, Araragi. None of this was for your sake.”

“I…doubt that, I think.”

I say this with conviction─with unfortunate conviction.

The crab that Senjogahara encountered.

An event that occurred while she’d been possessed by it.

Back then, she probably hadn’t even been able to hate Deishu Kaiki. Because that’s the kind of aberration the crab was.

That had to be Senjogahara’s regret.

Deishu Kaiki, the ominous Deishu Kaiki─she hadn’t been able to hate him in real time.

That was Hitagi Senjogahara’s regret.

That she couldn’t hate him as it happened─unlike Karen and Tsukihi Araragi, who did out of a shallow sense of justice.

In truth, she should have been angry─like a child. Like a child who’d just lost her mother.

“But in that case, there’s one thing I still don’t understand. Kaiki is supposed to be a fake and swindler, right? But from what you’re saying─it sounds like he was able to spot your crab aberration.”

Just like he had managed to infect Karen with this Cinderswarm Bee.

Wouldn’t that mean…Kaiki was actually the real deal?

“Who knows?” Senjogahara said. “But a fake with powers surpassing the real deal is also more dangerous than the real deal─though at the time I thought he was nothing but a quack. Thinking back, he may have been feigning incompetence. Just in order to squeeze more money from my father.”

“Now he’s hitting up junior-high kids for their milk money… My sisters were trying to stop him when he got Karen.”

“I see. So your sister is a Justice Man, too.”

“Yikes, that name…”

“Well, she’s a girl so maybe Justice Woman.”

“You know, your coinage sounds even crappier than you think.”

“The Fire Sisters of Tsuganoki Second Middle School… I heard some of the rumors.”

“Right, you did.” In Senjogahara’s case, it was more like gathering intel than getting wind of gossip.

“Like brother, like sister─you badmouth them a lot, and that makes sense. Justice types tend to be incompatible.”

“Don’t flatter them… They’re make-believe defenders of justice. As for me, I never thought of myself as an agent of justice. We’re more like a bunch of kids squabbling over who gets to play in a vacant lot.”

In that sense, wondering if it was “hating people who’re like me” or “self-hatred” was overblown.

It was just siblings fighting, nothing special.

“Araragi, let me say for the record that justice won’t work against this ominous fellow─not as far as I can tell. Let me be blunt. You and your justice might be potent against hypocrites, but it’s weak against really bad people.”

“I keep telling you, justice isn’t my thing…”

My sisters were, at least, right. I wasn’t even that.

I could make it pretty─but not right.

Shinobu had been a victim of that very shortcoming.

There was a long line of mistakes leading up to where I was today.

“Still,” I said, “I can’t just stand by while you turn into a criminal.”

“My plan isn’t to commit a crime. It’s to mete out punishment.”

“Modern society would view it as one and the same.”

If she’d been born in mythical times, people might have handed down tales of some seriously heroic deeds… Without a doubt, she’d been born into the wrong era.

Either that, or the wrong world.

But I, for one, was grateful─that she’d been born into this world and this era. I felt truly grateful to have met her.

“Senjogahara, maybe you don’t realize this, but I love you. If you did turn to crime and were sent to prison, I would visit you every day─but if possible, could we always be together? At times I wonder why I’m dating you─but I love you so much, I don’t need any reason.”

It goes without saying─but the list of things I want to protect includes you, Senjogahara.

“If we’re going, let’s go together,” I insisted. “Protect me─and I’ll protect you.”

“Dammit…that sounded insanely cool.” Senjogahara’s face remained stiff and expressionless, but her shoulders were trembling from whatever she was feeling. Was that a genuine reaction? “If I were a man, your runaway manliness would make me so mad with jealousy that I’d murder you.”

“You’re scaring me!”

“Luckily I’m a woman, so I can just be attracted to you instead.”

With that─Senjogahara pushed over the pile of pencils by her side.

“Okay, Araragi. We’ll do it your way.”

“You mean you’ll take me to see Kaiki?”

“Yes.” Senjogahara nodded. “But in exchange, I have one request.”

“A request?”

“If ‘request’ sounds too mushy for your tastes, then call it a condition─a prerequisite for bringing you to Kaiki. Well?”

Her tone was testing, but there was only one way I could answer.

“Go on. Whatever the request, or however many, I accept.”

“I only have one.” Araragi, she called my name gently. “I’m meeting Kaiki─in order to turn a page. Just like when Mistress─I mean, Hanekawa cut her hair.”

“Hold on, you did it again. I can’t possibly let it slide.”

“I’m not being threatened!”

“You’re being threatened?! By Hanekawa?!”

“It’s only normal to kneel for her, wherever we are!”

“Wherever, you say?!”

“Yes, just like when Hanekawa cut her hair,” Senjogahara reprised, ignoring my interjection and reverting to her usual tone, “and was able to move forward─I plan to face Kaiki and make a break with my past.”

The past. Senjogahara’s past.

Did that mean middle school? Her first year of high school? Her second year?

Or…some other time?

She declared, “I, too, am ready to move forward.”

“……”

She was already facing forward. I considered saying as much─but it would have been superfluous. Besides, maybe facing forward and moving forward─were two different things.

“Okay, so, what’s your request?” I asked her. “What do I have to do for you to take me with you?”

“I’m not ready to tell you yet.”

“It’s something you can’t even tell me?”

“You’re going to listen to any request, right?”

“Well, sure…”

But it was scary.

I wasn’t going to back out of it─but that was scary.

Like signing on the dotted line of an unfilled contract.

After all, it was Senjogahara I was dealing with!

“Once we’re through with Kaiki─however that turns out─I’ll tell you.”

“Why not now, then?”

“If I told you, it wouldn’t be foreshadowing.”

“Foreshadowing!”

“Yes. You die, and forever regretting that I didn’t voice the request now, I live out my life alone.”

“So I die in this plot line?!”

“Yes, and in the climactic scene, the telescope you gave me on my birthday comes into play as a key item.”

“I can’t think of any situation where it would! Forget about foreshadowing or whatever, just tell me now!”

“Fine, forget the whole thing.”

“……”

If she was going to be like that, I had no choice. Senjogahara drove a cutthroat bargain as usual.

I nodded. “All right─understood.”

“Ah. Then let’s go.” Senjogahara returned my nod, her face as blank as ever. “We’ll protect each other.”