Monogatari Series - Volume 6 - Chapter 7.08

008

Hitagi Senjogahara, who encountered a certain crab in between middle school and high school, was conned by five frauds during those two years before Mèmè Oshino finally resolved her physical problem─to some degree, she must have wanted to be fooled, but in any case, the first of that quintet was Deishu Kaiki.

The man who was the beginning and the end.

The first and last man.

Called the ghostbuster.

That was Deishu Kaiki.

A late middle-aged man dressed in a sable-black suit finished with a deep black tie, like he’d just come back from a funeral and was in mourning, he was visibly ominous.

A Fire Sisters act of justice had recently targeted this ominous man.

He was positioned as the villain.

I’ll leave out the finer details, but he’d been circulating charms that utilized aberrations, mainly among local middle-school students. When you thought about it, it was a pretty large-scale con, developed systematically over several months─he was stopped before the damage could grow too severe, which I guess was a silver lining.

But that didn’t mean we came out of it unharmed. Karen was stung by a bee─and all the follow-up was a real pain. I would in no way say that things went smoothly.

Still, it did give Hitagi Senjogahara the opportunity to face Deishu Kaiki directly and deal with her past trauma─for a closure of sorts.

She expelled all the venom from her system.

Deishu Kaiki promised never to show his face to us again and left our town for good─and yet.

And yet.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“Don’t be foolish. You thought I’d honor our promise? If so you are a dolt. The lesson for you to take home from this is that promises are made to be broken,” Kaiki answered ominously while stuffing his face with a blueberry muffin.

He could seem ominous even at a Mister Donut.

You’d think his image would improve at least a bit, but it didn’t make him one iota cuter.

I’d made a lot of tough-sounding claims at the time, like I should never meet Deishu Kaiki again for the rest of my life and If we meet again, it will probably be to kill each other… And now here I was bumping into him at the neighborhood donut shop.

You gotta be kidding me. All that tough talk, gone to waste.

Even after I (and Shinobu) walked over and sat down across from him without asking, he simply continued to eat, betraying not even the slightest hint of surprise─one thing Kaiki wasn’t, was ordinary.

He may have been a fake and a swindler─but he was every inch the real deal.

“Or so I would usually answer.”

Right when I almost opened my mouth, wondering how I might chew out the shameless man, Kaiki swiftly issued a retraction─the timing was nasty, like he was trying to annoy me.

“Relax,” he said. “Exceptionally rare though this may be, for the time being, I do in fact plan to keep my promise with Senjogahara─doing so would align best with my own interests. The interests of money, that is. I never meant to revisit this town a second time.”

“Yeah, fine, but you’re here…”

“I never meant to a second time. Only this time.”

“……”

The conman!

What a conman!

Actually, if he was going to be like that, this was his third visit at least, wasn’t it?

Prior to the issue of him being the real deal or a fake, a lot of what he said and did was just so small-time.

It was like he was papering over his smallness with that baritone of his.

“Kaiki… Whether or not you intended to deceive us, you made a big show of cutting and running. Why come back here to eat donuts?”

“I remembered I had a coupon that’s only good for this branch─I came back to redeem it.”

“I-Is that another lie?”

“What a vexing statement. I’ve never woven a lie or a monk’s hair,” the conman insisted solemnly.

This guy really was incorrigible… I already knew that, but still.

For reals.

But you had to admit, the man had balls.

Boldfaced─or barefaced. Way too audacious.

He had to know that if Karen or Senjogahara found him, he wouldn’t get off so easy this time─yet here he brazenly sat, not even trying to sneak around. He made no move to run or hide but also seemed to have no defense plan in place.

Naturally, I had never been confident in the first place that he would really, truly, in the strictest sense of the word, keep his promise.

Any promise that wasn’t put in writing…

Wasn’t much of a promise at all─still, for Hitagi Senjogahara, forcing Deishu Kaiki to make one had been enough.

Had been.

Right…

The issue here wasn’t so much Karen but Senjogahara.

She was so nicely reborn, but a third encounter with Kaiki, at this stage, could result in a massive relapse.

If she went back to her acid-tongued ways now, I wouldn’t know how to handle it.

“What I said about the coupon was the truth, and that’s not all,” Kaiki deadpanned using what sounded to me like the wrong conjunction. He brought his double espresso to his lips─wait, since when did Mister Donut serve double espressos?

Did he make a special order? Why was even his drink raven-black?

They speak of someone “donning an ominous air,” but in Kaiki’s case he seemed to exhale an ominous air. It was like he sucked in oxygen and emitted black smoke. His very existence was ominous.

“It’s a boring, minor business, so don’t concern yourself, Araragi. I will be out of your hair soon─”

“I’d rather you got out of it right now.”

“If wishes were ponies, young man. I didn’t want to see you any more than you do. I suffered some very great losses thanks to you all─the only saving grace is that your sister got busy taking care of all the follow-up and spared any expenditure on my part.”

“……”

“If I am a plague to you lot, you are a plague to me as well.”

As Kaiki spoke, he chomped on another muffin.

It really didn’t suit him. As ominous inside as he appeared, the man still enjoyed sweet fare?

Of course, it was none other than Mèmè Oshino who’d tamed Shinobu with donuts─maybe being an expert on aberrations demanded a high sugar intake?

“The truth is, I still have more coupons remaining,” Kaiki divulged. “Now that you’ve spotted me, though, it’s best that I don’t use them. I will try to scalp them to someone. I wouldn’t want to tarry and have you bring Senjogahara here.”

“I would never.”

“I suppose not. However,” Kaiki said, glancing at Shinobu, who was concentrating on eating her donuts beside me with no apparent interest in our conversation. “You’re quite the wily fox, aren’t you? It seems you are as wicked as I am. Look at you, out in broad daylight, in the middle of summer, sporting this little blond Lolita around town, pleased with yourself as punch.”

“……”

Don’t call her Lolita.

And I wasn’t pleased as punch.

I wasn’t him.

Shinobu hadn’t bothered to help out during our confrontation with Kaiki (she must have been sleeping peacefully in my shadow when it went down), so in a way this was the first time the two had come face to face─hmm.

Though human, Kaiki was an expert, like Oshino. An expert other than Oshino.

I wondered how Shinobu’s rule worked in this case─especially since it didn’t involve an aberration.

“How about it, little girl? Would you mind if I took your picture? I’ll give you 500 yen per shot─I could earn 500,000 yen with such material,” the conman tried to strike a dubious bargain with the vampire at my side.

You had to watch this guy, he was a slick one.

But wait.

Did Kaiki honestly not realize what Shinobu was?

Well, I suppose he was ultimately only an expert fraud… He and Oshino were actually different types.

That’s right.

Kaiki─didn’t believe in aberrations.

To him, they were no more than tools that he used in his scams. The bee didn’t exist─nor did vampires.

“Hmph, I suggest ye look elsewhere. I would be underselling myself.”

“You can have one of my muffins.”

“A muffin?! My lord, this knave’s not half bad!”

“Don’t get taken in so easily.”

He’d never even pay 500 yen.

In fact, he probably hadn’t paid for all those muffins. In the worst-case scenario, he might have forged the coupons.

“Well, I’m not such a rube to fault other people for their predilections,” he claimed. “Offer me a decent sum, and I won’t tell Senjogahara about these unusual tastes of yours.”

“You try to blackmail people, just like that?”

Skullduggery came second nature to Kaiki. But it was no skin off my back if Senjogahara discovered that I’d taken Shinobu out on a date (if she found out about Hachikuji, though, I might be in trouble).

“I never cease to be amazed,” I said, “that someone like you actually exists. I bet you don’t even have Senjogahara’s contact info.”

She’d destroyed his cell phone.

And she didn’t move to Tamikura Apartments until after she’d been swindled by Kaiki─though maybe a conman could easily obtain a cell phone number?

Either way, I doubted Kaiki would carry through with it.

As far as he was concerned, Hitagi Senjogahara was no longer worth a single yen─in fact, when he came to this town to work his con on middle schoolers, he’d totally forgotten that there was a young woman here whose family he had defrauded.

Of course, that might have been another lie. But at the very least─Kaiki hadn’t tried to approach Senjogahara.

That. And that was it.

Even taking away the issue of money, or adding it for that matter, Senjogahara was broke now and what Kaiki called “an ordinary girl”─she didn’t interest him in any way.

Which…worked just fine for us.

I let out a sigh.

I’d be lying if I said taking Shinobu out on a first date hadn’t put a little spring in my step, miffed though I’d been at first that she was interrupting my studies… Running into Kaiki completely ruined it.

Now I felt like I was in the pits. The guy was like a reverse leprechaun. He was just way too ominous.

What a contrast with Hachikuji, whose mere sight filled me with joy─today I was being lift up only to be cast down like in that old game show, the Up-Down Quiz.

“Stop it with those eyes,” Kaiki complained. “That’s no look for a kid to inflict on an adult.”

“No, I was just thinking, you’re really like a crow.”

“A crow. I’ll take that as a compliment. The crow is a tough and very clever bird.”

“Well yeah, I guess…” Their jet-black color gave them a bad rep, but judging by appearances wasn’t fair. Crows were even said to bring good luck in some regions. “They do toss garbage around and make a mess, though.”

“They pick through garbage because humans put out garbage. On the grand planetary scale, it’s humans that are tossing garbage around.”

“You seem like the type who hates being environmentally friendly…”

“Speaking of making a mess, the other day I saw a crow eating a pigeon. It was a breathtaking sight, an explosion of feathers all around them.”

“I’d rather not picture that…”

What a downer conversation… Small talk with Kaiki was so not worth it. Not that I wanted to have fun chatting about birds with a guy like him in the first place.

Not just crows, but birds in general, were tough and tenacious creatures─I already knew that. Forget about small talk, I should have chosen to ignore Kaiki the moment I laid eyes on him─but Shinobu had prodded me.

Because I wasn’t going to insist, I needed to ask him─and came over to sit with him knowing full well that the experience would be unpleasant.

Protecting Senjogahara, though, was my strongest incentive, of course.

“Yozuru Kagenui and Yotsugi Ononoki. You know them, right?”

I’d phrased my question in such a needlessly leading manner because I didn’t want to create any untoward opportunities for Kaiki. If he didn’t know, he didn’t know, and if he didn’t feel like telling me, that was fine. The one thing I didn’t want was for him to make this complicated and to demand payment for the info.

I really wasn’t interested in haggling with a conman.

Unfortunately, a kid’s shallow tricks were no match for the crafty wiles of an adult.

“You want to know? I will tell you. Pay up.”

Kaiki thrust his chest out proudly.

What a syllogism.

Geez, the miser─though in his case it was more like plunder.

This was a man who declared that he valued money more than his own life. Just as the Fire Sisters upheld the ideals of justice, Kaiki upheld the principles of capitalism.

He’d grind justice beneath his boot─without batting an eye.

“Meeting coincidentally like this must be fate, Araragi,” he said. “I could offer you a discount, considering. I won’t even ask for a coupon.”

“Coincidentally, huh.”

Such an unhappy coincidence─but I had to make the most of it, true.

“All right…fine.”

It wasn’t worth arguing over. The moment he got me thinking that way, I had already fallen into the conman’s trap and become an easy mark. But that didn’t mean I was proceeding without a plan.

Coming off as a boob and making him underestimate me seemed like a good idea.

Why put him on his guard? A distrustful conman was no laughing matter.

“But no more lying,” I cautioned. “This blond Lolita possesses the amazing ability to see through any and all lies, all right?”

“Who’s lying now? I’ll give you credit, you’ve got some nerve trying to dupe a swindler,” Kaiki mocked me.

Of course he’d see through such a blatant lie─and underestimate me. I smiled inwardly, pleased with myself.

“No matter how you look at her,” he continued, “the young miss is a foreigner. She seems to struggle with the language and probably can’t make out half of what we’re saying.”

If he meant that as a joke, then maybe Deishu Kaiki had a pretty unique personality… But no, it could be another one of his ruses.

He’d already conned scores of naive middle schoolers in various ways─perhaps I wasn’t the only one trying to come across as a boob. I couldn’t be careful enough. This ominous man was a swindler who’d succeeded in deceiving even Hitagi Senjogahara.

Come to think of it, having been fooled by him, Senjogahara went so far as to commit the atrocity of abducting her boyfriend just to keep me from getting any closer to Kaiki─from having anything to do with him.

If she knew I was unexpectedly sitting face to face with him, she might lose it all over again.

Sigh… Now I had a secret to hide from my girlfriend.

It really was draining, though, squaring off against Kaiki like this.

Not fun at all.

My health bar was shrinking by the second.

“How much do you want, then─for information on the both of them,” I said, taking out my wallet as I spoke. I’d already spent about 1,500 yen to buy the ten donuts and two cups of coffee─as someone who lived off an allowance and depended on his parents, I couldn’t afford to be too careless with my money.

I was hoping to take Senjogahara on another date once she got back from her grandparents’ house.

I was dealing with an adult here, however, and chump change probably didn’t cut it.

Would two thousand yen be enough?

I opened up my wallet and pulled out two thousand-yen notes but wasn’t sure. That’s when Kaiki snatched the wallet from my hand with the most natural, practiced movement, saying, “Let me see.”

Oh boy, “Let me see”?

The movement was so subtle (a sleight of hand you could almost call beautiful) that I didn’t even reflexively tighten my grip in order to keep my wallet from getting stolen, and he just plucked it from me─it was the kind of dexterity that better suited a pickpocket than a swindler.

From Shinobu’s point of view, sitting next to me, it may have even looked as if I’d handed over the wallet without resistance. She was staring at me as if she thought her master was a moron.

“Hmph. I suppose this will do, Araragi. I will accept this miniscule amount in the way of wishing you and Senjogahara, the young couple, good luck in your future life.”

You didn’t need to be able to see through lies to know that his selfless words were utterly insincere. He slipped my wallet into the breast of his funereal suit.

Did the jerk just filch my entire wallet?

He was the real fiendish monster. Crows were cute compared to him.

Unless, Kaiki being who he is, I needed to thank him for leaving me with a generous two thousand yen?

But this wasn’t some heartwarming story where the wallet actually only contained coins now. My precious 10,000-yen bill was in there, okay?

“Ah, if I had acted likewise, I might have feasted on many more donuts…”

Shinobu nodded her head up and down several times with deep interest as she said that.

As an aberration, she was susceptible to surrounding stimuli, and she was receiving some bad influences from the human world in the present progressive tense.

Some people couldn’t help but be a negative influence, but I wished that Kaiki would show a little forbearance.

Or true forbearance.

“Of course, there is no such thing as a miniscule amount of money to me,” Kaiki noted. “I’m actually the one who came up with the phrase, ‘Look after the pennies, and the pounds will look after themselves.’”

Kaiki was going from lies to deluded boasts now. He was ominous, and the stuff he said made no sense. Just what kind of everyday life did this guy lead? I couldn’t imagine what he did in private when he wasn’t running scams.

Or maybe he was on call 24 hours a day, 365 days a year as a constant, tireless conman.

As the real deal, and as a fake.

But since things had already gone south, it was probably better if I hurried and asked my questions─otherwise, he might charge me extra like one of those greedy binoculars at an observatory deck.

“Now tell me. About Yozuru Kagenui and Yotsugi Ononoki.”

“Hmph. Of course I will─I’ve received currency so this is now a valid transaction. But Araragi, the fact that you’re asking me must mean that you already have some notion of your answer,” Kaiki pointed out calmly.

His face was hardly expressionless, but I couldn’t read anything from it─and even if I could, I would no doubt be mistaken. His was the real poker face.

This, too, was something that Hanekawa told me.

The term has come to mean a completely expressionless face, as in one that betrays no emotion, but apparently its original sense was different. The ability to evoke a completely unrelated emotion on your face than the one that you were actually feeling─that was the true poker face.

It only made sense since a game had given rise to the word. Just wearing a blank look wasn’t enough to deceive your opponents.

You couldn’t deceive them, or fake yourself.

Not hiding expressions, but making them. Or to take it a step further…

Not hiding emotions, but making them.

That was how you did it.

In that light, Hitagi Senjogahara, whose face had been like cast iron until recently, would have made a second-rate con artist.

Maybe she could hide expressions.

But she couldn’t fake emotions.

If she could, I’d never have seen through her act…

She was pretty clumsy that way.

“Those two are experts. Ghostbusters, like me,” Kaiki stated as if he were telling me nothing more special than an acquaintance’s culinary preferences. “However,” he added, “whereas I am a fake─they’re the real deal. If I am a conman, they’re onmyoji.”

“……”

Onmyoji.

At that word, I turned toward Shinobu, but she was completely absorbed in her donuts like nothing he had to say could possibly interest her. Talk about antisocial.

“I said ‘they’ out of habit,” Kaiki proceeded to correct myself, “but strictly speaking Kagenui would be the onmyoji, whereas Ononoki seems to be a shikigami─seriously. Yokai, ghosts, those two are a pain in the neck with their passion for the occult.”

Why don’t they just tell fortunes by blood type instead, he griped.

The pair hadn’t struck me as all that unpleasant─but maybe it went beyond appearances.

I asked Kaiki, “So you know them?”

“What makes you think so?”

“Well, the way you were talking… I don’t know. Something about your choice of words.”

“I only know their names. Kagenui is fairly well-known in the business… The aberration roller, they call her. You’d have to be a quack not to know of her, but I haven’t actually met her. A real deal like her pays no attention to fakes like me… In any case, I am in fact a quack of sorts.”

He had answered me in the negative.

Hmph.

It seemed somehow significant to me that he’d referred to Kagenui and Ononoki as “those two,” which sounded personal…but it was no more than a matter of word choice.

Word choice could be like wordplay, but they weren’t the same thing. There were plain slips of the tongue, too. Just like brothers and sisters had their sibling-speak, maybe experts formed a community via language.

“While we’re at it, Araragi, there is something that I would like to ask as well─though obviously I will not be paying for the honor.”

“……”

Sure.

Ask away.

“How do you know of that pair? As long as you’re on the straight and narrow, you’re even less likely to get involved with them than with me.”

“I don’t know about involved… They asked me for directions, that’s all.”

“So you didn’t just come across their names but met them face to face? That is even less believable─are you trying to pull a fast one on me?”

“You’re the last person who ought to be doubting someone’s sincerity.”

“Are you sure you’re not mistaken? Perhaps they gave false names…”

“Does standing on top of a mailbox or saying ‘with a dashing look’ with a blank look ring a bell?”

“Hmph. That’s them.”

Kaiki nodded.

So that was enough to verify their identities…

“Come to think of it, today’s been weird,” I observed. “I can’t believe I’ve run into three ‘authorities’ in one day─ugh, coincidence is a scary thing.”

Maybe because it was Obon?

Though that would be occult thinking.

The scariest part was that the day was barely half over─at this rate, I might run into yet another expert in the afternoon.

Was Mèmè Oshino’s return being foreshadowed here?

Was it a lead-up to Mr. Aloha’s reentry?

In which case…uh, well, I don’t know, man!

“Coincidence, huh,” Kaiki picked up on my word. “Araragi, I used the word myself just a moment ago to say that meeting like this must be fate, but ‘coincidences’ as they’re generally understood are a tricky affair─and, by and large, a product of malice.”

“Malice?”

“Yes, malice. Nothing like fate.”

Malice─as opposed to justice.

Although Shinobu was supposed to be just some blond Lolita, not a vampire or anything as far as he knew, Kaiki glanced at her meaningfully as he repeated the word.

“Yozuru Kagenui and Yotsugi Ononoki,” he went on. “Implacable latter-day onmyoji─but Araragi. Even as experts go, they have a very narrow area of expertise. That two-man cell specializes in aberrations of the immortal kind.”