Monogatari Series - Volume 8 - Chapter 1.56

056

I realize I’m bragging about my own town when I say this, but we have an extremely extensive library. It boasts a significant collection despite its size, and though I’m unsure whether it’s due to a long-standing tendency or the librarians’ tastes, its shelves focus on fanatically niche titles rather than bestsellers.

It feels in some ways like a museum.

As a side note, when Mister Oshino was still here, I’d come to this library multiple times to borrow books on his request (he couldn’t make a card since he wasn’t a resident).

Its only notable flaw is that it’s closed on Sundays, but I’ve gone to this library ever since I was a child. I’ve never attended a cram school or taken lessons in anything, but you might say that all the things I needed in life I learned here.

All the things my parents never taught me.

I learned them here in this library.

By myself.

Lately, I’d been using it a lot as a place to study with Araragi, but even when it was Miss Senjogahara’s turn to be his tutor, I ended up visiting alone. To tell you the truth, I’d read most of the books in the collection by the time I was fifteen, but I liked the building’s air, its atmosphere, and found myself coming here even when I didn’t need to.

It was a perfect spot for studying.

While it may not have been home, it was at least a place where I felt at ease.

But of course, I hadn’t come here today “when I didn’t need to”─I was about to do research.

“Hello, Tsubasa. Welcome.”

“Hello there.”

I greeted a familiar employee before grabbing about five volumes that I already had in mind and sitting down in a window-side seat that was practically my reserved spot.

The full digitalization of collections that seems to be taking place all around wasn’t being carried out here, which meant my only choice was to make my plodding way book by book. Although I’d read all of them before, it isn’t as if my memory is perfect. More to the point, it couldn’t be trusted on this issue.

Because anything that’s inconvenient to me, I can cut loose.

I’m able to do so.

To draw on how Mrs. Araragi put it, I’m able to look away from anything I want.

I’d even forgotten all that happened over Golden Week, and I still couldn’t remember it perfectly─no, I didn’t want to remember.

I was forcing my painful memories and heartrending stress on someone else.

I was forcing them─onto Black Hanekawa.

Which is why my memories, my knowledge, and even my thoughts were of no use to me─if I still wanted to do something, if I wanted to struggle and flail to try to do something, I was going to have to go over and review everything like this.

Line by line, word by word.

Without looking away.

I was going to have to read as if I was burning it all into my eyes.

“…Hrmm.”

But while I persisted until closing time─there was no book mentioning any aberration or supernatural creature that could be the Tyrannical Tiger, not only in those first five books, but in the fifteen in-depth tomes on the subject that I ended up digging through.

I was even careful to look for any creatures with a similar name, thinking that maybe I had misheard─maybe it was the Pyretical Tiger, for example, which could make sense given that it was manifesting itself through fires─but that was another swing and a miss (I did find an aberration called the “Water Tiger,” but that was a kind of kappa, so it had to be unrelated).

Hm.

My intentions may have been good, but the results left much to be desired.

I thought I would be able to start rattling off facts and citations at this point in the story like I was Mister Oshino, but…things don’t always go that smoothly.

Or was there actually some bit about the tiger, and had I failed to register it? The possibility that it was in those books, but that I had looked away, not wanting to know─

“I wouldn’t be able to trust anything if I started to say that.”

No.

I couldn’t trust anything from the start so long as I was me. The question was what to do given that situation─what I could try to do.

If I couldn’t trust anything, then there should be some way to use that unreliability to my advantage.

I’d have to use the internet for my research if the library had nothing, but honestly, I wasn’t very interested in taking that approach. While the internet is an incredible medium for tapping into what’s happening at the moment, it’s far too full of misinformation when it comes to researching info from the past.

Frankly, it’s a poor choice when it comes to aberration lore.

Still, there was a chance it could at least provide me with a clue. I couldn’t afford to have some silly antipathy toward electronic information since I had no other choice─and it was an approach, a method unavailable to Mister Oshino, with his inability to figure out technology.

My phone was off because I was in the library, but I’d start searching once I got outside.

Having decided, I began placing each of the books I’d grabbed back in their original spots. I didn’t know the extent to which my memory was accurate, but I seemed to remember at least where every book in the library went, so it was easy work.

“Are you alone today, Tsubasa?”

But as I did this, a different employee from the one who greeted me called to me. This one had seen me with Araragi multiple times, which explained the question. It seemed that some people thought that Araragi and I were a couple, and since he showed no signs of noticing this, I never went out of my way to correct them.

“Yes, I’m by myself today.”

I still came to the library alone quite often, as I mentioned, but maybe I wasn’t conspicuous (to this person) during those times.

“Hm. The library’s about to close, are you all done with your research?”

“I am.”

I’d come up empty but finished reading what I could.

“Looks heavy,” the employee said, taking a glance at the stack of books I was re-shelving. “I wonder if that weight will be completely foreign to people once e-books become the norm. No, actually, there won’t be much use left for libraries at all once that happens.”

“Well, it’s hard to say. I think you’ll be quite all right so long as e-books are little more than digital photos. This weight is part of what makes a book a book… Books aren’t flat, they have volume. Figurine collectors didn’t start saying they were good with photos just because digital cameras took off. A book isn’t a book without a spine.”

Digitizing a book─was the wrong way to think about it.

Books and e-books ought to be seen as different things, like a book and a video─not a shift, not an evolution, but a new breed.

“I sure hope so.” Apparently uninterested in having any kind of deep discussion with a high school girl, the employee let out a little laugh, looked at the titles of the books I held, and asked in puzzlement, “You’re interested in ghosts?”

To be fair, none of the books were the kind that a girl in the flower of her youth would normally delve into, so I supposed I could understand the puzzlement. The more veteran employees knew about my tastes (as a voracious reader), but this one was still new.

“Yes, a bit─it’s for schoolwork.”

I wasn’t actually going to explain the whole situation and chose a vague and nice-sounding answer to paper things over.

“In that case, we have a book like that in the New Reads section. Did you look at that one?”

“No─not yet.” Now that I thought about it, I hadn’t checked out their new acquisitions.

“I doubt there’s any time left to read it now, but you can always borrow it.”

“Yes, I think I’ll do that.”

I didn’t get my hopes up.

It would be far too convenient a twist for this last, overlooked book to contain the info I needed about an aberration─but what did I have to lose?

I followed the employee’s suggestion and borrowed the book before leaving the library.

“Hm? Wait a second. A New Read…”

New read─new breed.

A thought suddenly came to me as I placed the book in my bag─no, it would be strange to say it came to me.

After all, Miss Gaen had told me from the beginning.

An aberration that I was going to name.

“If I did all this research and couldn’t come up with so much as a hint… If that tiger, like Black Hanekawa, is a new breed of aberration─”