003
In the end, I never found Hachikuji.
In the end, Ononoki asked me for directions, and even after we parted (that is, after her remark “I always want something salty after I eat something sweet” prompted me to buy her a rice cracker at the same store in the way of a souvenir. What an expensive young girl), I kept on searching for Hachikuji. But she eluded my grasp, right down to the tips of her pigtails.
Seemed like she’d already gone home.
Or─gone home doesn’t sound quite right, seeing as she had neither a home to go to nor a way to get there.
So should I simply say she went?
Or that she left?
Or even, bluntly, she vanished?
Makes me sad to think about.
Helplessly sad.
It wasn’t because of Ononoki’s interrogation─I was always thinking about it. All the time.
No matter how brave a face she put on, no matter how sunny her disposition, those feelings were headed down a one-way street, not even passing by anything, and Mayoi Hachikuji, that no-longer-living girl, was steeped in tragedy.
After all is said and done.
Death is harsh.
Death is a massive, towering barrier.
Take me, for instance. Over spring break when a vampire sucked my blood and I was stripped of my humanity, I gained an absurd amount of power and became absurdly weak in the face of the sun or a crucifix, and even now the after-effects linger absurdly in my body, and I keep absurdly engaging these aberrations─that’s not at all what I’d call happiness.
Am I happy? I can’t say that I am.
Of course, this body has saved my life, and to be honest those after-effects do come in handy─but there’s no way around it, misery is misery.
I was maybe putting on a bit of a show for Ononoki when I said there were good things about it, and there really had been good things, but you still can’t just spin misery into joy─not every cloud has a silver lining.
The sadness of giving up your humanity─I understand it better than anyone.
But after-effects and partial immortality aside, at least I still have a body.
I possess flesh.
Hachikuji doesn’t even have that.
Let alone a body and a mind─it’s doubtful that she even has whatever it is that we call our heart.
If anything, I’d call her a shadow.
Yes.
All she has is her abnormality, which is why her existence is irrational.
She is an aberration.
Not a living aberration─a dead aberration.
On that Mother’s Day when I started going out with Senjogahara, Hachikuji was released from a sort of curse thanks to Oshino’s clever scheme, but nevertheless, her current situation still doesn’t seem proper.
I have no idea what to think about it.
No idea at all.
Passing on doesn’t necessarily mean happiness for a ghost─I don’t really know, but everyone seems to think it’s inevitable, that it’s a milestone like getting married or getting a job or something, but maybe it isn’t like that at all.
Wandering isn’t always bad.
It can be good to lose your way.
It suits some people, like Oshino, to drift forever─and maybe I’m even less moored to any religious outlook since I became a half vampire, but I can’t help thinking that, for Hachikuji, to pass on is no blessing.
Depending on how you look at it, the idea that it’s proper to pass on is really high-handed.
In fact, going on as a kind of guardian angel for the town as she has been might be a form of happiness.
It’s meaningless to insist on what’s proper. What’s the point?
At least now, she seems to be having fun.
She seems happy.
…And I do understand how meaningless it is to think about all this stuff.
What I think, how I feel.
What I may know has nothing to do with it.
I’m not speaking rhetorically, I’m not being tactful. They really, truly have nothing to do with it.
What matters is how Hachikuji feels─what she thinks about her situation, what she’s feeling, that’s what’s crucial. How I feel, or even how Hanekawa (who’s quite taken with her) feels, is all completely irrelevant.
It’s sad.
Just how irrelevant it is.
If she enjoys going on not as a place-bound ghost but as a wandering ghost, chatting with people who talk to her on the street─that’s good enough for me.
No need for anyone to butt in with his opinion.
That expert I mixed it up with the other day, Ononoki’s “sister” and so-called embodiment of “justice” Yozuru Kagenui, sees “immortal aberrations” like vampires as her enemy─and roundly condemned “it” as wrong.
She may have a point.
I certainly didn’t get it when we were facing each other, but looking at it more calmly now, I understand what she was trying to say.
Not because Ononoki is cute─I do think so, deep down.
Whether I want to or not.
It’s so simple, even I can comprehend it.
Neither extreme logic nor extreme sentimentality yields great meaning─if you probe people’s principles to their conclusions, you arrive at “good things are good” and “bad things are bad.”
At the very least, I don’t want anyone to pity me for this half-immortal body, much less commiserate with me.
The only person who’s allowed to grieve for me is me.
So if a technocrat like Kagenui, or Oshino, showed up─or maybe this example will be easier to understand─if that God guy showed up and said, “I’ll turn you back into a proper human being”─I would just silently shake my head. Thanks but no thanks. To put it bluntly, that would be an unwelcome gift.
I’ve set myself on this path.
A lifetime’s burden, a lifetime’s journey.
Not even God can tell me otherwise.
So─it’s the same with Hachikuji.
Of course, it would be another story if she asked me to help her fix her current situation, but─I really have no idea what she thinks, about anything.
Not a thing.
Not one iota of mutual understanding has come out of our pleasant banter and fun talk.
The most important question remains unasked.
I’m sure I won’t be able to ask her the question Ononoki wants me to─I can’t ask her anything.
Because she won’t tell me anything.
What do you want to do?
What are you feeling?
Isn’t there anything I can do for you? I so desperately want to know the answers, but the questions remain unasked.
I want to help you fulfill your wishes, but─
“Then help her fulfill them. Why the pretense of concern, thou cretin? Art thou still going through puberty?”
“…”
After dinner I went back to my room to think things over, and before I knew it, what you might call the dead of night had arrived, and a little blond vampire girl had appeared right in front of me, like a light with a sensor that switches on automatically come dark.
Well just make yourself at home, why don’t you.
Not a speck remained of her original taciturn, inactive character.
“Feh, I couldn’t bear to watch. Bringing that girl over here, making kissy face all day long.”
“Enough with the outdated lingo.”
“A thousand pardons. My Edo-period habits die hard.”
“Not that outdated.”
“Wilt thou hear my impression of Ietsugu Tokugawa?”
“Who? I don’t know anything about the, what, seventh Tokugawa shogun?”
“Seems that ye do.”
Well.
We do have a student preparing for exams here.
“‘Ho, that’s nigh on the Edicts on Compassion for Living Things!’”
“Huh? Did he become all the rage with his grandpa’s dad jokes or something?”
Don’t be wasting my time.
Plus, the period was off… All things considered, didn’t this little blond girl, Shinobu Oshino, she who was once Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade, visit Japan somewhat before Ietsugu’s time?
“I caught wind of it overseas. Word of Ietsugu reached the four corners of the Earth.”
“He was that interesting?”
Wasn’t that during the era of national isolation?
Maybe word spread through the Dutch traders at Nagasaki?
“Don’t waste my time with this just because no one can confirm any of it. I’ve got my entrance exams coming up, and you’re going to throw my Japanese history all out of whack.”
“Well, to tell it true, I don’t know Ietsugu from Adam.”
“Oh no?”
“I based my impression of Ietsugu on a recorded narration I heard at Nagoya Castle.”
“…”
In other words, before she came here, before spring break, she was sightseeing at Nagoya Castle?
Hope you enjoyed yourself.
And what’s the deal with this series’ references to Nagoya─Doala and the Chunichi Dragons and all.
Before long I’ll be coming out with their local slang.
Or eating the strawberry pasta from Mountain Café.
“In any event, my master’s licentiousness makes me want to shield mine eyes. So ’tis with Miss ’Gahara, and so with Sister ’Basa.”
“You’re a vampire, don’t be calling them Miss ’Gahara and Sister ’Basa.”
Don’t get overfamiliar with the human realm.
And “Sister ’Basa” is nowhere in the original.
Go easy on the crossovers.
“Wait a sec,” I asked, “does that mean that when Hachikuji was over here this afternoon, you were awake?”
“I was half asleep, but ye were so excited that the other half was awake. Something like that exercise where ye stand on one leg with thine eyes closed.”
“So you were testing your physical fitness in my shadow.”
Hell of a gym to join.
But because excitement─in fact any condition─flows between Shinobu Oshino and me, paired as we are via my shadow, when I’m all excited about something like the unthinkable occasion of Hachikuji being in my house, it was like the night before a field trip for her. No wonder she couldn’t sleep.
While it isn’t a complete reversal of day and night, I’m still forcing a pretty irregular lifestyle on a vampire, about which I do feel bad.
Not that I’m gonna apologize or anything.
Then again, given that she didn’t bring it up, she must’ve been sleeping the whole time I was chasing after Hachikuji and having my ice cream date with Ononoki.
I took solace in the thought.
Shinobu and Ononoki were like oil and water; Ononoki felt traumatized by Shinobu, and Shinobu simply couldn’t stand Ononoki.
I’d be helpless if she tried to take it out on me.
…You know, I’m starting to think that maybe I should do something about my habit of making peace with my opponents just like that.
Now that I’m saying it, though, Shinobu herself was my opponent once upon a time.
“Fine, fine,” she said, “I jest about the standing on one leg part, but the closed eyes was not altogether untrue. Did I not tell thee? ’Twas a sight from which I would fain shield mine eyes.”
“Well…”
Sadly, I guess the sight of her “master” getting all woo-hoo over a girl doesn’t command a lot of respect.
“Forsooth, that young lady was defenseless, asleep on thy bed─how could ye cop not even a single feel, thou chicken? ’Twas the perfect time to go for it.”
“Is that what you expect from me?!”
Although to all appearances she’s an eight-year-old girl, Shinobu is actually a 500-year-old vampire, a wily veteran. Even Kanbaru can’t compare to her when it comes to sexual profligacy.
Age and gender have absolutely no bearing.
The talk about Ietsugu aside, when you’ve lived through so many different ages, you know, it’s natural to, you know, get like that.
“Ten is a fine age to be wed.”
“Nope. Not in modern times.”
“Do not take this amiss, but it seems to me that for the species to flourish, humans should wed upon the advent of menstruation.”
“No character could be harder to adapt for anime than you.”
No wonder she didn’t utter a single word.
I hear they made her talk like a vocaloid for the drama CD…
“Fine, fine, art thou saying my notions are better suited to a period piece?”
“What, are you making dad jokes?”
That wasn’t even funny.
She could just go get restricted by the new statutes.
Season Two will be proceeding without you.
“But,” said Shinobu, smiling.
A gruesome smile.
The gap─or gape, was frightful.
No way it could be adapted for anime.
“Even if she cannot match my 500 years, that young lady is not so young as she appears, if I may. Her form remains as it was when she died, but in truth she must be older than thee.”
“Well…”
Mayoi Hachikuji.
She died ten-odd years ago.
Hit by a car while crossing with the green─and since then, she’s been wandering the streets of this town, on and on, for over ten years─
I don’t know when her birthday is so I can’t say precisely, but either way she’s definitely over twenty, and therefore older than me.
She was my big sis.
“Indeed. And thus presents no legal issue, even in this modern world.”
“Laws don’t even apply to ghosts.”
Also, it’s not that simple.
Her age got fixed when she died.
When you look at it that way, Hachikuji is even more constant than Shinobu, more immortal than immortal.
Not living on, not risen─she’s dead, so she can no longer live, or die.
Even vampires age─even Shinobu has, and she’s 500 years old.
But Hachikuji is Hachikuji.
Eleven years old for all eternity.
Dead as she is.
“Fine, fine. Better than being pubescent for all eternity, is it not?”
“What a distinction.”
It wasn’t helping.
What the hell was she talking about, pubescent.
You talking about me?
“First of all,” I said, “the most important thing isn’t legal blah blah, it’s Hachikuji’s feelings.”
“One can never truly surmise a girl’s feelings towards marriage.”
“Oops. The tables have turned.”
“In any event, listen well. What I wish to tell thee is that worrying over it is fruitless.”
“Huh? That’s what you wanted to say?”
It wasn’t what she’d been saying at all.
You were egging me on to assault Hachikuji just now, weren’t you?
When the hell did you surmise what I was worrying about?
Don’t act like you were being all serious from the start, it makes me look like a fool.
“’Tis a waste of time for thee to consider what that young lady wants to do, or what she wants to be. Thou shouldst not even ask.”
“Shouldn’t even ask.”
“In any case, there is naught thou couldst do. Though in my excitement I did suggest that ye aid her in fulfilling her wishes, thou more than anyone must know the impossibility of doing so.”
“…”
“Thou wert unable to do aught for Miss ’Gahara, nor for Sister ’Basa. In the end, those two overcame their trials on their own.”
“What, did you become friends with those two behind my back or something?”
Getting a little familiar, aren’t we?
Really.
I seem to recall nothing but hostility between you and Hanekawa, and as for Senjogahara, I’m pretty sure you’ve never spoken a word to each other.
When did your character get so friendly?
“Indeed, ’tis most peculiar. I cannot bring myself to hate those two, though I know not why. Likely ’tis due to our pairing, by dint of which thine influence extends even to my preferences, even to love and hate.”
“Huh…”
So we were that deeply connected─if it went that far, it was more like telepathy than pairing.
“My desire to bang that young lady likely comes from thine influence as well.”
“I have no such unseemly desire!”
Always trying to pass the buck!
You’re a succubus all on your own!
“…Hang on,” I said. “If we’re really splitting hairs here, we were just a set before our pairing, before you got sealed in my shadow, in other words back during spring break. And originally, that came from you. Because in the beginning you were the master, and I was the servant. In other words, just as you’re under my influence now, I was under your influence during spring break. So does that mean my cool character crumbling back then─”
“Gulp.”
“Gulp, is it?!”
Some unexpected truths were coming out thanks to the continuation of the series.
I guess there were some benefits to prolonging this thing.
“Fine, fine. But let us return to the subject at hand. We’ll lose our readers if we keep on with this idle chatter.”
“Yeah? Well, I for one would like to stick with this subject a little longer…”
It feels reaaaally important.
Important enough to shake the foundations of the whole tale.
“Yet if we do nothing but chatter away, there may be another coup d’état. Sister ’Basa got rave reviews as a narrator for always getting straight to the point.”
“I suppose you’re right…”
In fact, there was some push for Hachikuji to narrate this volume.
I guess they really considered it.
Incidentally, there were a lot of reasons they didn’t go with that plan, but apparently one of the primary ones was that they were concerned I would come off terribly if the tale unfolded from Hachikuji’s viewpoint (unlike, say, Hanekawa’s more forgiving one); they took pity on me.
I’d been pitied…
What a bummer.
“Well, leaving aside things that haven’t happened chronologically speaking, you’re right. There really is nothing I can do for Hachikuji.”
It wasn’t like there was an enemy to fight.
If there were opponents, all I needed to do was defeat them, but as so often happens in real life, it wasn’t that kind of story.
Defeating something, beating somebody, in dramatic, world-altering fashion─that only happens in video games and sports. It’s never that straightforward in the real world.
What I─what we have to face is not even absurd, or preposterous─often, it’s just plain old reality.
Reality itself is the enemy, is our opponent.
And there’s no one who can beat it.
Not a single person, in all of history.
Everyone falls before reality.
Life is a losing battle.
“Well, if my master seeks to become the first, I shall not stand in his way.”
“Nah, those are over-the-top expectations for your master…”
“Best to let it lie,” Shinobu said, in a voice like ice. “Think not too deeply, nor too deeply involve thyself. ’Tis the same as for thee, or me─whatever will be, will be. In truth, it can be no other way. At the very least, ’tis not a matter for others to meddle in. In doing so, thou and I have failed utterly and often─even that former class president.” Understandably, Shinobu didn’t say “Sister ’Basa” this time. “Her meddling has brought nothing but pain, meow with the cat...”
“You said ‘meow.’”
“Now with.”
“So it was a misprint…”
If “me” could be mistaken for “n,” then this book wasn’t being written with a text editor or anything but with pencil and paper.
How are they ever going to make it into a digital book?
“Not to go off topic, but don’t you think denshi shoseki would do better if there was a cooler-sounding, English name for them? Despite all the talk, they’ve plateaued.”
“Well, there are already some terms…e-booku, for instance, though thou speakest not of such half-baked nonsense, but rather a well-turned phrase?”
“Yeah. We could give the characters denshi shoseki a cool phonetic reading, like they always used to do for the titles of light novels.”
“Purazuma taipu.”
“Awesome!”
Super sophomoric, though.
Especially the pun on “type,” as in classification and typeface.
“Tekusuto.”
“Concise, very sci-fi. I like it.”
“Bakkuboudo.”
“Emphasizing the point of view of the reader?”
“Raito noberu.”
“Yeah, just like that!”
With that perfect punch line to wrap up the day’s entertainment (?), Shinobu shrugged her shoulders and said, “Well.”
Not much of a segue…
“Here is the meat of what I wish to say to thee. I simply think thou wouldst be better served in worrying over other matters.”
“Ah.”
True, no matter how much I fretted over Hachikuji, even if it wasn’t exactly a waste of my time, it was certainly an idle use of it.
I knew that perfectly well.
I didn’t need to be told.
But other things I should be worrying about?
What things?
Nothing to worry about in my life.
Everything’s peachy.
“Hold there. Why dost thou cock thy head in confusion? Thou art a high school student, and the lot of the student is to study.”
“…”
Whaaat.
You, saying something so pedestrian?
What part of you was once a vampire?
When did you become just another nagging little sister?
Really brings me back to when Karen and Tsukihi were younger.
“I’m studying just like I should be,” I said like a peevish older brother. “You should know better than anyone, you’ve been lurking in my shadow all summer long. You know just how hard I’ve been studying for entrance exams with Hanekawa and Senjogahara. Forget Ietsugu, I can name the entire Tokugawa clan, and every damn member of the Minamoto bloodline to boot.”
“Whoa there, of course I know. And not just Japanese history, thou hast really been hustling in Japanese literature, math, English, science. Think thee I am not impressed? I have been behind thee all the way. Literally, in thy shadow. However.”
Shinobu held it a beat, then said very─to great effect, very plainly:
“Thou hast not done a single page of thy summer homework.”
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