Monogatari Series - Volume Ex - Chapter 4

004 

“As for what kind of girl Oikura-san is, for now I’m going to boldly omit that. Even if I don’t, she’s dealing with some complicated circumstances, and there’s also the matter of privacy.” 

“Ahaha, there’s no privacy when I draw a picture like this? Now, now. Then you’ll just have to guess indirectly.” 

“Umm, one of those ‘complicated circumstances’ was the cause of Oikura-san changing schools when she was a middle schooler. From A Junior High School to B Junior High School, and from region A to region B. Since it was a sudden transfer for some unspecified reason, she transferred leaving various things behind—but it’s really hard to just up and leave everything you had behind, after all.” 

“It’s particularly hard to sever ties.” 

“Specifically, she had one friend left to exchange letters with—Oh! The word ‘pen-pal’ that you were looking at oddly before, Kiriyamakun, means someone who you exchange letters with.” 

“No, no.” 

“I don’t know everything, I just know what I know.” 

“I guess that’s kind of an obsolete word now with the spread of email and social media—even to a middle school-aged Oikura-san, exchanging letters must have felt old-fashioned.” 

“Though if she didn’t keep it up, she couldn’t continue the conversation. Look, just as I have faithfully expressed in this picture, she’s a thoroughly troublesome character.” 

“She probably couldn’t stay connected to her friend with a popular method that it seemed like everyone was using—or I should say, 

deciding to exchange letters wasn’t normal.” 

“Do you know about correspondence chess?” 

“Yeah, that.” 

“Exactly, each letter is one move, alternating moves in exchange, no clock because the amount of time it takes is irrelevant, a very dramatic chess match—but with the middle school-aged Oikura-san at her new school, and her classmate at her old school, naturally their back-and-forth was through shogi.” 

“Hm? No, it seems shogi was her partner’s hobby. Oikura-san’s hobby was math. A perfect open-information-style game like shogi is suited for the thought process of a math freak.” 

“The feeling that equations are beautiful and the sensation that the standard moves are beautiful shouldn’t be unrelated.” 

“The effect from the blend of an old-fashioned method of communication like exchanging letters, and the nostalgic feelings she felt for her hometown, probably continued for an unexpectedly long back-and-forth. She felt it personally—she’d probably hate it if you told her, but just maybe, I think if this had been an exchange with properly written letters, she probably wouldn’t have even gotten to three rounds.” 

“I think Oikura-san is the one who decided to keep it going as correspondence shogi.” 

“But the end came to visit.” 

“After a number of games had ended, at the timing for the start of a new game, what arrived from her pen-pal wasn’t a piece movement.” 

“It was an incomprehensible board state that ignored the standard moves altogether.”