Hanamonogatari

by Nisioisin

  001

  I want to tell you about how stupid Suruga Kanbaru is. Do you mind listening? The story is so inconsequential that I feel bad making anybody listen to it, so don’t go out of your way or anything, but if it’s really no bother, I would honestly be grateful.

  Still, it’s probably pointless.

  Utterly pointless.

  She would disagree, and simply talking about your feelings or having someone listen to your problems making you feel better is a notion that I don’t buy either. Even if you think you feel better, you probably only think so.

  It’s the thinking so, that very illusion, that people desire deep down─I’ll bet she’d say. Yet even though those words resonate with me on some profound level, there’s something about it that I just can’t accept.

  No.

  I’m sure I can’t accept it just because she’s the one saying it─I’m not weighing the view itself but deciding based on the kind of person she is.

  Awful, right?

  When it’s not a matter of what was said but who said it, you might even call it discrimination─then again, if that’s the kind of person I am, it’d be disingenuous of me to dismiss that way of thinking.

  How wonderful it’d be to live without coming to dislike anyone, how blissful to live without hating.

  I get that.

  I get it, you don’t have to tell me twice.

  But it’s easier said than done.

  There are plenty of people I’ve disliked in my life thus far, plenty of people I’ve hated─in fact, does any such person exist? Someone who could stand up in front of the world and say “I’ve never disliked anyone in my life”?

  At any rate, I─Suruga Kanbaru─know tons of people that I can’t stand.

  And.

  I don’t think much of myself, either.

  I’ve seen enough of my dark side to die from it.

  To kill for it.

  …I’m not much good at thinking about things, or to put it plainly, I’m stupid, so I don’t really know, but how does everybody else cope with all of that?

  It can’t be that most people living in this world love themselves and find themselves impeccable─everyone’s got to have something they’re dissatisfied with, something about themselves that they dislike, whether it’s their personality or their life itself or whatever. Everyone’s got to descend into self-loathing sometimes.

  Make that all the time.

  And yet they have to wake up every morning and keep at it, right?

  Coming to terms with it, finding the sense in it─if possible, I’d love someone to teach me how.

  I couldn’t do it.

  I couldn’t, so I turned to a devil for help.

  I cut loose my dark side as though it were separate from me─but what I did there, actually, was to remake myself into a devil.

  Finding the devil in me, I went and nurtured it─that’s all. But precisely because that’s all it was, I think everyone does the same thing to some extent.

  Not that it mitigates my sins by any means─nor do I have the slightest intention of running away from them.

  But I can’t help wondering.

  How does everybody else do it?

  …It’s because I want to know that I’m telling a story about how stupid I am. After all, it’s only polite to go first if you want someone to share something with you.

  Nope.

  I don’t actually believe that.

  I was taught that point of etiquette─it’s her again.

  So the story I’m going to tell you now is hers too─it’s my story, and her story.

  I’d be grateful if you listened.

  And if possible, when you’re done listening, I’d be very happy if I could hear your story in return.

  I live my life stupidly─

  How do you live yours?

  002

  “If you can’t be medicine, be poison. Otherwise you’re nothing but water.”

  That’s the kind of thing my mother would say to me.

  I don’t think she was a very good mother─at least, she didn’t resemble the generally accepted image of a mother at all.

  So much so that when I encountered a “mom” on TV or in a book, or in conceptual form, it wasn’t just jarring, it gave me the creeps. She was that sort of person.

  Sure, the idea that all mothers are going to be the Virgin Mary is nothing more than some outdated pigeonholing, and I realize in theory that the so-called maternal instinct is nurture, not nature.

  Still, I think she was a bird of a different feather.

  A mother of a different feather.

  “Suruga. Your life will probably be more aggravating than other people’s. It’s going to wear you out and piss you off, but that’s not because you’re better, it’s because you’re weak. All life long you’ll cradle that weakness─I pray you’ll learn to live for that aggravation.”

  She loved to blow smoke up your ass with head-scratchers like that─and when she said stuff like that to me, I suppose she was treating me like a grown-up instead of a child. Which is nice and all, but a parent who doesn’t treat her child like a child is a pretty odd proposition.

  Kids are supposed to remain kids in their parents’ eyes, for good.

  It seems like I was only ever “this little person” in her eyes.

  Whenever my friends talk about their parents, I end up feeling that much more keenly how unusual she was.

  Being my parent, for me she’d been the norm.

  The norm.

  But it’s also true that the whole time I was growing up I thought there was something weird about that norm.

  I always wondered what my father saw in such a person─though I guess that amounts to nothing but a charming anecdote about how, in my innocence, I believed that a husband and wife must absolutely love each other.

  If I was going to wonder, though, my question shouldn’t have been why he fell in love with her, but why she went so far as to elope with him.

  It’s really hard to believe that she could be so passionate.

  She’d had a bitter time of it.

  Or so I’ve heard, at least.

  In getting together with the Kanbaru family’s eldest son, she experienced various hardships and rank prejudice, suffered many setbacks, and eloped with him in the end─

  A life on the run.

  Not a happy love affair, to put it mildly.

  Certainly not a blessed union.

  A romance against the current of happiness─on that point alone she was indeed my mother, but there remains a gap between us that’s hard to reconcile.

  Maybe I just prefer to think so.

  I want there to be.

  Maybe that’s all it is─but actually, in the first place, the one who’d hate us getting lumped together might be my mother. She probably wouldn’t want to be─not with a person like me who does vaguely know when to quit.

  Be that as it may.

  For that couple, who met their end together, like the best of friends, in a car accident, there may not have been room for anyone else, even if I was their own child, their only daughter.

  That’s how it seems to me.

  It always has, but only the more so lately.

  When she and my father died, my paternal grandparents took me in─I have no idea if I even have maternal grandparents. This might sound odd, but I have a hard time believing that person was ever “somebody’s child.” Incidentally, my grandparents feel endless hatred for the woman who stole their beloved only son and kicked the bucket in a virtual double suicide; even though they never tried to indoctrinate me into any kind of grudge when I was little or uttered a disparaging word in front of me, the animosity they bear towards her shows no matter how hard they try.

  I wish they’d
just come out and say it.

  I think we might be able to get riled up together.

  “As my daughter, you’re already cursed. And it’s not just you, the moment they’re born from people, all babies are. Doesn’t it give you the creeps? People birthed by other people. We live in a heartless world where the beauty and sanctity of propagating life gets rammed down our throats, but don’t you feel it’s a precious curse bestowed on us by God? Or is it just my imagination? No, no, my feeling that you’re dear to me isn’t my will, it must be God’s.”

  She said (I think ) some such thing to me, so she must have loved me in her own way, paradoxically.

  Come to think of it, I remember my dad telling me: “That girl does God’s living for Him.” It’s sweet in retrospect that he referred to his wife as “that girl,” but I still can’t go along with that opinion.

  I can’t swallow it.

  How do I put this? Well, if I may: she was like the Devil.

  “God or Devil, it’s the same─for all that we prattle on about it, we’re nothing but their playthings. Don’t waste your time thinking about such self-evident nonsense─” that person said.

  Said my mother, Toé Kanbaru, née Toé Gaen, to me.

  “─And rise and shine, stupid girl. The thrill of a new term begins today!”

  “!”

  Jolt.

  I opened my eyes, shocked out of sleep by that shout─it had only been a dream, of course, but the rebuke echoing in my head was so realistic that I was fully awake in an instant.

  It was an early April morning, still chilly, but in a mere instant, my entire body was drenched in sweat.

  “…Aaah, aaah, aaah.”

  It was the rudest of awakenings.

  The rudest awakening in Kanbaru history.

  I thought I might die. Araragi-senpai─my dear senior Koyomi Araragi─always grumbled about how his two adorable little sisters roused him from bed every morning, but however they go about it, I doubt they assault him in his sleep with lethal force, so there’s no way he wakes up this terrified.

  Ah, that was scary.

  Well, today it was a bad dream, but it’s been a long time since I had a “pleasant awakening”…

  I thought this, staring at the left arm─my own left arm, bound tightly to one of my room’s posts with duct tape.

  “Phew…”

  Performing the routine work of stripping away the tape with my right hand as usual, I slowly regained my composure.

  My pulse returned to normal.

  With my left arm tightly fixed to an immobile post, I couldn’t roll over, so it was difficult to get a good night’s sleep. I have no idea what I’ll get up to in my sleep if I don’t do that, though.

  In my sleep. In my unconscious state. I have no idea─what I’ll get up to.

  If I used handcuffs or something, I might unlock them while I was unconscious, hence the duct tape. This way, if I were, for instance, to put on a raincoat and go out like a sleepwalker for a midnight stroll, I’d need to tear through the tape and make a wreck of it. Even if I couldn’t prevent the sleepwalking itself, I’d at least know that I’d gone outside.

  I’d know that I’d sinned.

  I could avoid the sin of ignorance.

  It did nothing for my night’s sleep─but it was marginally better than knowing nothing.

  Since that May.

  Since I attacked Araragi-senpai in a trance, unconscious, asleep─ever since I was possessed by a devil, I saw fit to rely on the ridiculous restraint.

  How many rolls of duct tape have I wasted?

  Well, not wasted.

  Because every time I woke up in the morning and saw the duct tape still intact around my bandaged arm, I breathed a sigh of relief─thinking, Good, looks like another night has gone by without me hurting anyone.

  So it wasn’t a waste.

  “Haha─recognizing your unconscious destructive urges is a bitter pill to swallow, isn’t it, Suruga? Turns out ignorance isn’t a sin, it’s bliss. Most people live out their lives never facing the fact that humans are basically just talking monkeys, no different from the beasts, but you? You got screwed. Or maybe you screwed up? Not that that’s why I bequeathed you the Monkey’s Paw. Why did I, then? Don’t ask. Questions are for losers.”

  I felt like I heard such a voice.

  Paying it no heed, I started getting dressed.

  The season was still a little cold to be sleeping naked.

  I shivered, not because of the night sweat drying on my body.

  My mornings began with changing the bandage on my arm, which got sticky from the tape─I thought wearing only that and nothing else, like being naked apart from an apron, was pretty chic.

  Or is it just me?

  003

  “Good morning.”

  When I went out to the living room, breakfast was waiting for me.

  I’m thoroughly awful at housework, catastrophically bad at both cooking and cleaning, not even rolling on the floor bad, and it’s all because my guardians, my grandma and grandpa, are extremely meticulous people and take much too good care of me.

  I wasn’t blessed in the parents department in many ways (in any way at all), but I have been as far as grandparents go.

  Then again, while the food was waiting for me, my grandparents weren’t. Grandma was doing the laundry, and Grandpa was out tending the garden. Ordinarily, the ideal family sits down to breakfast all together, but that never really happened for us.

  Old folks start the day early─but that’s not why.

  In fact, I start my day earlier than they do. I’m in the habit of jogging 10 km x 2 every morning before breakfast.

  That day, too, I’d taken not one but two turns around town.

  While I’m working up a good rhythm and a pleasant feeling during my run, Grandma and Grandpa finish their breakfast. I do my best every morning to pick up the pace so I can sit and eat with them, but, well, that’s not going to happen unless I basically double my speed.

  Which means it’s not going to happen at all.

  “‘A real family eats together’? Come on, that’s bullshit─look, that Hanekawa girl eats with her family, but they’re not together at all, are they? In the same place, but not together. And I ate with you most of the time, but did you think of me as family? I was your mother, but listen, were we really family?”

  I finished breakfast while that voice chattered on in a corner of my head. I fully replaced the calories I burned on my run─thanks for the grub.

  My auditory hallucinations were especially severe that morning, though.

  The harbinger of something to come?

  Or the aftereffect of something past?

  …I guess I was just a bit mentally unbalanced that day on account of starting a new chapter of my life.

  Really.

  I was no good on my own.

  I was no good at all on my own.

  Thinking such thoughts, I reached for the morning paper─already somewhat wrinkled and puffed out from my grandparents having read it─and spread it out on the table.

  With eyes as wide as saucers, I examined every inch, scanning all that had happened in the world yesterday. Being a regional paper, it was of course full of local news, which is exactly what I was looking for.

  Stabbings, other incidents of violence.

  Where and when they occurred.

  I carefully checked each of those─and compared them in my head to my schedule and timetable the previous day. Recalling whether or not I had an alibi.

  “…Phew.”

  Finished with the newspaper, I breathed a sigh of relief.

  Everything was okay.

  Another day gone by, and I hadn’t committed any crimes.

  004

  Returning to my room, I noticed that my nails were getting pretty long. It was the kind of thing that didn’t bother you at all if you didn’t notice it, but once you did, it drove you crazy.

  I surveyed my room, muttering, “Nail clippers…�
�

  They had to be here. Somewhere in this room, there had to be nail clippers, and not just one, but probably two or three.