Hanamonogatari

by Nisioisin

  Suruga, put your nail clippers back where it was when you’re done, my grandmother always tells me, or scolds me, I should say, so I was certain, but a diligent excavation would be required to discover them. My room was “a wee bit” messy, and finding what you were looking for was a tall order─Araragi-senpai described the mess as a “sinkhole,” and I have to say, he really hit the nail on the head. His way with words is something I strive to emulate.

  Hmm, if I looked for the nail clippers now, I was definitely going to be late for school.

  He described looking for something in my room as a “treasure hunt,” by the way, hitting the nail on the head once again. True, looking for something the size of nail clippers amid this “heap after a landslide” seems hopeless.

  Like looking for a needle in a haystack.

  I’m sure my grandma would lend me other nail clippers, but she’d chew me out first so I was hesitant…

  I didn’t want to get scolded.

  Sigh.

  Why do nails have to grow, anyway?

  “People who feel uncomfortable about their nails growing are ill-suited to life. It means they don’t want to grow up.”

  My mother said that to me while she was clipping my toenails when I was little. It seemed more like a monologue than something that was actually addressed to me, but looking back on it now, maybe she was talking to me after all.

  That someone’s gaze isn’t directed at you doesn’t mean the sentiment isn’t─and vice versa.

  Someone who’s looking at me isn’t necessarily looking at me.

  I was facing down a stark choice─either head to my grandma’s room and gird my loins for a scolding, or head to school and stop to buy new nail clippers at a convenience store on the way─when all of a sudden a third option appeared before my eyes.

  To be precise, all of a sudden, when I took my uniform, fresh from the cleaners, down off the hanger on the wall and cut off the tag with a pair of scissors.

  Huh.

  If I had to, I could use the scissors to cut my nails.

  A revelation.

  A spectacular paradigm shift, a small insight that allows humanity to progress by leaps and bounds, like the seal on a glass milk bottle─though I guess I don’t see those anymore.

  You might be surprised to learn that I’m a regular MacGyver, substituting things like that.

  Whether to call it a paradigm shift, or adaptability, or what, I don’t know.

  But this wasn’t the first time.

  I once purchased a certain electrical appliance, which was great and all, but for ease of transport the box had been sealed up with industrial-strength vinyl packing tape.

  And I didn’t have any scissors.

  It’s no easy feat to get through industrial-strength vinyl packing tape without scissors.

  So what brilliant idea did Suruga Kanbaru hit upon?

  “I’ll cut it with my watch.”

  I made the bold judgment that something on the order of industrial-strength vinyl packing tape wouldn’t stand a chance if the sharp side of my watch buckle could be exploited in conjunction with the principle of leverage.

  More of a sharp judgment than a bold one, you might say.

  And what happened?

  Well.

  As is so often the case with cutting-edge thinking, it was the watch buckle rather than the tape that gave.

  Packing tape is really something.

  What a sticky situation─(shouted quip) oh, cut it out!

  Wait.

  I was trying to tell you how paradigm shifts are my specialty…but ended up relating one of my fails.

  Hang on a sec, there was this other time when…

  Hmmm.

  Maybe I’d better hold off on using scissors in place of nail clippers?

  Since I was seeking a fresh start and a new outlook for the new semester, I went ahead and offered sincere praise to myself for coming up with the idea.

  But that lasted only while I was cutting my right nails with my bandaged left hand.

  I’m left-handed so I was using left-handed scissors, which on the flipside are difficult to use with my right hand.

  It would be a real trick to cut the nails on my left hand, which was exposed at the moment.

  The nails on my left, monkey hand…

  “Bad move.”

  Not a paradigm shift at all.

  More MacGuffin than MacGyver (sorry, not funny).

  Fine.

  It was going to stay hidden under a bandage anyway.

  Just cutting half of my nails definitely left me feeling almost half-refreshed. Next, I dug out a mirror from where it was buried and trimmed the stubborn bedhead that a 20-km run, a shower, and a hairdryer had done nothing to fix.

  Snip.

  Somehow my hair had gotten all grown-out.

  I considered a drastic stroke instead of fiddling bit by bit but couldn’t work up the courage.

  I guess I’m a waffler.

  It must undercut everyone’s image of me, but that’s who I really am.

  I’m a waffler.

  Always putting off decisions.

  No, I’m neither warm nor sweet like a waffle, so that expression probably doesn’t suit me─in which case I’m just plain old greedy.

  I’m like Greed.

  Desiring everything, I lose everything.

  This Greed loves Hitagi Senjogahara.

  Given everything in the beginning, left with nothing in the end.

  That’s Suruga Kanbaru, my life in a nutshell.

  I’d even lost my nail clippers─okay, discussing a fatalistic view of life and my room’s messiness in the same breath might get me a scolding from my senpais Senjogahara and Araragi.

  I don’t want to get scolded.

  I really don’t.

  When I thought that far, I realized something.

  They wouldn’t take it upon themselves to scold me anymore─because they weren’t around anymore.

  They were gone.

  Even now I felt them with me, but that was only an illusion.

  Snickering at my inability to let go, I finished changing into my uniform and headed to school.

  To Naoetsu High, now bereft of both Koyomi Araragi and Hitagi Senjogahara.

  005

  When I say it like that, it’s as if those two are dead or something, but that’s not the case at all. They just graduated.

  They graduated, and I became a third-year.

  That’s all.

  That’s all there is to it.

  With Araragi-senpai’s grades, being held back had been a real possibility, but in the end the teachers granted a pardon and fudged his attendance record.

  Strictly speaking, such misconduct flew in the face of due process, but after he prostrated himself in the faculty room, even Hanekawa-senpai, that paragon of impartial justice, couldn’t bring herself to say anything.

  The Fire Sisters are the same way; those siblings just love to perform a dogeza. I heard that his beauteous prostration took the teachers’ breath away, but it was Hanekawa-senpai who told me that, so who knows if it’s true.

  She has a tendency to mythologize his behavior, and though it’s not lost on me that I do the same thing, her words are best taken with a grain of salt.

  Well, even so, she might not want to hear that from me… Of course, she and Senjogahara-senpai graduated no problem (I held a little going away party for them just last month), so as it stands I’ve been left behind at Naoetsu High.

  No, I have plenty of friends in my year and in the grades below me, but all three of the people who got it when it came to “aberrations”─you might call them accomplices─were gone, and I was beset with a kind of bewilderment distinct from sadness.

  It was over?

  Just like that?

  It felt way more “I guess that’s it, then” than I’d expected─not a dramatic parting, not a devastating one, just “I guess that’s it.” I had no choice but to keep harboring the secret of my left arm, but it
’s also true that a secret is something too heavy to keep harboring alone.

  The three of them knew about my arm, knew what I’d done, and still stood by me. That alone was enough to ease my heart─but that was no reason.

  Even as you found reasons.

  “Change goes hand in hand with growing up. There’s no such thing as ‘unchanging everyday life,’ Suruga. If there were, it wouldn’t be everyday, it’d be hell.”

  Another one of that person’s lines.

  It wasn’t anything to utter, even by mistake, to a child, who had a ton of growing-up to do. But she didn’t treat me like a child, so what can I say.

  By the way, it’s been a while now since the ruins of that cram school, so full of memories, burned to the ground─before I knew it, I’d become accustomed to seeing the post-conflagration landscape in place of that abandoned building.

  What comes to mind now is a scorched field.

  That, too, is change and the everyday.

  Anyhow, today.

  April ninth.

  I─Suruga Kanbaru became a third-year.

  And alone.

  Just like in middle school─but at that time, I had the unshakable goal of “taking Naoetsu High’s exams and chasing after Senjogahara-senpai who graduated ahead of me.” This time I had no such goal, no aim.

  Without fixing my gaze on her, not even in some far-flung future, I attended high school─all alone.

  “Ah, Suruga-senpai, wassup.”

  …As I ran to school, a little drunk on my thoughts, a bicycle came up beside me.

  Huh.

  I said all alone─but what about this kid?

  Even if he’d completely slipped my mind.

  Even if I’d totally forgotten.

  Somehow.

  “Morning, Ogi.”

  Without slackening my pace, I greeted the first-year beside me─no, the second-year now, at any rate the boy on the bike.

  Since he was riding one, he had no problem keeping pace with me─though I was confident that if I gave it everything I had, I could leave any granny bike in the dust.

  Still, as a third-year, it was about time that I settled down a bit. I wasn’t about to run full speed on the way to school.

  Here was a junior who’d taken to me, and I was never going to treat him with disdain.

  “You run fast,” he said.

  “Oh, I think I’ll make the first bell.”

  “No no no no, I meant you’re a fast runner.”

  “Ah.”

  Nodding, I looked at the boy beside me.

  He’d transferred to Naoetsu High sometime around the end of last year…I’ve forgotten exactly when. And his name was Ogi Oshino.

  Oshino.

  He said he was related to Mister Oshino, but the veracity of that was uncertain─while Araragi-senpai, being who he is, swallowed the story whole, Hanekawa-senpai was openly dubious.

  It’s rare for their opinions to diverge that starkly─but, well, given Ogi’s, how do I put it…his ambiguous presence, it’s not surprising.

  His…

  His?

  “Wait, Ogi… Didn’t you use to be a girl?”

  “What are you talking about? I’ve been a boy all along. Ever since I came crying into this world, I’ve been a boy, without even a moment’s deviation.”

  “…Right?”

  “Uh huh. And I’m not one of those tomgirls that are all the rage right now.”

  “Well, I don’t know about ‘all the rage.’”

  It’s very much a niche trend.

  But I suppose it’s just human nature to imagine that your little playground is the entire world. While the internet and whatever do seem to have opened things up, if you don’t bear in mind that it’s just a deepening, not a broadening, you end up in a world of pain.

  I did.

  Or rather, I became a painful character.

  I don’t know…

  I get really fed up thinking that I might live out the rest of my life mired in this kind of remorse.

  “Hmm… Anyway, of course you were a boy. My apologies, somehow I had it wrong.”

  “Ahaha. Getting it wrong once in a while is fine, I think? A life where we aren’t forgiven even a single mistake would be stifling.”

  “Mistake, huh? Mistake,” I repeated Ogi’s word absently, glancing at my bandaged arm as it pumped back and forth with every stride. “Life is just a series of mistakes, though.”

  “Whoa, what’s this? I get treated to a negative remark that’s so unlike you, and on the first day of the new term.”

  Ogi tilted his head atop his bicycle.

  That was dangerous.

  Just as I thought so, he started pedaling faster to pull ahead of me, and with a spin-move U-turn, he was staring me straight in the face.

  He was set up like a roadblock in front of me, but pedaling in reverse, he began moving backwards and didn’t actually impede my progress.

  …No, hang on.

  I don’t ride them so I’m not a hundred-percent sure, but were bicycles the kind of vehicle equipped with a mechanism that let you move backwards if you pedaled in reverse?

  It’s not a Segway, for chrissakes.

  Even Araragi-senpai, who loved his bicycle above all else (I was the one who destroyed his beloved ride, by the way) never pulled such an oddball move…

  “That’s not at all like Suruga Kanbaru, the star of Naoetsu High who led a no-name basketball team all the way to the nationals. You should be saying, ‘Life is just a series of successes.’”

  “Why would I ever say something so arrogant? Who could? Get him over here so I can teach him a lesson.”

  “Get him? It’s you yourself.”

  “Wrong.”

  “But it’s a fact.”

  “That’s all in the past. Oh so long ago.”

  No one remembers last year’s glories─no, of the year before last. The names of athletes who get injured and retire are fated to fade from memory.

  One of the students in my year officially retired just the other day.

  A new generation comes in, and you’re forgotten.

  “All in the past,” Ogi echoed. “In the past, huh? Hearing that is a real buzz-kill. For a student like me, at least, who entered Naoetsu High in the hopes of becoming a star like you.”

  “Liar. How can you tell such appalling lies with a straight face? Aren’t you a member of the No Extracurriculars Club?”

  “Yes. But I’m their ace.”

  “What do you mean, ace?”

  “I leave school early every three days.”

  “You’re an ace, all right.”

  Ogi is exhausting to talk to.

  Always keeping me off balance…which reminds me, Araragi-senpai often said the same thing about me.

  In which case I really was a pain in his ass, though it was a little late for remorse. Being put in the same position now, I understood for the first time how senpais felt.

  I’d text him an apology later.

  I learned how to send one quite some time ago.

  Even I learn.

  If you think I can’t learn just because I’m stupid, you’re very much mistaken.

  Anyway, that said, I think Ogi and I aren’t much alike.

  I don’t really remember how we ended up on speaking terms in the first place when we’re in different years and he doesn’t play any sports─before I knew it he was just there as though he always had been.

  Suddenly on good terms with my dear seniors Araragi, Senjogahara, and Hanekawa.

  It seemed very natural.

  Which itself seemed totally unnatural.

  …But anyway, I guess with the three of them gone, it’s just me and him.

  That’s rough.

  Maybe rougher than being alone.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “It’s nothing…” I wasn’t going to say Life’s going to suck with only you around for company to his face.