Hanamonogatari

by Nisioisin

  A lazy gesture accompanied by a lazy smile.

  “So, what now, Kanbaru?”

  “I’m going home.”

  Oh? Numachi raised her eyebrows.

  She seemed genuinely surprised.

  “I thought I’d get at least one more smack from you, but you’re a surprisingly sensible woman. Though I can tell you right now that I’m going to keep on building my collection under another name. This habit of mine seems to have become something of an addiction─and I’m hooked on the hard stuff.”

  “I apologize for hitting you earlier. Sorry.”

  “Well aren’t you gracious.”

  “I don’t approve of what you’re doing, it’s predicated on predilections that I simply can’t wrap my mind around, but it also doesn’t seem like you’re contributing to anyone’s misery. Superficially it almost seems like you’re doing a good deed.”

  “I’m glad you get it.”

  “I don’t,” I said, putting some distance between us.

  And she didn’t try to close it─probably because she had no reason to.

  “See you around, Kanbaru. It’s too bad our long-awaited reunion had to be like this. I was really hoping to be reunited on the court, but─I guess that’s an impossible dream now, for the both of us. Life’s a bitch.”

  “Time takes care of that as well, though, doesn’t it.”

  “Of course,” she agreed straightaway.

  Without reiterating my farewell, I turned my back on her and walked away at a brisk pace, leaving her alone in the burnt field where the ruins of the cram school had once stood.

  The truth is I wanted to run, but for some reason I couldn’t─and it wasn’t out of consideration for Numachi and her injured leg.

  At any rate, I felt better.

  I’d discovered the identity of Lord Devil, and it wasn’t me─just having confirmed that was enough.

  …I’d probably go on repeating these pointless errands for the rest of my life. Forever gripped by paranoia that I might have perpetrated every single incident in the world.

  I’d doubt myself and feel remorseful ad nauseum.

  That would be my way of taking responsibility for my past mistakes─my manifest punishment.

  This time the culprit hadn’t been me, but in a surprising turn, an old acquaintance─and though I couldn’t comprehend her mindset, I nevertheless thought that the person waiting for me in that burnt field could just as well have been me.

  Every morning when I read the paper and saw the names of the perpetrators apprehended the previous day─I identified with them, even though I didn’t know them at all.

  And I’d keep doing that.

  For the rest of my life.

  Forever.

  …Or could time take care of that for me, too? Might the day finally come where I skim the newspaper like a normal person, and hear a rumor without pricking up my ears?

  And at night.

  Would the time come for me─to sleep without binding my left arm with duct tape?

  Probably not.

  In that sense, Numachi, who’d been keeping up her Lord Devil act, or something like it, for almost three years running, was no different. Her leg injury ending her athletic career had been a shock, and she boasted about collecting tales of others’ misfortunes to ease that shock, but by her own logic, wouldn’t time take care of her “worries” as well?

  Even if she didn’t gather such tales─

  Or would that take more than just three years?

  Would her worries go on forever as well, recurring throughout her life?

  “…Well, whatever.”

  The fact that my old archrival was up to her elbows in some pretty weird stuff left me with some complicated feelings that I couldn’t really put into words, but at the same time, there was nothing I could do about it.

  Archrival she may have been, but if circumstances hadn’t brought us together in such a manner, I could easily have passed her by on the street without noticing.

  Even so.

  Even so, wouldn’t Araragi-senpai stick his nose into what she was up to?

  Maybe not.

  It suddenly occurred to me that I should text him. If I explained everything in detail, he might stick his whole head in, not just his nose, so of course I withheld key points and was curt:

  An old acquaintance of mine (female) fondled my boob.

  Ordinarily, he didn’t respond to texts all that promptly, but just this once I got a reply right away:

  Count me in!

  “…”

  Smiling, I turned off my phone.

  010

  After relating the above events at great length, this might seem like a chabudai-gaeshi, or flipping over a set table, but the fact is that this kind of thing wasn’t all that uncommon in my life. In fact, it happened all the time.

  I catch the ghost of a whisper about something and go check it out, full of anxiety, only for my delusions of culpability to come to nothing─as I said, I was doing this over and over again since the previous year.

  Repeat, repeat, repeat. Endlessly.

  Well, it’s just that it got worse last year, when I started acting on it, while the thoughts themselves were a fixture ever since elementary school─ever since I made my deal with a devil.

  Like when I thought it was my fault that the cram school went out of business.

  I’d stalked Araragi-senpai for more or less the same reason, and I’ll be the first to admit that the whole thing bordered on the pathological, but on the other hand we can say, though we’d be stretching things a little, that such abnormal behavior was routine work to which Suruga Kanbaru became accustomed.

  We can.

  Once you get used to it, the abnormal can be normal, is normal.

  Eccentricities inevitably go into fashioning the everyday.

  So while my reunion with Roka Numachi in the middle of that burnt field was of course unexpected─while being suddenly confronted by an old acquaintance whom I’d never expected to see again, my middle school arch-nemesis no less, was in its own way something of a shock─I was surprised, and that was all.

  Retired players are forgotten. I’d forgotten about her until I saw her again, and she must have forgotten about me.

  The passage of time is a strange thing, our ties to others are funny things─those banal thoughts ran through my head, but they’re available to anyone who picks up an old novel; as the fruits of personal experience, they’re not even worth mentioning.

  Life is overflowing with surprises of that caliber.

  If I sound cold, that’s probably because I am, but I can’t hide my true feelings about it─it’s like Numachi said, I’ve never been able to approach things any way but straight on. If I got emotionally invested at every turn like my seniors Araragi and Senjogahara, my body would give out. Or rather, my mind would.

  I might come across as a reckless and foolhardy hothead to Araragi-senpai, but some people see me as cool and dispassionate.

  As for how I see myself─no, we’ll leave that alone for now.

  Taking it in that direction would open up a real can of worms.

  Anyway, that’s all my reunion with Roka Numachi was for me. Even if I belonged to this new Twitter thing I’ve been hearing about, it wasn’t an event that would have made me tweet.

  I wouldn’t have tweeted anything.

  Normally.

  Since I say normally, you know that’s not how things actually turned out. In reality, the name of my middle school arch-nemesis, Roka Numachi, would soon become impossible for me to forget.

  Impossible to forget?

  Judging from my unconscious use of that phrase, I guess that somewhere deep inside I intensely want to forget about her─but let’s move on to the following day.

  My second day as a third-year high school student.

  On the morning of the second day of my new life that new term─I woke up at the same time as always.

  “A brooding frown makes people think you’re w
ise, but they’re dead wrong. Thinking about things isn’t always good. It’s the ones who don’t think about anything and just blithely float through life who tend to hold the world in the palms of their hands. Worrying is just a waste of time. If you have the time to think, then act. Forget your worries. No use crying over spilt milk.”

  That was what my mother said to me in my dream that morning─she appeared in my dreams often enough, but as I got out of bed I thought to myself that it had been quite a while since she’d shown up two days running.

  That is, I tried to get out of bed, but my left arm, still fixed to a post with duct tape, held me back.

  “…Nnng.”

  Absently, I stripped away the tape─and as I was stripping it away, I came fully awake. The work of freeing myself from this wrapping was like my version of morning calisthenics.

  Same wake-up routine as always.

  Same as always. That’s what I thought.

  As my vision came into focus, I spotted my nail clippers─the ones I’d searched for so thoroughly the day before but had never found.

  On second thought, I hadn’t searched all that thoroughly─but, that’s always how it goes: you can’t find what you’re looking for no matter how hard you search, but as soon as you give up, there it is.

  I finished removing the duct tape, and kept on going, unwrapping the bandage from my left arm. If I didn’t cut my nails right when I found the clippers, I’d lose sight of them again. And yesterday’s plan to stop and buy new ones at the convenience store had been derailed by Ogi’s intrusion.

  I felt like I’d come out a little bit ahead, finding the old ones like this. I might treat Ogi to a can of juice with the money I’d saved, but it might not be a good idea to spoil such a cheeky junior─with trivial thoughts running through my head, I cut the nails on my left hand.

  Thumb, pointer finger, middle finger.

  I got that far─and only when I had just the ring finger and pinky left to go did I belatedly notice.

  Very fucking belatedly.

  But there was no helping it.

  Because it was the way it was supposed to be─in fact, the way it was up until the day before was what was unnatural, however accustomed to it I may have become. So there was no helping the fact that it’d taken me some time to notice.

  Yes.

  The left arm I had exposed and aired by unwrapping my bandage─wasn’t a monkey’s.

  Nor was it a devil’s.

  It was the human left arm it was supposed to be again.

  011

  For a second I thought I might still be dreaming, that I was having one of those “waking up from a dream” dreams, but that wasn’t the case.

  “This must be a dream” is pretty much just a comic-book idea, and I’m not so dreamy a girl that I need to go around pinching my cheek─still, at the sight of my smooth, slim left arm.

  Not beastly, but human.

  I couldn’t help but gasp─and do a double take in disbelief.

  I quite literally could not believe my eyes.

  In a daze, I stripped naked and looked at myself in the full-length mirror standing in the corner of my room─and in my reflection, regardless of how I posed, my left arm.

  My right arm in the reflection was a human’s.

  My dear, departed arm─I’d almost forgotten what it was like.

  …Come to think of it, there was absolutely no need for me to get completely naked, but that’s just how discombobulated I was.

  It was only natural.

  The sudden, abrupt, unexpected return of an arm that had been a beast’s ever since last May─the arm that had forced me to retire from the sport of basketball, which I’d played ever since middle school─was not something I could process just like that.

  What the hell was going on?

  I mean.

  I did feel happy, of course.

  It’s not like I hadn’t longed for the day when my arm would return to its proper state─though I’d convinced myself that it was my just deserts, that it was karma, as if I’d accepted it honorably, it had still made me sad to see that beastly arm every time I unwrapped it to change or take a bath.

  I’d hidden my arm under a bandage to avoid people’s prying eyes─but I’d also been hiding it from my own.

  Even when I was alone in my room, even when I went to sleep at night, I undid the bandage as infrequently as possible─so.

  So it’s not that I wasn’t happy.

  But bewilderment occupied a vastly higher proportion of my emotional pie chart than happiness.

  Why?

  Why had my left arm been─liberated?

  Today, this day, all of a sudden? Without warning?

  By the way, Mister Oshino did say that time would take care of the problem─his expert opinion was that my arm would be freed from the devil when I turned twenty.

  Had he just been a little off about the timing?

  Had it happened two years early?

  Was that within the margin of error?

  “…”

  But, but, could things really turn out that conveniently? Was it really okay for someone like me, who’d perpetrated something so dire, to be blessed with such good fortune?

  No, there was one other possibility.

  A horrible possibility that I didn’t even want to consider.

  This arm had become the Monkey’s Paw in the first place because I’d petitioned a devil─to “get rid of Araragi-senpai” because I hated him with all my being.

  The Devil’s Arm was the plain and simple embodiment of that hatred─and it was because the matter was never resolved, because it ended without my wish being granted, that it got stuck that way.

  If my arm changed back─that didn’t mean something happened to him, did it?

  On that day last year.

  That time.

  The negative wish I had made back then─could that unforgivable wish possibly have been fulfilled out there somewhere?

  That unthinkable possibility floated into my mind, and the moment it did, I reached for my cell phone where it was plugged into the charger.

  I’d left it off since the day before, but now I turned it on in a panic─given that I run twenty kilometers every morning, I’m a much earlier riser than most high school students, and, well, at the moment it was more predawn than early morning, but that being said, I had to do it. I had to get in touch with him as soon as possible.

  Just as I was running into trouble opening the contacts and finding his name, my phone showed a new message.

  A new message.

  From my dear senior.

  Perfect timing, I thought, but in fact it seemed as though it had been delivered to the server while my phone was off, and I was receiving it only now.

  That other message was a joke. How come you didn’t answer? Are you pissed? You’re not pissed, are you? Well, I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean it, let me make it up to you somehow.

  ……

  Pathetic!

  If it actually was something worth apologizing for, such a casual message wasn’t going to cut it.

  Hmm, as far as I could tell from the message, he didn’t seem to be in any sort of trouble…

  It’d be just like him to meet some hideous fate immediately after sending the message, but at least it seemed like I didn’t need to be in a rush to call him.

  Or rather, I didn’t want to call him.

  If I was pissed at all, then it was now.

  I mean, come on…

  But if nothing bad had happened to him, why had my arm gone back to normal?

  It was mysterious─I definitely felt more confused than happy.

  Honestly, it was even a little unsettling.

  For the chains that bound me night and day to suddenly be undone─was distinctly unsettling.

  For this to happen─without a reason.

  Didn’t Mister Oshino say that every aberration has its reason?

  Time heals all wounds.

  Is that all thi
s was?