Hanamonogatari

by Nisioisin

  No.

  It didn’t matter if she was dealing with a swindler or a college student, she wasn’t the kind of person to get hung up on such details… Even me, her one and only daughter, she never saw as anything but an independent individual.

  She evaluated everyone based solely on their “personality,” regardless of title or standing─which may have been a wonderful thing, but given that she had to live in human society, it was also a little pathological.

  In practice, being raised by her was like being cursed─and this ominous swindler before me… Being saddled with that request when he was only a college student, dragged along by it even now, all the way to me.

  It was like he was cursed too.

  “I dropped out with my buddy in the middle of the term and left home, so I didn’t know what happened after that─Izuko-senpai being who she is, she never revealed her family background to me even though we belonged to the same club in college. It was only recently that I heard Gaen had died. And that her orphaned daughter had been taken in by her paternal grandparents─and when I heard it, I couldn’t believe my ears. She never seemed like a woman who would go and get herself killed… Or is that exactly why she did?”

  “That’s why you came to town last year?”

  If so─what did it mean?

  He had come to town because of me─in order to check on me─but he pulled a scam on the local middle school girls just for good measure?

  “Precisely the opposite. Looking in on you was the part that happened incidentally─Gaen hadn’t given me any money, after all, so I had no reason to do anything on her behalf. I just figured I’d check on you while I was there, that’s all.”

  “…”

  That was probably true.

  But even if it was, it didn’t make me feel any better.

  And furthermore, if it was true, then why─was he waiting for me at the station today, why was he treating me to this meal? “Incidentally” just didn’t─

  “Were you by any chance sweet on my mother?”

  “Hm? Hmph, so that’s what the kid thinks. Everything always has to be about love.” Kaiki didn’t sound all that offended by my frank question despite his reply. “You’re so simple it’s disgusting. If that’s how you think, you’re going to be easy prey for the swindlers of the world.”

  “But you keep calling her Gaen. According to what you said, her last name should have been Kanbaru by the time you met her,” I bluffed with everything I had. In the hopes of landing a retaliatory blow. “Isn’t that because you don’t want to accept that she was married? Since Kanbaru was the name of your rival in love─”

  “Cut the shit. But I suppose I must commend you on your powers of insight. At your level, though, your head is liable to end up crowded with superfluous nonsense, and you’ll be even easier to dupe─won’t you.”

  “…”

  “But you’re more or less on point. Yes, it was a lifetime ago, but I was head over heels for your mother.”

  He admitted it readily, unambiguously.

  A little too unambiguously and a little too readily─it didn’t feel like I’d struck much of a blow at all.

  In fact, it felt like I’d missed the mark entirely.

  “She was a good woman─unlike her younger sister. I had a lover of my own at the time, though, so nothing happened. You can rest easy. I didn’t come to see you because I’m your father or anything. It’s just plain old nostalgia.”

  Memories, just memories, he said, memories that aren’t worth a plug nickel.

  Now, that was definitely a lie. The part about them not being worth a plug nickel─the “memories” part had to be true.

  Okay.

  It was only natural, all too natural…but this man’s relationship with my mother had become nothing more than a memory long ago.

  What about me?

  Was my mother─nothing but a memory to me too?

  “…Do I look like my mother?”

  “Hmm, hard to say. It was over fifteen years ago that I knew Gaen. You’re her daughter, so I guess you look more like her than not, but I only vaguely recall her face.”

  “You’ve forgotten the face of the woman you were in love with?”

  “Yeah, I’m cold─but so are you, no?” Perhaps perceiving an accusatory nuance in my words, Kaiki threw them back in my face. “You keep calling Gaen ‘that woman,’ ‘that person’… Is that any way to refer to your mother? She died over ten years ago. You’ve started to forget her, haven’t you?”

  “…”

  That─isn’t the case at all.

  In fact, my mother is rooted in my heart, etched there so deeply that I could never forget her. Inseparable from my being.

  Inscribed in me.

  So deeply that I see her in my dreams, and I hear her voice speaking to me.

  It’s just─from the time I was little, heck, from the time I was a baby, I’ve always called Toé Gaen─

  I’ve always called that person “that person.”

  …Yet the monkey’s paw that I thought was inseparable separated from me so easily─would that person be cut off from my heart in the same way someday? I didn’t expect to find out Kaiki’s true relationship with my mother way back when─but just as he seemed to have processed it thoroughly.

  “At the very least, your mother wasn’t the type to keep mulling things over. Earlier I said you’re simple, but Gaen was probably even simpler than a kid like you. Her way of thinking was so simple that everyone around her fell on their faces all on their own. Speaking of which, that woman once said, ‘Once you’ve thought, you’ve already thought wrong. Don’t waste even a moment of your life on thinking’─in that regard, at least, she was possessed of a philosophy mutually exclusive to my own.”

  “…”

  From those words, from the way he uttered those words that were so clearly hers, I knew that Kaiki still cared about her. And that the goodwill to treat me to this meal obviously sprung from that. It wasn’t “me (her daughter)” he was interacting with, it was “her daughter (me)”─and at the same time, I could see that his goodwill formed a closed circuit within himself.

  He wasn’t trying to deceive me.

  He’d come to check in on me “incidentally”─it seemed I could take that at face value as well.

  He was just flipping the pages of a photo album.

  Like a perfectly normal person.

  …Would it come for me too someday?

  The day when a person I had fancied, when unrealized desire, became nostalgic memory?

  Unrealized goals, unrequited love.

  Would the day come when I could look back on them and laugh?

  “It will. The toys and stuffed animals you loved when you were a kid, you get sick of them someday, no? Or is ‘get sick of them’ too harsh? Maybe I should say you graduate from them.”

  “Graduate…”

  “Well, either way, Suruga, I’m glad that Gaen’s legacy is doing well. That left arm isn’t even injured, is it?”

  …He threw it in so casually that it took me a few seconds to realize he’d seen through the secret I’d been keeping for almost an entire year, but in the course of those few seconds, before I could react, Kaiki produced a case from his suit jacket pocket. He opened the case and held out his business card.

  As I went to take it, he said, “Oops,” and drew it back for a moment, taking a fountain pen from his breast pocket and running it across the card, then holding it out to me once more.

  Like he was drying it over the brazier.

  I saw that the title “Ghostbuster” had been crossed out.

  Ghostbuster Deishu Kaiki

  And there were two telephone numbers (mobile) and two email addresses (Gmail and his mobile again).

  “What’s this…”

  “I don’t envision it happening, but if you’re ever in trouble, get in touch. I kind of promised that woman I’d watch out for you.”

  “Are you trying to trick me?” I asked reflexively,
though I didn’t think for a second that he was. I had to ask, though. “…Like you did Senjogahara-senpai?”

  “Nope, no tricks when it comes to you,” he replied bluntly.

  Of course, that’s exactly what a swindler would say─but while it got on my nerves, there was really nothing I could add.

  “You really respect your beloved senpai, don’t you, Suruga? You’d feel like you were being faithless to them if you didn’t steel yourself to keep on disliking me, to keep on feeling negatively towards me.”

  “…”

  Kaiki spoke like he’d seen directly into my heart.

  “But it’s pointless. I’m not deceiving you, and I mean you no harm. So you can’t hate me.”

  “…”

  “In the same way that someone you like won’t necessarily like you back─someone you dislike won’t necessarily dislike you back. They might not even let you dislike them.”

  “You…may be right.”

  “I am right. If you think I’m just going to sit back and be someone you hate, you’re dead wrong. Let me put it this way. Let’s say there’s someone you respect. There’s got to be someone who hates that person so much that they want to kill them. Araragi and Senjogahara are probably heroes in your eyes, but nevertheless there has to be at least one person who hates them to an absurd degree.”

  “…”

  “We aren’t comic-book characters. There aren’t people you can completely hate, or people who are completely evil. No one’s nature is identical from every perspective, or at every point in time. Your forte is running, but you don’t always run, do you? Sometimes you walk, sometimes you lie down. It’s the same. I love money, but I also spend that money.”

  Sometimes I’m even kind to people, even if I’m not particularly attached to them, Kaiki admitted with a grimace─the expression might have been a masochistic smile, but I couldn’t be sure.

  In the end, I guess he was right.

  In the same way that I unconditionally lionized people who could run fast, others tended to view great ability as an indicator of superior character.

  But in reality it wasn’t that simple.

  You hear all the time about supposedly “great men” abusing their children or engaging in sordid relationships─and the opposite was also possible.

  People who’re abhorred as villains are sometimes excellent fathers, or sweet daughters─there are even misers who exhaust the limits of atrocity to make their money and then donate the bulk of it to local charities.

  Evil deeds can in turn help people, and malice can serve people’s needs─but enough already. No need to unfold some grand theory of humanity.

  All that needs to be said is this.

  The people you hate also have friends.

  The people you hate also have people who love them.

  That is patently true, and if you don’t accept it, you won’t be able to function in society.

  Yes.

  This man who hurt my friends─wasn’t going to hurt me, no matter what.

  No matter how far I went in my duty to them by hating this man─he’d continue being kind to me.

  Kaiki would keep fulfilling his duty to my mother.

  My friends’ bitter enemy─was a kindly uncle to me.

  “If I’m ever in trouble, get in touch, huh?”

  “Yes. I’ll hoodwink just about anyone for you.”

  “…In that case, I don’t want to get in touch with you.”

  If I’m ever in trouble.

  That phrase made me think of Lord Devil─of Numachi, whereabouts currently unknown, the unaccounted-for woman. Roka Numachi, the collector of troubles, of worries─of misfortune.

  “But I’ll accept your goodwill, anyway.”

  So saying, I filched the business card from his hand and thrust it into my pocket in a deliberately brusque manner. That was the sole act of protest remaining to me.

  I probably shouldn’t have accepted it. I should have put my duty to my friends first. I ought to have dropped the business card straight onto the wire mesh over the brazier and let it burn.

  But what Kaiki offered wasn’t goodwill towards me, but my mother─so I had to accept it.

  I was nothing but a middleman─for his goodwill, for his kindness, for everything.

  “What’s wrong? Your meat-eating hand has stopped. Meat, meat, meat meat meat. Beef, beef, pork, chicken, beef, beef, offal, offal, eat it in that order. You’re a little on the skinny side. Pig out on some meat.”

  “I don’t easily build muscle or put on weight. Exercise wasn’t always my forte. I was a scrawny kid. I used to be a slow runner…”

  I said this with my loss to Kaiki running through my head.

  Yes.

  That’s why I had wished on the Devil’s Hand─and gotten stuck making the outrageous wish come true on my own.

  So these legs of mine are my property.

  And the proof of my transgression.

  Out of failure, strength…or something like that?

  “Hmph. You seem genuinely pissed that you lost to me. Well, I was on the track and field team in junior and senior high, if it makes you feel any better.”

  “Track and field…”

  You wouldn’t know it to look at him.

  You can’t judge a book by its cover, and even less so someone’s past.

  “Oh, want me to teach you the running style I came up with? It’s called the Kaiki Stride.”

  “…I’m all set.”

  Even if he was speaking from a place of kindness, it was simply too humiliating. And there was no way I could use a technique that bore his name.

  “I don’t do track and field anyway, I’m on the basketball team. Or I was, before I retired.”

  “Right, it was Senjogahara who did track and field.”

  “…”

  “Well, I say track and field, but my specialty was the shot-put.” Whether this was a joke or not I couldn’t tell, but following up on the evasive remark (at this rate the whole track and field thing was starting to feel like a lie), he said, “If you can get by without coming to me for help, so much the better, that’s for sure.” But also: “It’d be better to rely on me than on the Monkey’s Paw, though.”

  “Uh…”

  “She entrusted it to you, didn’t she? Your mother. That mummified Monkey’s Paw,” Kaiki clarified like it was nothing. “Just to be on the safe side, let me tell you now: absolutely do not use it. A junk man will probably show up before long, so just hand it over then.”

  “Junk man?”

  “Yes. What you might call─a collector.”

  A collector, the man says.

  “There’s someone trying to gather all the body parts of a devil. I expect they’ll try and steal the Monkey’s Paw from you─I’m saying this for your own good: just give it to them when they show up.”

  “…Okay.”

  Assenting, I glanced down at my left arm─which up until recently had been that selfsame Devil’s Arm.

  It─had already been stolen.

  “Got it. If and when this collector appears, I’ll just hand over the ‘hand’ that person entrusted to me.”

  “You’re being oddly obliging. Does that mean you’ve already gotten rid of it? If so, that’s well and good. Now then, it seems like you can’t get on with your meal while you’re looking at my gloomy mug.” Removing his bib and standing up with that bit of self-awareness, Kaiki extracted a few bills out of his wallet and put them on the table. “I’m going to head home─you take your time. Order yourself another two or three plates. Meat. Eat meat. Meat, I say.”

  So long, he bid curtly and made to leave the private room without a shred of reluctance─at which I unconsciously called out, “Hang on…”

  Hm, Kaiki turned back to look at me.

  Though I’d called to him, there wasn’t anything I wanted to ask, and God knows I didn’t want to feel even guiltier than I already did by continuing to dine with him.

  Still, somehow.

&nbs
p; I’d called to him.

  “Um. I…”

  “What is it? Have you fallen for me?”

  “…”

  “I’m joking. Boy, you really are a serious girl.”

  “…Everyone keeps on saying that,” I grumbled in a small, petulant voice in response to Kaiki’s remark. “And I’m sick of it.”