Hanamonogatari

by Nisioisin

  “Just kidding.”

  “All right, I don’t care what you were up to─but I’ll never feel comfortable unless you tell me how you knew I’d be going to the open campus.”

  “Gathering rumors is where I shine.”

  “…”

  She was slippery as an eel, this one.

  I couldn’t even have a proper chat with her.

  In which case, I was just going to get down to business.

  “Numachi…you weren’t only collecting unhappiness, I take it. You were a collector not only of unhappiness, but of a devil? I don’t get it, why would you─”

  “That’s what I’ve come to this schoolhouse full of good little boys and girls to explain to you. Say, Kanbaru, you free after class today?”

  “…Yeah,” I answered. I would have said yes even if I wasn’t.

  “Then I’ll be waiting for you after school at the gym. Looks like it’s about time for the first bell to ring, so I’m going to pull back for the moment. We can talk more then.”

  It was unclear to me how she had the nerve to select a public place like the school gymnasium for our appointment. The gym after school, full of students engaging in club activities, seemed like an especially untenable choice if she was worried about being seen─but when she pushed that arrangement on me so authoritatively, I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  She was the kind of woman who barged into my classroom.

  She probably had something in mind─in reality, after meeting up at the gym, we might move to another location.

  So we could talk some more.

  So she could talk to me some more.

  “Sounds good… I’m looking forward to hearing your story.”

  “And hear it you shall. And I want to hear what you have to say as well, about this arm─”

  She approached and thrust the arm out at me as she said this.

  That arm that so very recently had been my own.

  She shoved it at me.

  Like she was shoving me away.

  “What are you talking about? Why would you want to hear about my left arm─”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” asked Numachi, a smile creeping ever so slowly onto her face.

  A touch of monomania tinging her voice.

  “Knowing the provenance of the pieces is crucial for any precious collection.”

  019

  As soon as Numachi left the classroom, all the other students came swarming in as though they’d been lurking right outside the door.

  I say “as though,” but I wondered if maybe they actually had been. In that case, it was pretty cold-blooded of them to watch from a safe distance as I was confronted by an obviously dangerous individual. Thankfully, that wasn’t it; by coincidence every single one of them had happened to get a late start that day, and they’d all made it to school just in time.

  Weird, right? Bizarre.

  One of those coincidences that almost seem planned.

  Reminds me of a story I heard, where lightning struck a church during mass but no one was hurt because every single one of the usually punctual faithful happened to be late that day for one reason or another.

  Okay, God might strike me down for making that comparison.

  Because if someone was pulling the strings, it was neither God nor an angel, but Lord Devil.

  Which was no longer just a name for attracting clients─since her left arm, at the very least, had been transformed into that of a devil.

  And I suspected that her left leg, too─

  “What’s the matter, Ruga? You’re looking grim.”

  “Higasa…”

  I couldn’t bring myself to inform my friend, ebullient as always, that my former archrival had been in our classroom until moments before, let alone describe how utterly, tragically transformed she’d been─to the point that both inwardly and outwardly she was barely human.

  “…It’s nothing. That open campus yesterday was fun, huh? Maybe not that college in particular, but it really made me excited about college in general. Gotta put my nose to the exam prep grindstone from here on out─”

  Higasa must have felt a little uncomfortable at my ham-fisted change of subject, but she let it pass without comment, like a true friend.

  The curriculum was taken care of in what felt like the blink of an eye─and after school.

  I went to the gym.

  Where a lone figure stood waiting amid the cavernous emptiness─Roka Numachi.

  The crutch that should have been supporting her broken leg was lying on the floor─and she was standing on that leg as though nothing was wrong with it, dribbling a basketball in an easy rhythm with the plaster-sheathed left hand that should have been holding the crutch.

  She was waiting for me.

  Roka Numachi was waiting for Suruga Kanbaru.

  “How ’bout a little one-on-one?” she skipped the pleasantries.

  Ah ha.

  That’s why─she’d chosen the gym and not somewhere else as our after-school rendezvous point.

  It was the only place around with a basketball court.

  And just like that morning, she’d taken care of everything, clearing out all and sundry. The volleyball team, the badminton team, and of course the basketball team─each would have their own reason for showing up late.

  And so I answered her.

  Anyone who’d answer differently was no basketball player at all.

  “Let’s do it.”

  020

  As someone celebrated for leading the Naoetsu High girls’ basketball team to the nationals, people may get the wrong impression when I say this─and the Ogis of the world may very well be disappointed to hear it─but part of me wants to make the highly irregular argument that there is no winning or losing in the sport of basketball.

  Maybe that goes beyond irregular, all the way to irrational?

  Or maybe it’s just irrelevant?

  But the thing is, I’m not saying this to flaunt my eccentricities and come across like some superior athlete. It’s how I really feel.

  I’ve come to the conclusion that the more you play it, and the more absorbed in it you become, the more unfathomable is this sport of basketball.

  I’ve come to feel like it’s not about winning or losing.

  Every game of basketball has an outcome, of course, but that strikes me as a little different than victory or defeat.

  I think my feeling stems from the reality that, man or woman, there isn’t a single player on Earth who can boast a perfect shooting percentage.

  Some say it’s actually rebounds that are most important in basketball, but that’s only because there are so many missed shots to begin with.

  No player shoots with the intention of missing, while on the other side, the defense is doing everything they can to block the shot.

  As a result, the success or failure of a shot becomes a matter of probability─the identical shot will go in sometimes, and sometimes it won’t.

  Mm-hmm, probability.

  There’s no getting around the fact that there are stronger teams and weaker teams, of course, but if you follow my argument to its logical conclusion, the outcome will be a matter of luck in any game between teams that are both above a certain level.

  The lucky team wins─and the unlucky team loses.

  I’ve felt this way for a while.

  I don’t expect anyone to go along with my opinion, and other basketball players─Higasa, for instance─might be pissed off if I told them how I felt, but the fact is that there have been times when my team beat a team that was clearly better than us, and times when the opposite occurred.

  You might call it “the flow of the match.”

  That’s just putting lipstick on a pig, though, and I prefer to call it “a muddle,” or even “a fluke.”

  I have no idea how it looks to the spectators, but from the perspective of a player on the court, there isn’t much difference between the winners and the losers. Because the smallest change in the flow c
ould easily have taken things in the other direction.

  This applies to all sports, not just basketball, I imagine─the time you spend practicing and honing your skills is the main event, and the games are just the icing on the cake, just a chance to try your luck.

  The old advice to “practice like it’s the real thing and treat the real thing like it’s practice” is right on the money.

  Which is why I honestly wasn’t that upset when our team was eliminated from the national tournament my first year in high school.

  Some of the older kids on the team cried, but I thought we played just as well as the other team, so it didn’t feel to me like we had “lost.”

  It’s frustrating to lose at a game of chance because your luck is worse (Araragi-senpai likes to make fun of me for that), but in a game of skill like basketball, there’s no reason to be ashamed when you lose based on luck, no reason for regret.

  That’s how I feel.

  At the root of that value system is the fact that “running” was what first drove me to start training as an athlete.

  Track and field.

  There’s no room there for something like the flow to worm its way in.

  No muddle, no flukes.

  It’s a completely merit-based contest, where the faster person wins and the slower person loses. Elements of chance don’t enter into it.

  Not that I belonged to the track team or anything─at the time I thought that there was no room for a sore loser like me in a world of clear winners and losers.

  What might I do if I lost?

  I had no clue.

  A person like me is not cut out for competition.

  Sorry for droning on like this, but what I’m trying to say is that basketball is a sport I play for the genuine love of the game.

  I truly enjoy playing it, accompanied by absolutely no negative feelings whatsoever.

  If you accused me of insulting the game of basketball, of not taking it seriously, I could only hang my head and say that you’re exactly right.

  Exactly right.

  I don’t take it seriously.

  I mean, even in a one-on-one game against Numachi, who didn’t exactly fill me with warm feelings─I forgot everything.

  I forgot about Lord Devil, I forgot about the devil’s arm.

  And just totally got into it.

  We dove in without even worrying about the hassle of keeping score, alternating offense and defense in dizzying succession.

  In the end, I think we shared the understanding that she probably won in terms of points but that I did in terms of substance.

  While my school uniform may have given me a slight handicap against Numachi in her tracksuit (such as it was), in reality that handicap amounted to essentially nothing. At the very least it was insignificant.

  She managed somehow or other to propel herself with her plaster-encased left arm and leg like normal─though in my experience, those “devil” parts aren’t even comparable to human limbs in terms of physical power, so maybe “like normal” isn’t the right way to put it─that being said, the casts themselves were a real hindrance, so her playing style was undeniably clumsy at times.

  In fact, when I attacked from her left─or when I focused on guarding her from the right, she crumbled easily.

  The problem was that she was blocking so many of my all-important shots that, score-wise, I think she almost certainly won.

  Roka Numachi’s Quagmire Defense seemed to be fully functional, even after all this time.

  Which reminds me that back when we were both active players, a rather warped ethos had been attributed to Numachi’s undeniably strong team: As long as you don’t lose, you win.

  She’d seemed like the odd one out, but maybe she was that ethos’ poster child.

  Take her “unhappiness collection” as Lord Devil─using time to neutralize problems, that idea’s vertical axis, could be thought of as its expression.

  Even after getting injured and retiring─switching schools and down in the dumps as she was now, maybe she was still a basketball player at heart.

  “You should have dunked.” Our strength at long last completely spent after an hour or more of reckless attack and defense, Numachi made that critique. “With the way I am now, it’d make you unstoppable one-on-one.”

  “…I actually don’t like dunking.”

  “Yeah? Really?”

  “It feels like cheating.”

  Maybe cheating is going too far.

  Maybe it’s more appropriate to call it a last resort, or a trump card─I never did it much during actual games. There probably isn’t a single high school girl in Japan besides me who can dunk, so I could never shake the feeling that it was a cheap move.

  In terms of probability, and the flow and all that, dunking involves putting the ball directly into the hoop, so it boasts a hundred-percent success rate.

  Hmm, was I stingy with it because I want to skirt the issue of winning and losing?

  “I mean, that’s freestyle basketball,” I said. “You do it to entertain the crowd more than to win.”

  “Huh. Makes a runt like me jealous, though. From my perspective it’s a legit skill.”

  “It’s not like I’m tall.”

  “Really? You were shorter back then─me, I stopped growing back in the first year of middle school.”

  Once she said this, I noticed that indeed Numachi didn’t seem to have grown a single inch.

  Focusing on her hair color, I’d ended up with a strong impression that she’d transformed─but making her hair black again and putting her in her old uniform might easily resurrect the Numachi from our playing days.

  …Or maybe not.

  She’d wandered too far off the path these last three years to return to the old days. Even if she herself hadn’t changed, her way of life was too different.

  I’m not one to talk, but─at least I don’t go around collecting “devil” parts.

  You don’t see me starting any literally diabolical collections.

  Her left leg.

  Her left arm.

  Those plaster casts weren’t just concealing the surface.

  “If a devil would grant me any wish,” Numachi said, playing around with the ball, which was pretty big in comparison to her small frame, “I think I’d wish to be taller.”

  “…”

  “No, if I did, I might start slaughtering everyone around me who’s taller than me─and I’d be taller, relatively speaking.”

  According to the crybaby devil, she insinuated.

  To me.

  “Kanbaru, what did you wish for, I wonder?”

  “…I don’t really want to talk about it.”

  “Oh come on. We’ve already had such an intense conversation. With this.” Numachi rolled the basketball across the floor towards me. “What is there left to hide?”

  “True─in which case, promise you’ll talk to me honestly, that you won’t keep anything back, either.”

  “Sure. But what should I talk about?”

  “What you’ve been doing these past three years.”

  “Didn’t I already tell you?”

  “This time I want you to include the stuff you left out before.” I rolled the ball back to her. “That left leg of yours─and the arm.”

  “Sure,” she agreed readily, so readily that it felt anti-climactic. “But you have to go first.”

  “…”

  “The more entertaining your story, the provenance of this left arm I retrieved from you─the more I’ll tell you in return… Hey Kanbaru, do you have a type? Of boys you like, I mean?”

  “I’ve never really thought about it.”

  “Ah…you always did seem like a lesbo. That was the rumor going around.”

  “I can’t deny it. But I like boys too. I like them on the small side, and kind.”

  “Oh yeah? I have a type, too. At this point in my life,” Numachi prefaced like some old lady though we were the same age, “I don’t care about looks or their p
ersonality anymore. What kind of a life he’s had, his background, his backstory, that’s what I go for─I’m hoping this left arm’s backstory will be interesting to me.”