Hanamonogatari

by Nisioisin

  “It’s the theory of evolution.

  “Fail, run away, get sloppy, get caught, get exposed, apologize, deceive, talk my way out of it─through endless repetition, I figured out my system.

  “The system you’re familiar with.

  “By this point, I’m sure oh-so-clever Kanbaru has figured out how I came to meet Deishu Kaiki. Right, eventually I horned in on his territory.

  “There are similarities between his cons and my hobby, after all─my activities aren’t commercial, but in terms of methodology, you could say we’re essentially in the same business.

  “I want to make it clear that I don’t approve of his cons─abusing his knowledge of charms to take money from innocent people, I mean, come on. There sure are some bad apples in the world.

  “But we can’t ignore the fact that some people have also been saved by his actions.

  “I agree that the inevitable victimization that results from his work, unlike mine, is unacceptable, but then charms are just ineffective for most people.

  “Oh, were any of your friends affected? I get why you would be pissed in that case, but at the same time, you should try and understand.

  “There’s no such thing as universal evil.

  “Every evil also brings some salvation.

  “Every evil, and every devil.

  “On the flipside, all justice hurts someone─they say there are no absolutes in this world, and that includes absolute right and absolute wrong.

  “War engenders great inventions, and disasters bring about economic benefits. It’s always been that way. The words ‘good and evil’ can easily be replaced by ‘profit and loss.’

  “But all of that being said, it’s not like I found a kindred spirit in Kaiki. We had a little disagreement, so we decided to share information so as not to step on each other’s toes, that’s all.

  “Because, while we might be in the same business, his way of doing things was inconvenient for me, and vice versa.

  “He’s a reasonable guy, in his own way.

  “He just wants to make a buck, so he knows how to make a deal.

  “Now, in addition to learning that there was this guy named Kaiki, there were a few other things I learned at that point. Got a guess? Right, charms─and aberrations.

  “As an expert in the field, Deishu Kaiki told me about the existence of these aberrations. No, he doesn’t believe in ghosts himself, so more precisely he told me about the theory that they exist─but.

  “That’s a little bit of foreshadowing.

  “It foreshadows how I turned my hand more broadly to assembling a ‘devil.’

  “How long was it since I started my collection? As someone who still goes to school you might not understand, Kanbaru, but when you’re not tied to any such organization, the calendar starts to lose its meaning. Monday runs into Sunday runs into Friday, and January, February, December, they’re all the same. It’s like you start to tell the season by the rotation of the menu at McDonald’s. Very cultured, I know. In a contemporary way. The point is, I don’t know precisely how much time had passed, I can’t remember. But it had been at least a year, I think.

  “I don’t actually number my collection, so I have no idea what number this particular girl was. I was well over a hundred, but not yet up to two hundred, somewhere in there.

  “Sorry to be so vague, I know I promised to tell you the whole truth.

  “But one thing is for sure. That girl─Roka Hanadori was her name─was #01 in my Devil Collection. She was a high school student in my town, so she was probably older than me, though I never asked.

  “Yeah, I remember her name.

  “It made such an intense impression on me that I blurted it out just now despite my usual dedication to privacy─and yes, it’s partially because our first names are read the same way, but that’s not the only reason.

  “Her name means a blossom on a high tower, while mine means a wax flower─quite a difference, eh? Plus her family name uses the characters for ‘flowers’ and ‘birds’ as opposed to my ‘swamp’? Enough to make you jealous, for sure.

  “But the issues she was dealing with completely dispelled any such envy or petty jealousy.

  “…I’m telling you this because it’s an integral part of the story, but keep it to yourself. And stop prying into Hanadori’s life. It goes against my professional ethics. Given that it’s not technically my profession, I could turn a blind eye to any indiscretions if I had to, of course, but I have my pride.

  “Let’s say it was in a certain town. This story takes place in a town where I’d set up shop and was doing my Lord Devil thing─when Hanadori showed up.

  “By then I had started using my Easy, Normal, Hard filter─and she chose Hard. She came to see me, face to face. You know what I thought then?

  “Yup… Damn, it might be time to close up shop in this town. The fewer Hard-mode clients, the better. When their issues are grave, the root of the problem remains whether or not I succeed. Sometimes I can’t say, ‘leave it to me,’ even as a lie. Not to mention the fact that when Hanadori came to me, she looked like she’d been to hell and back five times already.

  “Even my leg didn’t faze her one bit. I was wearing the cast and using the crutch to flaunt my ‘weakness’ and make myself seem easier to talk to.

  “She came to me and pleaded, ‘Help me…’ Of course, I immediately started trying to decide who to pass her off to. Was this a matter for the police? Or child-protective services?

  “But that calculation went out the window in the blink of an eye.

  “She was wearing track pants under the skirt of her school uniform. Baggy ones─exactly like the ones I’m wearing now.

  That winter you saw a lot of girls sporting that fashion, so at the time I just assumed she was being trendy. But now that I think about it, was it even winter? Maybe the very tail end? Either way, she wasn’t wearing those track pants under her skirt to protect against the cold. She took them off in front of me.

  “You know what’s coming, right?

  “Her leg─was a devil’s.

  “Yup, this leg. Hairy, tough, too unbalanced to be attached to a girl─this leg.

  “But it wasn’t the state of her leg that Hanadori was upset about.

  “‘This leg,’ she said. ‘This leg is trying to kill my mother, all on its own.’

  “I’ll give you the gist of her story, but don’t pay attention to the details and just forget it all afterwards, okay? Please. There was a college student she was planning her future with, and if that was all then no big deal, it happens all the time, but she said she was pregnant with his child. Maybe that happens all the time too. And I guess it happens all the time like it did with her, that her parents, dead set against it, told her to have an abortion.

  “Happens so often that it might as well be the plot of a cellphone novel─but just because it happens all the time doesn’t mean it isn’t tragic.

  “Me? I wanted nothing to do with it, obviously. I mean, holy cow! People had come to me with some pretty serious problems before that, but hers took the cake. No contest.

  “The hospital is probably where you should be, I thought, but she was probably seeing a doctor already… And her case wasn’t covered by my ‘time heals all wounds’ warranty.

  “Pregnancy wasn’t something that just went away over time.

  “In fact, it would only get worse.

  “The truth is that I was at a loss. Why is she opening up to me about this heavyweight shit? It’s not the kind of thing you go to some urban legend of a consultation service for… But like I said. The stuff that ‘happens all the time’ that she shared with me was just a preamble.

  “She’d never swallowed the rumor, of course─but it seemed like her back was definitely against the wall. She didn’t want to snuff out a new life, but she also wasn’t old enough to be a mother, her own mother was all over her about it, the man she was building her life around wasn’t being helpful─so.

  “So she turned
to a devil instead.

  “She wished on a mummified left leg─just like you wished on that mummified left hand.

  “I never got to ask how she came to be in possession of such a thing. It was my first exposure to any of it, so what can you do? Such a waste, though. Which is exactly why I hope to get it out of you this time─I think maybe she said it was a keepsake from her father or something? She mentioned living alone with her mom…heheh. I guess she was doing that much better than you, having one parent, at least. Not that I explicitly heard her say her dad was dead or anything. Still, it must have been because of that family situation that her mother was so concerned about her daughter and so harsh with her.

  “What’s good, what’s bad?

  “The world is a complete mystery to me.

  “Maybe her father was somebody, like your mother. It’s a possibility, anyway. Either way─she must have had some grounding in that stuff to wish upon a devil.

  “And to become a devil.

  “You probably know better than anyone, but this devil is really a monstrous creature that grants its owner’s wishes in a negative form. And for sure, on the surface Hanadori’s problem would be solved by her mother’s death. It could also be solved by the death of the boyfriend, or of the child in her belly─what’s it called again, an Elektra Complex? All sons curse their fathers, and all daughters despise their mothers─maybe mom was just the one within kicking range.

  “There are plenty of possible interpretations, and I don’t know which one is correct. In any event, she made a wish, and the devil decided to grant it by possessing Hanadori’s leg─and bumping off her mother.

  “It failed. Late at night, in a trance, Hanadori kicked the shit out of her mother as she lay sleeping, but in the end it wasn’t enough to kill her.

  “Because in her case, Kanbaru, it was her leg that had been imbued with power, not her arm. Even though she kicked her mother with the leg, she couldn’t keep her balance while she was doing it, so her mother wasn’t hurt that badly.

  “In which case, Araragi’s lucky to be alive, isn’t he? What is he, immortal or something?

  “Hanadori quickly realized that she herself was the culprit who’d put her mother in the hospital. I mean, it was basically what she had wished for, plus her leg had turned into a beast’s leg, so it didn’t take a rocket scientist to reach that conclusion─and so she was stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea.

  “If her wish couldn’t be granted, her leg would stay like that forever. But granting the wish meant killing her mother. She could commit suicide instead, but that would also mean killing the baby inside her. And of course she couldn’t ask her boyfriend for advice─she didn’t want him to see her with that leg.

  “So she came to me.

  “Grasping at straws. Then again, she’d brought it on herself, so maybe she was grasping at a voodoo doll.

  “But I felt like I understood why she’d seek out an urban legend for help─an urban legend like Lord Devil. A realistic problem like pregnancy is one thing, but in terms of dealing with an aberration-related problem like a devil, I was the perfect counselor.

  “I wasn’t called Lord Devil at the time, but that kind of eeriness had been a necessary part of the staging. It was that darkness that must have drawn her to me. Like a moth to a flame.

  “I’ll ask you the same question I asked earlier. Do you know what I thought then? What I, a collector of unhappiness, thought after she told me all this?

  “…Wrong. You’re completely off base. How did you manage to hold your team together when you don’t understand people at all?

  “I thought, I want to help this girl.

  “I’m not lying, I really did. For the first time in my life─I genuinely wanted to help someone.

  “I get why you don’t believe me. I am without question the lowest of the low. I’m the kind of person who listens to people’s problems, and then does nothing; I just leave them in the lurch. The kind of person who eases her pain with others’ misfortunes. Still, where do you get off calling my desire to help someone a lie?

  “Like I said earlier, the masses love a celebrity scandal. But anyone with a lick of sense understands that one shameless little blot marring an otherwise sterling career doesn’t render the rest of the career null and void. The indiscretion of one’s twilight years doesn’t cancel out the glories of youth.

  “In the same way, you can’t dismiss the sentiment of a delinquent who shares an umbrella with a stray dog. When a typically bad person does some tiny bit of good, it looks better than it would otherwise─sure, that may be true, but it doesn’t mean that you can completely dismiss how the delinquent boy couldn’t bear to leave a soaking-wet dog to its fate.

  “No one is all good.

  “No one is all bad.

  “Just because a cool hero collects dirty books, or an otherwise ideal woman is bad at the multiplication tables, nobody would say that negates all of their positive attributes.

  “People want to whittle others down to a single aspect of their character, but things aren’t that simple. It’s only parents who see children as children, and it’s only children who see parents as parents. When your title changes, who you are changes too, and who you are also changes depending on who you’re interacting with.

  “Who you are changes with the passage of time.

  “A devil can be angelic too─even if only for a moment.

  “I’m the lowest of the low, but not always. I wanted to do something to help Hanadori.

  “I wanted to take her place, if I could.

  “Did I sympathize with her because we shared a first name?

  “Did I want her to pull her life together where I’d failed?

  “Not really. That wouldn’t add up. What I felt was a purely chivalrous desire to help her out.

  “Pure chivalry. I won’t deny that I was more surprised than anyone to find such an urge inside me.

  “But, all that being said, what could I do?

  “I was a self-proclaimed treasure hunter on a long journey of self-discovery. I’d become well versed in other people’s unhappiness in the course of my activities, but I was an expert on its myriad variations, not on what to do about it. Never mind the fact that her problems, be it the pregnancy or the devil’s leg, surpassed anything else in my collection.

  “Even if I mobilized all the knowledge at my command, it would do no good. I was just some person who’d been brought up in a laissez-faire spiral of indulgence, growing up in a world of athletics totally divorced from anything having to do with men─our names were the same, but the lives we’d led were nothing alike.

  “There was nothing I could say that would get through to her, mean anything to her. So I didn’t say anything at all.

  “Not a word.

  “I just hugged her.

  “Roka Numachi, embracing Roka Hanadori.

  “I hugged her without a word.

  “Gently? Nope, firmly, forcefully, vigorously.

  “I’m pretty sure I was the one who was crying. Maybe I shouldn’t have hugged a pregnant girl so forcefully, even if it was still her first trimester, but I wasn’t thinking.

  “And then I spoke.

  “What I said─I, who had nothing to say─was something I’d said over and over again, so many times before.

  “It’s okay.

  “I’ll take care of everything.

  “I’ll solve your problems, without fail.

  “So you don’t need to worry anymore─those were the irresponsible words I whispered into her ear.

  “Not just once, but over and over again, so many times─I must’ve been crying. It’s lame, I know, but I’m pretty sure I was crying the whole time.

  “To be honest, I have no idea what she thought of that, of me. I wonder if it just made her uncomfortable? Maybe she thought I was pitying her and hated it. Either way, after a little while she left and went home.

  “I think she said something about staying up all night again so she wo
uldn’t attack her mother in her sleep─yeah, she definitely said ‘again.’

  “Can humans really go that many nights without sleep? The devil would probably come out during the day, too, if she fell asleep─anyway, what could I do, but silently watch her go?

  “Even after she was gone and I was alone, I felt agitated. I kept thinking, I want to do something for her, I want to help her. It was burning me up.