Hanamonogatari

by Nisioisin

  “Yeah.” I thought maybe Karen was hung up on the implication that I hadn’t wanted to see Numachi if I could avoid it─but that wasn’t the issue.

  “Weird. That can’t be true.”

  “Huh? Can’t be true? But I was with her today, up until─”

  “You can’t have been,” Karen said. Still solemnly, as if minding my feelings. “Roka Numachi killed herself three years ago.”

  027

  “From what I’ve heard, she broke her leg during a middle-school basketball game─and her athletic career was finished, just like that. So she ended up leaving that school…and before she graduated from her new middle school, she slit her wrists.”

  She took a box cutter in her right hand and slashed through her left wrist.

  Slashed through her left wrist.

  Her left.

  Karen’s halting words rang in my ears for some time after she uttered them.

  It was the first time I’d ever heard her sound like that…and I found my mind wandering to the irrelevant thought that such a dark tone didn’t suit her at all.

  When it rains, it pours, I guess, and as if to hammer home the point.

  Higasa called me right after Karen hung up─it seems that after our conversation she took it upon herself to conduct her own investigation into Roka Numachi and was bothering to call and inform me of the results.

  “Bothering,” huh?

  What a cynical way to put it.

  When did I become the sort of person who said that about a friend who was looking out for me?

  No.

  I bet everyone has moments when they become that person─for instance, when you’re confronted by the fact that someone you were talking to up until a little while ago has been dead for three years.

  That kind of moment.

  “Apparently, it wasn’t just her leg─seems like things had also gotten really bad at home. The girl who told me about it said, ‘Her mother might as well have killed her by her own hand’…” Even though it happened a long time ago, it was only natural to be shocked by the news that someone you crossed swords with back in middle school had died, and I could hear it in Higasa’s quiet, gloomy tone too. “She always seemed to be above it all, so I never imagined… But it seems she had her reasons. Since it was after her family moved far away, I guess no one around here talked about it…”

  But suicide? she asked. As if to say─I can’t think of anyone less likely to commit suicide in the whole world. No word seemed more at odds with her swamp-like playing style.

  But it was an unshakable fact.

  Karen emailed me a newspaper article that Tsukihi had copied at the library. It was a short article from a local paper in a different region of the country, probably even shorter than the article about her breaking her leg, but it was definitely an obituary.

  Presented with information from multiple sources, not to mention concrete proof, I was forced to accept the fact.

  That Roka Numachi had died.

  And three years ago, no less.

  She’d ended her own life.

  …So who was the girl with the dyed-brown hair I’d seen only a while ago? Another person with the exact same name? A lookalike who assumed her identity?

  That couldn’t be.

  Memories of appearances tended to be vague, and her vibe had changed along with her hair color, and in fact those things could be researched─but her basketball style, that couldn’t be faked.

  They used to call her the Poison Swamp, for crying out loud; the Quagmire Defense was hers and hers alone.

  There was no question about it. That girl was Roka Numachi.

  The one I knew.

  My former archrival─Roka Numachi.

  “Okay,” I muttered, still lying on the futon, my face buried in my pillow. “So, in other words, that Numachi was a ghost.”

  I accepted the possibility calmly, easily.

  Not based on the facile view that if devils exist, ghosts must too, but rather because it explained a bunch of other things if it was true.

  First of all, her brown hair.

  She said herself that if she hung around our town with such a conspicuous look, people would be talking about it in no time. When I thought about it, there was no way I wouldn’t have turned up some kind of intel on her after five whole days of searching.

  And clearing everyone out of the classroom and the gym. That couldn’t be explained away as happenstance─it fit together much more neatly if she’d made it happen. Even without her devil parts, she must have been that kind of supernatural presence.

  And no wonder time couldn’t heal the “wound”─the unhappiness─that was Numachi’s injured leg if her time had come to a dead stop three years ago.

  Three years ago.

  Her hair color was different, but her height and style hadn’t changed at all─at all, not even a tiny bit.

  Also, the transplantation of devil parts would go much more smoothly if she herself were an aberration. For them to move to her body like an infection just from hugging, or touching, someone─it had to be because Numachi herself was an aberration.

  There was an affinity between them.

  And it was only with the perfectness of hindsight that I questioned this now, but any way you slice it, it’s unrealistic for a teenage girl to roam around the country for three whole years even if she’s not in school.

  Japan is too full of meddlesome people.

  I hear Hanekawa-senpai has been having real trouble on that score since she left Japan to travel the world, and she waited until after graduation. Seems like you have to be a middle-aged man like Mister Oshino for people to finally leave you be.

  Maybe the part about an insurance payout for her leg was true, but it wouldn’t be enough to support a vagabond lifestyle for three whole years─however.

  If she were a ghost, any concern about expenses vanished in a puff.

  A new-fangled item like a cell phone had thrown me off, but on second thought, they’re ubiquitous enough nowadays to be featured in ghost stories…

  Even I’ve got the hang of them, after all.

  If we’re really going to get down to it, my seniors had told me─about a ghost that haunts this town, that haunts its streets.

  Haunting the entire country is a pretty huge difference…but it’s just a difference of scale, and if you look at the cases themselves, they’re pretty similar.

  A ghost.

  If the Lost Cow is an aberration that makes people lose their way, then was Numachi an aberration that gathers people’s unhappiness?

  An aberration that gathers unhappiness─even I could think of a few aberrations that shouldered misery for people.

  A misfortune-picker.

  A collector.

  If her idiosyncrasy, which bordered on the pathological even if we were to mince words, could be attributed to the fact that she was an aberration─then that odd, urban-legend feel of “Lord Devil” started to make sense as well.

  Urban legends.

  Chinese whispers.

  Campfire tales.

  If it was a Tale.

  But then, why was I able to see her? Going by experience, only people mired in unhappiness were capable of espying Numachi’s unearthly figure.

  So why─no, hang on.

  I can’t say I wasn’t mired in unhappiness, that day when I went to the burnt field where the cram school once stood─since for me the devil’s arm equaled misery.

  From her perspective, I must’ve been like a turkey showing up at the kitchen door along with a baster and a carving knife─or no, not quite. She was operating in this town because she was after my piece of the “devil” in the first place.

  She set up shop.

  And set her trap, and waited for this turkey to waddle into it. Numachi was a hunter.

  I felt like I’d been taken in, cheated, and I guess I really had fallen into a trap, but on the other hand, so what?

  I went through hell last year.

  One lit
tle ghost wasn’t going to rattle me now.

  Unbeknownst to me, an acquaintance of mine had died somewhere, that’s all─someone whose funeral I probably wouldn’t have attended even if I’d known about it.

  We weren’t friends, and we hadn’t spoken much.

  Feeling sad would be, in fact, dishonest.

  And it’s not like actually talking with her, or her apparition, left me with a good impression.

  Just the opposite, it was often unpleasant─to put it bluntly, our two interactions this month made me clearly dislike her.

  So I didn’t have to feel sad.

  It should have been fine not to.

  Yet─in that case, what the hell was this feeling?

  This feeling that I couldn’t sit still, couldn’t stand still, never mind sleep.

  “…”

  I forced myself to sit up and look for the cell phone I’d tossed away. Then I called a certain number─listed on the business card that Deishu Kaiki had given me.

  I made the call because, while he was a swindler, he was also an expert on aberrations, and if he was acquainted with Numachi, he might have more detailed information─but it didn’t go through.

  He must have been toiling away as usual, mobilizing assets that lay dormant here and there in Japan’s households, in order to do something about the recession.

  Or maybe a high school girl who shamelessly and untowardly called him the very next day after being told to get in touch if she was ever in trouble disgusted him.

  Well, I was glad the call didn’t go through.

  I found myself breathing a sigh of relief.

  Even if Kaiki did have more detailed information, he would only share half of it with me, in keeping with his personal principle. Plus, I felt like maybe I didn’t want the details.

  Yes.

  I think I could be forgiven.

  It wouldn’t be a sin in the first place even if I just forgot about it. If I filed everything concerning Numachi under “I guess it must have been a ghost” and forgot about it─I might not be able to right away, but eventually I’d forget.

  If I focused on preparing for exams─since seeing my left hand would no longer force me to recall the past.

  This thing we call memory is vague.

  Even seemingly unforgettable traumas recede into the past at some point─a little encounter with a ghost at the beginning of my last year of high school? That would be gone before I knew it.

  “Okay.”

  Fixing my resolve.

  I stood up and began to stretch.

  Removing the underwear I was still wearing, I loosened up all the muscles in my body, at length and fully.

  Then I gathered my hair into a ponytail and changed into some light running clothes.

  “Time to run!”

  028

  I’m a bit too empty-headed for thinking, a little too dull for feeling. There’s only one thing I’m much good at, and that’s running.

  When I run, I can leave everything else behind.

  They say the legs are like a second brain. I imagine that comes from people often having a flash of insight while they’re out for a stroll, but that only applies to walking. While they’re running, humans don’t do any thinking at all.

  We may not be able to walk without looking back─but we can run without looking back.

  Our minds, our worries.

  We leave it all on the starting line.

  That said I do usually have my course planned out beforehand when I go for my early morning jog, but that night I left even that up to chance.

  Whenever I came to a corner, I turned it.

  Traversing roads in my own town that I’d never been down gave me just the slightest feeling of freshness, but I left that feeling behind too.

  It felt good.

  It felt good to run with every ounce of strength I had.

  Come to think of it, isn’t running really the only chance we have to use every ounce of our strength? Most of the time, people have a limiter in place. Whatever they’re doing, frankly they’re not giving it everything they’ve got because if they don’t regulate their strength, they’ll end up breaking something.

  Themselves or their surroundings─something gets broken.

  So they look at their watches, keep tabs on how many lives they have left before game over, and try to avoid leaning too far towards industry or sloth.

  To avoid using their full strength.

  In that sense, I guess people regulate themselves while they’re running as well─not a person alive can complete a marathon at the speed they would run a sprint. It’s always important to pace yourself, no matter what you’re doing.

  But that night, I even left all thoughts of pacing myself behind─and ran with every ounce of strength I had. Push it too far and your pace drops. But even then, give it everything you’ve got.

  Run to the breaking point.

  Run until you run out.

  It was an ugly run, without proper form or anything. My gait and breathing were all over the place.

  The appropriate expression to describe it was probably less “mad dash” than “running blind”─or more likely “running around like a chicken with its head cut off.”

  But I ran like that until dawn, all night long. I ran for over ten hours without a rest─I don’t know how many circuits of the town I made, but I must have run over sixty miles.

  I was probably in for worse than just a few sore muscles.

  I could very easily have pulled the muscles in my thighs or, yes, suffered a stress fracture.

  Given that I slammed down hard onto the asphalt after pushing myself to the point that my legs literally buckled under me.

  But it didn’t feel like a forfeit, it felt like I’d crossed some invisible finish line.

  I had that feeling of elation.

  Like I’d completed the race.

  No one had told me to run, and I hadn’t actually resolved a damn thing with Numachi, but I nevertheless felt like my slate had been wiped clean.

  “My legs…are killing me.”

  Not just my legs, my whole body was killing me.

  It was a struggle even to blink.

  But it was probably nothing compared to the pain Numachi had felt─according to Higasa, she’d been dealing with a lot of other stuff too, but it was hard for me to believe that she’d chosen death for any reason other than that pain.

  What besides that suffering would have driven her to die─since her emotional pain seemed to be eased to some degree by her unhappiness collecting, the foundation for which she laid even before transferring.

  But maybe that was just what I wanted to believe.

  At this point, I couldn’t really know how much of her story was true and how much of it was a lie.

  Common sense dictated that she was nothing but a hallucination, something I saw at a particularly sensitive moment in my life with my seniors gone and my environment altered─including the devil’s arm.

  “I guess I should have at least paid some attention to my form…” I muttered as I lifted my head slightly. It felt like lifting a ten-ton weight, and once I got it up I saw that the soles of my brand-new Reeboks had worn down to nothing. “But if I did, I doubt I would’ve made it.”

  Only after the words got out did I realize that I had no idea what I’d made, and I looked up at the sky with a wry smile on my face.

  “That reminds me…Senjogahara-senpai’s form…was always beautiful… So beautiful…”

  Struggling even to blink was an exaggeration, but the fact is that once I closed my eyes, opening them again felt like too much of a chore.

  What passed through my mind then, though I don’t know why, was the sprinting figure of Hitagi Senjogahara on the track of Kiyokaze Middle back when we were there.

  She’d been a celebrity.

  I hadn’t known, but according to Numachi, Hanekawa-senpai had been just as famous─and apparently she’d been the harder of the two to approach for everyone.
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br />   Knowing her now, I bet it was because she was too perfect. In that regard, Senjogahara-senpai could be silly, which made her more popular with her juniors─she might say that had been a performance, too, but when you get right down to it, no one isn’t acting when they’re interacting with others.