by Nisioisin
“Reassuring?”
“Yeah,” he nodded. “Because there were so many students in that classroom who wanted to protect their classmates─when I realized that, it made me think the world was still doing okay. If that many people wanted to be heroes─world peace had to be just around the corner.”
“…”
“I was quickly disabused of that notion, though─it was a pretty weak basis for such a revelation─but if there’s something besides Hanekawa that contributed to making me who I am today, it was probably the feeling I had back then,” Araragi-senpai said, laughing.
I still couldn’t tell if he meant it─in fact, with a punch line like that, it seemed like he must have been joking.
And yet.
I was pretty sure he’d─given the most sincere answer he could to my question.
Right…
For the sake of others, for everyone’s sake─as fishy as that sounded, it wasn’t entirely a lie.
Self-sacrifice.
Denying yourself.
It actually isn’t impossible to understand─we just don’t want to.
And me doing so would be odd, I seriously feel.
There’s not a damn thing I want to accomplish so badly that I’d die for it.
A woman who has something she wants to accomplish so badly, she’d die for it─who even in death keeps on gathering.
Keeps collecting─unhappiness, and a devil.
“Listen, Araragi-senpai. You have a friend who’s a ghost, right?”
“The word ‘friend’ doesn’t begin to express our relationship. I sometimes wonder if she and I were the same person in a past life.”
“Yikes, that’s creepy.”
“Anyway, what of it?”
“What do you think is the difference between people who turn into ghosts and people who don’t? Not all people become ghosts, right? If they did it’d be trouble, the whole town would be overflowing with them─in which case, what separates them?”
Does it have to do with the presence or absence of regret?
Do they become ghosts because they’ve left something undone, or because they have a grudge or something? But when you put it that way, surely no one dies without at least some regrets.
Everyone leaves behind loved ones, not to mention unfinished business, when they die.
“That’s a good question, I’ve never thought about it…but I wonder. Maybe everyone actually does become a ghost. Maybe our town is overflowing with ghosts, and it’s just that most people can’t see them.”
“So with any given ghost, there are people who can see it and people who can’t─then it’s not that some people become ghosts and some don’t, it’s that people can see some ghosts and not others.”
“But wouldn’t life kind of lose its meaning if everybody could just become a ghost after they died?”
“True. The part after you die definitely seems more fun,” I agreed.
“I bet ghosts and the afterlife and stuff were originally invented by people who couldn’t accept someone else ‘dying’… I mean, I don’t feel like I could become a ghost even if I died.”
“Then, do you think ghosts ought to pass on?”
“Probably, but if my friend passes on, I might feel sad. Or no, not sad, I just won’t like it─”
Which might be why she’s sticking around this town without passing on.
As he said this, he took a curve─and I thought, does that friend get to ride in the passenger seat of his car?
Well, I guess that picture reeks of a crime.
“I want to do something about this situation,” I said, gazing at the sky through the window and sensing that we were getting close to my house. “But leaving it alone, I somehow know, would be best.”
“Best? How come?” my senior asked simply. Since I hadn’t explained the circumstances to him at all, that was perfectly natural.
“Because no one is suffering.”
“…”
“No matter how miserable the situation, if the person seems fine, you shouldn’t interfere, right? What’s the point of going out of your way to tell them, ‘you’re unhappy’? If they’re enjoying their unhappiness, then there’s nothing anyone can do about it. And as it stands, many people are even being helped. If a lot of people are being saved by a situation that I want to do something about, and not a single person is suffering─it can’t possibly be okay for me to stick my nose in for my own selfish reasons?”
Hearing all this, Araragi-senpai probably felt clueless─I doubted he’d heard anything from Karen, and I hadn’t explained a single thing, only let out this torrent of angst, so how could he dispense any advice?
Indeed, his blunt response was, “Search me.”
All the same, just talking about it made me feel a lot better.
I think. Dammit.
Did that mean Numachi was right? Would time eventually take care of this feeling as well?
Yeah, probably.
Aimless and forlorn sorrow, too─would someday be a memory.
Which you would then be able to forget.
In which case─
“But you know, Kanbaru.” To my surprise, after taking in my hopelessly garbled story─and after his initial blunt response, Araragi-senpai kept going. “It’s not true that no one’s suffering.”
“Huh?”
“At least one person, you, are suffering. And that’s plenty of reason for you to act. The fact that you yourself are suffering makes this case huge, as far as you’re concerned.”
And if you’re suffering, it pains me, okay, and Senjogahara too, okay? he reminded teasingly.
More so than warm, his words felt natural, like I’d come into contact with the temperature of a human being for the first time in a long time.
But, right.
That’s right.
He was the kind of guy who said stuff like this all the time.
“Not to sound like Oshino─but the only one who can save you, if you’re in trouble, might be you.”
“Still… This feeling I have, it’ll just go away at some point. Time even takes care of troubles that settle in your heart.”
“What the hell? Those words, if anything, don’t sound like yours. Did someone say something like that to you? Don’t think too much, or Think more, that crap?”
“Yeah. Different people have said a lot of different things to me.”
Numachi.
Kaiki.
And my mother─they all told me whatever they felt like telling me.
“Forget them.”
And just like that, Araragi-senpai gave all that whatever the boot.
“That someone isn’t you. When did you get so smart and start worrying your head about different people’s needs?”
Just like I’ve done everything my way─you’ve got to do it your way from now on, he said, still facing forward.
Still driving, of course.
If he looked back at me, that might be a problem.
“Just as I was the me who wanted to live up to your expectations, if you want to conform to someone else’s view, then fine, but if you don’t find it persuasive, then you’ve got to fight. Like I have, against Senjogahara, against Hanekawa, against Oshino, even against you and your expectations of me.”
“I see…”
I saw─that I ought to have kept it simple.
Wavering at length until I was hemmed in─that definitely wasn’t in character.
Not like me, at all.
At my senior’s words, I sat up in the back seat, though we couldn’t have been driving for more than ten minutes, certainly not long enough to relieve my exhaustion.
“I’m persuaded by your view,” I said. “So I’m going to fight.”
“Mm-hmm. Good luck, then… Anything I can do to help?”
“Nope.”
I was pretty sure that he wouldn’t be able to see Numachi.
But that wasn’t it─what had to be done next, only I could do.
Yes.
>
I had to graduate as well.
From him, and from Senjogahara-senpai─I had to become a new me, who could get by on her own.
In fact, I should have been showing such a me to my esteemed senior that day.
In that sense, I hadn’t been on my lonesome at all.
It was from here on out that I would be alone.
I needed to be just me.
“Ah.” Told that he was useless, Araragi-senpai sounded pleased for some reason. “Glad to hear it.”
“Yup. Though if you really want to do something to help, you can come and clean my room.”
“Put that first on the list of things you need to graduate from.”
030
Araragi-senpai drove me right up to the gate of my house and was about to drive off without even getting out of his New Beetle, but I hadn’t actually recovered to the point of being able to walk on my own─or at least I pretended that was true─so he helped me into the house.
I was hoping to be carried in those arms one more time, wishfully thinking that Senjogahara-senpai would be totally fine with it, but of course he didn’t go that far and just gave me his shoulder to lean on.
It was its own kind of intimate contact, and that was good enough for me.
But, bad luck for him, we bumped into my grandma who was cleaning the front hall just at that moment─they’d met a number of times before, and she had taken quite a shine to him, so before he knew what hit him, he was invited in for breakfast.
I told her I’d been running all night long and the last thing I wanted to do was eat, so I was going to take the day off from school and sleep all day. I started to head back to my room.
When my grandpa called out to me.
Apparently, a package had come for me early that morning.
“A package?”
Yes, a package, my grandfather nodded.
He said it had been left outside the gate and that he’d put it in my room for me.
“…”
Left outside the gate? What the hell?
That seemed pretty suspicious.
Was it a bomb or something?
Thinking that my grandparents, old-fashioned as they were, tended to be too lax about these things, this time I walked on my own towards my room, or maybe crawled would be a better way to put it.
The thing that had been left in my room was a box wrapped in bright white paper. Because my grandpa said that a package had been delivered, I somehow imagined a cardboard box, but when I touched it, I discovered that what was beneath the wrapping paper was actually wood.
When I tore off the wrapping paper, I saw that it was a paulownia box.
It seemed somehow familiar─or perhaps strange─but no, the paulownia box I knew all too well was smaller than this one.
Attached to the lid was a piece of paper with a note:
This is something Gaen asked me to hold onto, so you don’t need to pay me for it. If you want to use it, use it. If you want to throw it away, throw it away.
The handwriting was infuriatingly good, and it wasn’t signed.
But it was pretty easy to guess who it was from, given the unprompted talk of money, especially since the sender referred to my mother as Gaen.
In which case the paulownia box─had to be his response to the phone call I’d made yesterday.
I held my breath and opened the lid.
Sure enough, the thing crammed into it─was the mummified head of a devil.
031
I did end up taking the day off from school.
And the next day, and the next.
I had no choice.
That’s how horribly sore my muscles were after an entire night of running─it was like I had wrecked my entire body.
I had plenty of time to reflect on what came of acting without considering the consequences─but at the same time, I’d gotten to see my senior again thanks to that lack of consideration, so let’s call it a win.
“All’s well that ends well” are profound words indeed.
That being said, I may not have needed my third day of rest, but, but, I wanted to be back in tip-top shape when I returned to school so I decided to be extra cautious.
I had options, of course.
To put it in Lord Devil terms, I had the Easy, Normal, and Hard options─Easy would naturally be to take the mysterious mummified object that had been delivered to me and to say, Ewww gross, and smash it to bits. Then live out the rest of my life in calm, composed contentment.
That would be simplest.
If this were a novel, it wouldn’t be a bad ending for my coming-of-age story. The last page could close with the masterful line, And so the girl grew into a woman.
Normal would be, yes─handing over the mysterious mummified object to the junk collector who desired it so much. Then we could make believe we were friends and act out a proper farewell accompanied by a catchy line. Not a bad ending either. Sorry, thanks, farewell. That would wrap up the story nice and neat, and it might leave a surprisingly pleasant aftertaste as well.
But I chose Hard as a matter of course.
There never really was another option.
That’s how I live my life.
When I play video games, I always choose the highest difficulty level right off the bat.
Which is why─I chose to draw out a devil using a devil as bait, and as if that wasn’t enough, to do my best to exorcise that devil once it graced my presence─as the bonkers way to end this tale.
I doubt very much that it was what the mystery man who sent me the mummified object was hoping I would do─he, that swindler, probably wanted me to pick Easy Mode.
But I wasn’t going to be the me he wanted me to be.
Just as I couldn’t do what my mother, not that I know what she expected by bequeathing that mummified hand, wanted me to do.
I’m an athlete.
So I know very well the significance of living up to people’s expectations─but if, in spite of that knowledge, I stumbled onto the significance of betraying those expectations, I might as well go all the way with it.
If high school is all about making memories─I should at least make satisfying ones.
Even if I’m going to forget them someday.
“…I didn’t expect to see you again, Kanbaru.”
After school, Friday.
Although it was after school on a weekday, and not exam week or anything, no one was practicing in the gym─I was the only person there, just like on Monday.
“This is like suddenly remembering a long-forgotten memory just as you’re drifting off to sleep.”
While a girl with dyed-brown hair, wearing a tracksuit and holding a crutch, two of her four limbs encased in plaster casts, stood on the court─I couldn’t count her as a “person.”
Since she wasn’t human anymore.
“I figured I’d find you here, Numachi… Kaiki told you, I assume.”
She scowled at this, a rarity for her, and said, “That swindler. He fucking had it all along. And the head, no less, the most important part of all─unbelievable. His policy might be to share only half of what he knows, but he fully intended to deceive me all along. Dammit, was his endgame to snatch all the parts I had collected out from under me? Or was he going to try and turn a profit on the head?”
“More likely the latter, after it reached its peak value─then again, maybe a little bit of both. He could probably maximize his profit by selling an assembled devil to some scholar.”
Something like that.
Either way, I’d found it kind of puzzling that Kaiki would continue his dealings with Numachi for so many years. She may have thought of him as a business associate, but the relationship couldn’t have been terribly important to someone like him, who had such an extensive operation─but this explained everything.
Mixing up a ghost in his quest for profit, though? That was just too greedy.
It did make me feel kind of yucky that I was the only person he was kind to, but…yea
h.