Koimonogatari

by Nisioisin

  “Hmph.”

  I scrutinized the back of the sheet as well as the inside of the envelope, and once I had confirmed that the message was only that single word, I carefully returned the sheet to the envelope, carefully tore it into pieces, and carefully threw it in the wastebasket.

  Then, deciding that throwing it in the wastebasket wasn’t enough, I flushed it down the toilet. Since I was already in the bathroom, I proceeded to take a shower.

  I’m a guy that loves a hot shower, but this time I opted for a cold one. It was the middle of winter so there was some danger of catching a cold, but I really needed a cool head at the moment.

  I considered the situation as my whole body slowly turned blue. How many people knew that I was staying at the hotel? Did Senjogahara know? I had called her out to the station the night before, and perhaps she had deduced the general area I was in. But it’s not like this was the only hotel─there was no way she could have guessed I was staying at this one in particular.

  Nor would she tell me to “withdraw”… That would be far too illogical for someone as forthright as Senjogahara when she had commissioned me for the job in the first place.

  Whoever had been tailing me popped into my head.

  Now that I thought about it, it might have been a case of nerves, my mind playing tricks on me─I had felt anxious about my hotel being watched. Which wasn’t impossible. Perhaps I’d been under surveillance all along and it’d taken me until now to finally notice.

  By enlisting the aid of someone supernatural like Ononoki, Gaen-senpai could probably find out where I was without going to the trouble of tailing or monitoring me. The shikigami always shows up like that so I hadn’t been overly concerned, but when you get right down to it, dropping in while I was reading in a Starbucks was suspiciously abrupt.

  Even if she could pin down my location, though, that’d be it─no one could place a letter, leave that message, in a locked hotel room.

  It would require a certain amount of physical destruction, even if it was Ononoki─I had just broken into the Sengoku home so it’s not like that’s such a big thing, but my room was on one of the upper stories of a high-rise. Whoever it was definitely couldn’t get in through the window. It was fixed and didn’t even open.

  So who left the letter in my room, and how? My enemy couldn’t possibly have an accomplice inside the hotel─enemy?

  What enemy? Wasn’t my current foe that adolescent god?

  “Maybe I’m up against some sort of powerful organization,” I said experimentally. Figured I might as well.

  Or I was just poaching Ononoki’s idiotic comment about a secret society─I actually felt like I might freeze solid, so I adjusted the temperature of the shower and warmed myself back up. Once I was warm enough, I toweled off and left the bathroom, then picked up my cell phone.

  For a second I was worried that it might be bugged, but judging that I was “worrying too much,” I went ahead and called Senjogahara. Not to confess that I’d strolled by the Araragi place earlier, of course.

  “Are you lonely or something, Kaiki? You can’t keep calling me like this, night after night…”

  “Senjogahara, there’s something I want to ask you.”

  “What is it this time? I wore blue underwear today…”

  She sounded sleepy. That is, it seemed like she was still half-asleep. I was kind of surprised, I wouldn’t have thought the girl was ever anything less than fully alert. Always taut and tightly wound, like the string of a bass.

  “Wake up. Senjogahara.”

  “I’m awake…rhubarbrhubarb.”

  “Don’t give me that rhubarbrhubarb shit.”

  “ZZZZ.”

  “That’s not half-asleep, that’s asleep.”

  “What do you want? Want me to come out again? Fine, I’ll go anywhere you like… Want to meet at the same Mister D’s as last time?”

  “No, I don’t need you to come meet me today.”

  Worrying about my phone being bugged was excessive, but meeting in person might still be dangerous. If they’d found out where I was staying, they couldn’t possibly not know about Senjogahara, my client─but as a precaution, it seemed best to avoid direct contact.

  “It’s not that, I just need to ask you something.”

  “What? About our business?”

  “What else would you and I have to talk about?”

  “Fair enough…”

  Senjogahara, finally seeming ready to listen in earnest, said, “I’m going to go splash some water on my face, hang on a sec,” and put down the phone. After a little while she returned and asked, “So what’s the deal?”

  Fully present.

  Incredible. The alacrity with which she switched gears was almost unbelievable.

  “I thought you already had a game plan?”

  “Yeah─that’s all set. And things are going swimmingly with Nadeko Sengoku. I already had faith, and seeing her today only deepened my conviction.” I realized that I had made it sound as if I really was a believer. The irony being that neither faith, conviction, nor belief were words that had any bearing on my life. “So no problem on that front─” I thought it best not to mention Gaen-senpai or Ononoki yet. It’d probably just make her needlessly anxious. “But something else has come up. Which is why I need to ask you something.”

  “Fire away.”

  Man, was she dauntless. Switching gears so fast. It was almost as if she had only been pretending to be half-asleep.

  “You…or I guess you and Araragi? And maybe Shinobu Oshino, and this Hanekawa? Anyway, in the course of trying to resolve this problem with Nadeko Sengoku, in other words before you came to me for help, did anybody try to interfere?”

  “…”

  “Interfere or…give you a warning, anything like that? For instance, did you receive a letter telling you to ‘withdraw’─”

  Senjogahara was silent for a while, seemingly lost in thought, and then she probed, “Did something happen?”

  She seemed to be telling me to disclose my purpose if I wanted her to reply─well, I suppose that was only natural from her perspective. In fact, I would’ve been taken aback if she didn’t have any such misgivings, if she’d answered such a specific question with a simple yes or no.

  I told Senjogahara about the day’s events, which doubled as a progress report. Not everything, naturally. I had to cover up the breaking and entering, for instance, even if it had been conducted in the course of the job. If I let that slip, Senjogahara would become an accomplice after the fact.

  It was purely a matter of courtesy as a swindler to claim sole responsibility for any illegal behavior. This may be the age of accountability, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to disclose absolutely everything. Even user-friendliness has its limits.

  The part about Ononoki and Gaen-senpai, however, I had no choice but to mention at this point, though I’d have preferred to hold off on it or keep it hidden altogether as well.

  “Hmm… Ms. Gaen, huh?”

  “Apparently she was in your town a while back, did you happen to meet her?”

  “No, I didn’t…but Araragi and Miss Hanekawa each dealt with her. Regarding different things. Actually, Nadeko Sengoku became a god in the first place because of Ms. Gaen’s talisman─but. You already knew that, didn’t you, Kaiki?”

  “Yeah. So you did too.”

  I was about to criticize her for withholding a crucial bit of info, but then I was the one who hadn’t let her tell me about the situation─because I didn’t want her feelings to muddy the waters. In which case, maybe on the other end of the line she was breathing a sigh of relief that I’d gotten that far.

  “Did Gaen-senpai tell them what she told me? Did she tell Araragi and Hanekawa to withdraw?”

  “Not Araragi… How could she? That’d be like saying, ‘Give in and let yourself be killed.’ Even a kindergartener knows that’s an unreasonable demand.”

  “Very true.”

  Gaen-senpai probably thought that
Araragi and Senjogahara should die, should be killed, if it served the balance of things, but she’d never say it to their faces.

  “But when Miss Hanekawa met her, Ms. Gaen apparently said something unpleasant…so maybe she did to Araragi too. Said something unpleasant, I mean.”

  “Hmm…”

  “Still, it doesn’t seem like she demanded Miss Hanekawa do anything. More like a friendly warning…”

  “Sounds about right. She didn’t try to force my hand either.”

  Though she did disown me.

  But…if that was the case, maybe I needed to speak to this friend of Senjogahara’s, this Hanekawa, to hear what she had to say. It’s just that I had a premonition that I’d absolutely regret meeting her…

  Be that as it may, I had only heard about Gaen-senpai’s aims through Ononoki, a filter so fine it might as well be a plank of wood, and seriously hadn’t a clue as to her true intentions. Hanekawa, on the other hand, received her warning straight from the horse’s mouth, so maybe she’d been able to discern something.

  Something…what something?

  What would that something need to be to satisfy me?

  “Kaiki,” said Senjogahara. “If you want to hear what Miss Hanekawa has to say─” Well well, I’d thought Senjogahara was pathologically opposed to me interacting with any of her friends or family, but here she was, offering to introduce me to Hanekawa? But that wasn’t the case. “You should give up on that idea right now. Of course, being the contrarian that you are, I imagine you’ll try to meet her behind my back, but that’s going to be impossible. She’s overseas at the moment.”

  “Overseas… Looking for Oshino?”

  Now that she mentioned it, I remembered her saying something about that when we talked back on the first. That Hanekawa was abroad searching for Oshino but hadn’t found him, or whatever─though if I may, as someone who’s known the guy forever, she was barking up the wrong tree.

  Oshino is a Japan-only vagabond.

  The subject of his research, that is to say, the field of his fieldwork, never extends beyond our borders. Unless his worldview changed considerably, he wouldn’t go overseas─to begin with, he wouldn’t be able to obtain a passport, same as me.

  Even if she did find him overseas, bringing him back would be no easy task.

  “Another one for futile efforts, huh? This Hanekawa person.”

  “Maybe. You might be right. Futile. But that kind of dedication, doing everything she can in spite of it all, is just like her. And I appreciate it.”

  “Yeah. Appreciate it,” I agreed indifferently. That kind of dedication was just like her? I didn’t even know this Hanekawa.

  “Well, she’d been planning all along to take a trip around the world after graduation, so she just laughed it off as location-scouting…not that that makes me feel any better. She must have finished location-scouting by the end of last year.”

  “A trip around the entire world… That’s quite an undertaking.”

  “Some people say it’s Mister Oshino’s influence.”

  “Sounds like the student has surpassed the teacher…”

  What a fearsome girl─and she was still only in high school.

  But given the circumstances, it wasn’t going to be possible to get Hanekawa’s story, at least not right away. We could probably get in touch via phone or email, but I doubted I could get the whole story out of someone I’d never met.

  “When is she coming back?”

  “I have no idea.”

  You must have some idea, I thought. They must be keeping touch by email or phone─so regardless of where Hanekawa was, Senjogahara simply didn’t want to introduce us.

  Now that’s friendship.

  While it might be unrelated, if she put Hanekawa and me in touch with each other, I might get a better sense of what was going on in Gaen-senpai’s mind, and the chances of Senjogahara’s life being saved might well increase, yet even so?

  Theirs was an odd relationship.

  “Well, so be it,” I cut short that discussion. I wasn’t going to waste any more time making Senjogahara tell me how she had no intention of telling me. I had to draw the line somewhere. “At any rate, Gaen-senpai seems to be afraid that I might fail and not fulfill your commission to deceive Nadeko Sengoku, which is of course unthinkable─”

  “In that case, wouldn’t Araragi and I just get killed like we were going to all along? As far as Ms. Gaen is concerned, that was the plan.”

  “No, I think she’s afraid Nadeko Sengoku will be enraged by my attempt to deceive her. It’s a little different from Araragi going up there, or putting up a fight. Deception is, I mean.”

  “Well, I guess I can see that.” Senjogahara didn’t seem particularly convinced, but she assented nonetheless. Then, I assume in service of deepening her own imperfect grasp of the situation, she tried an analogy: “In other words, kind of like how confessing your love and getting flat-out rejected is one thing, but confessing your love and getting rejected with a lie like ‘I have a girlfriend’ is unbearable?”

  Romance analogies didn’t mean anything to me, but I went ahead and answered, “Right, exactly.” If it worked for Senjogahara, it was good enough for me.

  She lapsed into a sullen silence as if she’d read my mind, before bringing the conversation back around. “So according to what you said, Ms. Gaen offered you three million yen to withdraw, right? Why did you refuse? In other words, why didn’t you withdraw at that point?”

  “What, would you rather I had?”

  “It’s not that, it’s just…” Senjogahara hedged, then said plainly, “Not knowing your intentions makes me anxious.” The woman could say the most horrible things without batting an eyelash─not that I didn’t understand where she was coming from. “Maybe you figured out some clever way to wangle more than three million out of this?”

  “…”

  I didn’t dignify that with a response.

  “I’m sorry,” she relented immediately. “That was a horrible thing to say.”

  What a pushover.

  “Seriously though, how come? I’m grateful that you’re not giving up on the job, of course, but you see why it makes me anxious.”

  “I don’t need to figure out a way to wangle more than three million yen out of this. Because I already did.”

  100,000 + 3,000,000 = 3,100,000, more than three million yen.

  “I guess you’re right.”

  “I get the same amount whether I finish the job or not, so I’ll see it through. My logic couldn’t be more simple.”

  “If the amount is going to be the same, don’t people usually call it a day?”

  “That’s the logic of a child. Adults don’t abandon their work just like that.” My remark was meant to make me sound cool, but I felt miffed that opinions remain generally divided over whether swindling actually constitutes work.

  Senjogahara’s sullen reply was, “Don’t treat me like a kid.”

  027

  “Anyway, don’t worry about Gaen-senpai. She won’t be an issue. She’s not the type to use force, even if I take her three million yen and don’t withdraw. She might put me under surveillance─” I said, the person who’d been tailing me in the forefront of my mind, “but I doubt she’ll bring her strength to bear on actively obstructing my con, my deception.”

  “Really? You aren’t just telling yourself that because you want to believe that your senpai is tolerant and broad-minded? She’s all set to ruthlessly, cold-bloodedly stand by and watch as Araragi and I, and his loli slave, are murdered.”

  “I don’t need you to tell me that Gaen-senpai isn’t as tolerant and broad-minded as I want her to be. Come on, we’re talking about someone who’d disown her own adorable junior over a little thing like, worst-case scenario, one measly town going up in smoke.”

  “Well…”

  It seemed as though Senjogahara was about to say something. Probably something like, She doesn’t need an excuse to disown a junior like you, but I imagine s
he realized it was a “horrible thing to say” because she didn’t finish her sentence.

  Though maybe that’s just my persecution complex speaking.

  In other words, maybe I, Deishu Kaiki, was more hurt by Gaen-senpai’s threat of disavowal than I was admitting─if so, I was somewhat pleased at having discovered a heretofore unknown side of myself.

  “Well, I only know this Gaen person from what other people have told me, so I’ll just have to take your word for it. So she won’t bring her strength to bear on obstructing us…”