by Nisioisin
So she worked to become fast.
“My only option was to fulfill my wish on my own. Because if I did, there’d be no reason for the paw to attack my classmates. And fortunately, I started getting the hang of it as soon as I started─there wasn’t any physical issue that made me slow, like being heavy or having a bad leg, so while I didn’t become athletic overnight, I improved when it came to running. I managed to come in first at field day… Thanks to that, I started to make friends with my classmates. It of course took a good bit of time, though.”
Having made her own wish come true─she never stopped working, even after field day. To say that she must have been talented to begin with would perhaps be unkind. Her continued efforts only continued to flower, to the point that she began hearing from middle school track teams not long after entering sixth grade.
Tup, tup, tup, tup, tup, tup.
But Kanbaru couldn’t join a track team. She couldn’t put herself in a place where people might be faster than her─because she didn’t know the reach of her first wish. Maybe it expired the moment she took first place at field day─maybe it would last forever. There was no way to find out. Since there wasn’t, the latter possibility was a source of fear.
For Kanbaru.
She already knew she wasn’t made to be a distance runner─mini-marathons in grade school were one thing, but she couldn’t keep going in middle school and high school. If anyone were even a little bit faster than her, all her efforts would be for naught, end of story.
That was probably why she decided to join the basketball team in middle school─if her field only extended as far as those courts did, no one could catch up to her.
“Forgoing clubs and sports might have been an option, but not only did I need to stay in good shape, just in case, but also athletics were a more or less compulsive refuge for me by then. If I didn’t do something─I felt like I’d be crushed. People call me sporty, but I’m not sure if I’m the real deal. I was just motivated by fear.”
But.
Playing basketball ended up being fun.
She ended up liking it.
Her speed, which had been a compulsive refuge─she could now put to positive use. She’d thought of her legs merely as a means to run away from the paw, but she could apply them constructively─towards an actual goal.
Plus.
Becoming the star of the team─
She ended up getting to know Hitagi Senjogahara.
“She was the star of the track team…and she came to watch me since I had a reputation for being fast. She might have forgotten by now…and even if she does remember, she might not think anything of it, but she was the one who came to me first.”
“Huh…”
That was a bit of a surprise.
Even if it was the middle-school and not the current-day Senjogahara, it was still a surprise.
“She asked me to run a hundred-meter race with her, saying that it didn’t have to be official or anything. It killed me to have to turn her down. This was a charming person who was a year above me. It might not have been love at first sight, but I’d fallen for her by the third day of talking to her. I started wanting to be near her. Being with her was therapeutic.”
Therapeutic.
The word was as far removed from Senjogahara today as Pluto is from the Sun─but it really seemed that meeting her allowed Kanbaru to put out of her mind the mummy she’d received from her mother, the paulownia box stuffed in the closet.
It let her forget.
It let her forget─what she wanted to forget.
But.
“It was still there in the back of my mind, sitting in my subconscious, and more than once after that day, I was seized by a sudden impulse to use the paw. I’d be seized by an urge to rely on it. Like when we faced a really strong team in basketball. Like when I got in an awful fight with a friend. Like when I wanted to get into Naoetsu High where my senior Senjogahara was… Like when she rejected me.”
Each time─she held out.
Each time, she managed to make it happen on her own.
Or, each time, she gave up on it.
By then, she understood why her mother had given her the box─it was as a sort of wish that Kanbaru would become someone who handled any problem she came across by herself. Unlike the one in “The Monkey’s Paw,” which taught you to accept fate, her mother’s lesson must have been to alter your destiny with your own hands. It had been passed down again and again─her mother had gotten it from her mother, and her mother’s mother had gotten it from her mother, and her mother’s mother’s mother, and so on. The lesson passed down for generations had to be that you fulfilled your own wishes. So it was all thanks to herself that Kanbaru was fast and also smart.
She hadn’t been─born with it.
It was the result of work, of blood, sweat, and tears.
She always remained aware of that.
Hence.
She might have been able to solve Senjogahara’s secret, her problem, by wishing upon the paw, but didn’t even then.
Quietly.
She stepped away.
She gave up─on being by Senjogahara’s side.
She gave up─balling her fists, biting her lip.
She didn’t mind dying for Senjogahara’s sake.
Suruga Kanbaru had told me that─in no uncertain terms.
Kanbaru smothered her own feelings for Senjogahara’s sake.
Stood by and watched her own heart die.
What she didn’t want to forget.
What she couldn’t forget─she did forget.
“But a year later…I found out about you. I ended up finding out about you and her. I ended up seeing her by your side.”
She couldn’t hold out anymore.
She couldn’t do it.
She couldn’t give up.
She had no recollection of when she’d opened the closet, when she’d taken the paulownia box out of it, when she’d undone the seal, or when she’d wished upon the paw─she hadn’t paused even when the paw that had only gone down to its wrist was extended to the elbow─and when she noticed.
Her left hand─had turned into an aberration.
Her arm had turned into a beast’s paw.
Kanbaru─
Felt truly terrified for the first time in seven years.
“…And so you started stalking me after that. Come to think of it, every time we met, you asked me if anything odd had happened to me.”
So─that’s what she meant.
She wasn’t making small talk.
She wasn’t trying to spy on Senjogahara, either… Unable to play the sport she loved with her arm in that state, Kanbaru must not have wanted to go out in public at all, but she went as far as to bandage it up and hide it─because she was concerned about my safety?
But then, four days after she started stalking me.
The night of the fourth day.
That’s when─it happened.
Kanbaru said she had a dream─
A dream where a monster in a raincoat attacked me.
And that was why she seemed so calm from the moment I stepped into Class 2-2.
She already realized everything─
Knew what had happened.
This backstory was quite different from my analysis.
I’d surmised that an aberration was involved, but Kanbaru actually didn’t intend the phenomenon… It was all the paw’s doing.
The Monkey’s Paw grants its owner’s wishes, the story goes.
But not in the way its owner intends, the story goes─
The simplest way to be by Senjogahara’s side was to eliminate her current boyfriend, Koyomi Araragi─thought the paw.
Probably.
And afraid of that, Kanbaru was stalking me─
But her premonition was on the mark.
In truth, if I wasn’t who I was…if Koyomi Araragi wasn’t Koyomi Araragi, the formerly immortal human with an experience of being a vampire, I would have certainly
died at that point. I wouldn’t have been able to dodge the first two strikes, and even if I had, the third blow would have been lethal. That was its absurd potential and capacity for destruction. My guess was that those four elementary school kids had been spared thanks to Kanbaru’s body still being a fourth grader’s and also still being unathletic─but now she was on another level. Ironically, the body she’d forged to escape her first wish was making her second wish inflict that much more damage. Only her left arm had attacked me, but the incredible speed that my eyes couldn’t even track─that physical capacity belonged to Suruga Kanbaru. It was an upgraded version of the same.
Capacity─destructive capacity.
A capacity for violence.
And.
It was far from over─nowhere near over, since I had survived. Once the sun set and night came, the monster in the raincoat would attack me, again and again─Kanbaru would keep on having dreams about that fiend assaulting me.
Over and over, until I died.
Until her dream came true.
Until her wish was granted.
Until Kanbaru’s second wish was granted.
She wanted to be by Hitagi Senjogahara’s side.
That was all she had wished for─
“‘Annoyances come / In forms none greater than that / Of the visitor / But then of course I speak not / Of yourself, my esteem’d friend’─”
“Huh?” Kanbaru opened her eyes dubiously when I recited the poem. “What was that?”
“Nothing… I was just wondering if the person we’re visiting will welcome us─”
And then.
Without changing our clothes or eating lunch, we went straight to the remote, abandoned cram school where Mèmè Oshino and Shinobu Oshino lived, me riding my bike and Kanbaru dashing on her own two legs.
And that─finally brings us to now.
The present moment.
Kanbaru and I were facing Oshino on the fourth floor. Despite giving him the rundown, he showed nothing resembling a reaction, simply looking up at the fluorescent lights hanging (just hanging, of course, since there was no power) from the not-so-high ceiling. He wiggled the unlit cigarette he’d stuck in his mouth midway during the explanation─but didn’t speak. I’d said everything there was to say, including about Senjogahara, and didn’t have any more cards to play.
A vague awkwardness drifted in the air.
Normally Mèmè Oshino gabbed more than he should as if he were born full-formed from a tongue, but he sometimes sank into these deep silences, which made him really hard to deal with… He was cheerful and happy-go-lucky on the surface, but at times like these, I wondered if he might not be an awfully gloomy guy at heart.
“The bandage,” Oshino said─at last. “Could you undo that bandage for me, missy?”
“Oh, okay─”
Kanbaru glanced at me beseechingly. To put her at ease, I told her, It’s all right. At that, she started to unravel her bandage using her right hand. Whip whip.
Then─the beastly hand appeared.
Without being prompted, she rolled her sleeve up─all the way to her upper arm. She bent her elbow, as if to indicate where the monster’s arm and her human arm connected.
Taking a step forward she asked Oshino, “Like this?”
“…Yes, that’s good. I see. That’s what I thought.”
“What you thought?” I cut in. “And what’s as you thought, Oshino? Damn you, acting as inscrutable as ever─you constantly leave people hanging on your words. Pretending to be omniscient can’t be that fun, now.”
“Don’t prod me like that. You’re feeling spirited, Araragi. Something good happen to you?” Spitting out the cigarette in his mouth without ever having lit it─well, actually, I’ve never seen Oshino smoking one─he directed his trademark flippant and frivolous smirk at me. “Araragi, and you too, missy. To start off with a correction─that isn’t a Monkey’s Paw.”
“Wha?”
Oshino had overturned the premise out of the blue─and I was shocked. Kanbaru looked like she’d been caught off-guard, too.
“There’ve been so many versions since Jacobs that it’s hard to know what’s true without seeing one for yourself─but from what little I know, I’ve never heard of the Monkey’s Paw combining with the owner’s arm. A crab for missy tsundere and a monkey for missy here would be like the old Japanese folktale and downright neat, but the world isn’t so accommodating. You researched it yourself, missy, didn’t you? And found nothing? No story where the Monkey’s Paw merges with the owner. If there is one, that means uneducated old me has a big hole in his knowledge.”
“…I did some research, but I was still in grade school.”
“That’s what I thought. So how did you get it into your head that it’s a Monkey’s Paw? Your mother absolutely must not have said such a thing to you… But I guess the conditions did match by and large.”
“The conditions?” I asked. “What do you mean?”
“There are a pair of them in how the story goes, Araragi. The Monkey’s Paw is an item with a story attached to it. It grants its owner’s wishes, the story goes. But not in the way its owner intends, the story goes─was that it?”
Heh, Oshino snorted with an unpleasant smile.
It was the smile of someone with an awful personality.
Or may I say, rotten to the core.
“I suppose it was a convenient interpretation for you, missy─or maybe a comforting one? It doesn’t really matter. What’s for sure, though, is that it’s not a Monkey’s Paw─originally it was mummified, right? And it gained life by melding with you. Then─my guess is that it’s a Rainy Devil.”
“Rei...?” I blurted out when he spoke the name, but without allowing me a question, or even a moment, Oshino pushed on.
“So, Araragi. Have you read Faust?”
“Huh?”
“Thank you for the reaction, I see that you haven’t. In fact, it seems like you haven’t even heard of it. But I’m not the least bit surprised, not anymore. I’ve decided to get accustomed to these reactions of yours. What about you, missy? Have you read Faust?”
“Ah, umm.” Kanbaru sounded surprised to be put on the spot but replied, as if it were a spinal reflex, “No, I’m not very well read, so I haven’t. Of course, I’m familiar with the plot and rough outline of the tale.”
“I see. No, that’s par for the course. Yup, yup. Usually, a high schooler would at least know that much. Uh oh, how embarrassing, Araragi.”
“Don’t make fun of him! He just happened not to know, that’s all! To begin with, he’s not someone you can fit into existing frameworks like ‘reading’!”
Suddenly incensed by Oshino’s words, Kanbaru had raised her voice to scold him. Puzzled by her unlikely reaction, he turned his eyes toward me for an explanation.
I couldn’t bring myself to meet them.
…Kanbaru.
I appreciated that she was getting mad on my behalf… I never imagined someone getting mad on your behalf would be so heartening, but yelling at Oshino there came too close to agreeing that I’m stupid…
“Kanbaru,” I said. “Could you please drop that routine for now? It’s amusing, yeah, but if you pull that every time Oshino makes fun of me, we’re never going to get anywhere …”
“Hm. I see. Profound words, befitting someone like you who faces any person with an open heart. Honestly, I struggle to accept your wisdom, as lacking in virtue and as quick to spite as I am, but if you say so, I’ll restrain myself and persevere.” Kanbaru nodded and bobbed her head in a bow to Oshino. “I’m sorry.”
She was a girl who could say sorry.
Good girl.
“…No, I don’t mind,” Oshino excused her. “And it was amusing. But considering that one of your arms has turned out that way, you’re a spirited missy. Something good happen to you? Well, in any case─Faust. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was the leading author of the Storm and Stress, or Sturm und Drang epoch, and his career-crowning achievement was
the drama Faust. It’s about─do you think you could tell him, missy? Whatever you know is fine.”
“Um, sure.”
Kanbaru looked at me hesitantly.
She seemed almost apologetic.
Like when she gave me the outline of Jacobs’ “The Monkey’s Paw,” Suruga Kanbaru’s personality was such that she couldn’t instruct her elders about anything without feeling presumptuous.