by Nisioisin
Why do you keep provoking her right back, I wondered. It worked on some people, like Hanekawa, but Senjogahara was the last person to try it on.
She was the type to respond to provocation with a preemptive strike.
“N-Now, now,” I was forced to step in and mediate.
As if to wedge myself in between the two.
“Keep your nose out of this. I’ll kill you.”
“……”
So casual a death threat, Senjogahara.
Why should the sparks fall on me?
She was like a firebomb.
She was going to outpace my vocabulary, wasn’t she?
“Well, in any case.” Oshino’s carefree manner offered such a contrast with hers. “We’re not going to get anywhere unless you start talking. I’m no good at reading minds. And more importantly, I like dialogue. I’m a talker at heart. But I do keep secrets, so don’t you worry.”
Senjogahara didn’t respond.
“U-Uhm, so to start with a simple explanation─” I began.
“It’s fine, Araragi,” she interrupted again before I could go over the gist of it. “I’ll do it myself.”
“Senjogahara─”
“I can do it myself,” she said.
005
Two hours later.
I had left the former cram school where Oshino and the vampire now known as Shinobu lived and was at Senjogahara’s home.
The Senjogahara residence.
The Tamikura Apartments.
A two-story wooden building built thirty years ago, with a sheet metal communal mailbox out front. It did have a shower and a flush toilet, at least. A so-called one-room apartment measuring barely more than a hundred square feet, with a small sink. Twenty minutes walking to the closest bus stop (not train station, mind you). The rent, including the maintenance fee, neighborhood dues, and utility, estimated at thirty to forty thousand yen a month.
It was very different from what I’d heard from Hanekawa.
It must have shown on my face because Senjogahara explained, “My mother fell for religion, a sketchy one.”
Unprompted, like she was making an excuse.
Like she was trying to paper this over.
“She not only gave them everything we owned but took on a huge amount of debt. A believer and her money are soon parted.”
“Religion? You mean…”
She was into some money-grubbing cult.
And we all knew what that led to.
“My father took custody of me after my parents filed for an uncontested divorce at the end of last year, and now we live here together. Well, I say that, but I rarely see him because the debts are in his name and he’s still working himself to the bone to pay them off. I’m living alone for all intents and purposes and love the freedom.”
“……”
“But the school still has my old address on file, so you can’t fault Hanekawa for not knowing.”
Hey.
Were you allowed to do that?
“I’d rather not announce my whereabouts to people who might become my enemies one day.”
“Enemies…”
It sounded overblown, but perhaps such cautiousness wasn’t improbable in folks with secrets to keep.
“Senjogahara. When you say your mom fell for religion─could it have been for your sake?”
“What an unpleasant question.” Senjogahara laughed. “Who can tell? Beats me. Maybe that wasn’t it.”
It was─an unpleasant answer.
But perhaps the natural one to an unpleasant question.
My question really had been unpleasant, so much so that I look back and loathe myself for it. I shouldn’t have asked, and this was the moment when Senjogahara should have dispensed a lashing with her trusty acid tongue.
Having lived under the same roof, her family couldn’t not have noticed that their daughter no longer had any weight─especially her mother. This wasn’t school where you could just sit there and take the same classes. An incredible anomaly afflicting the body of their dear only daughter would have come to light right away. Once the doctors had all but thrown in the towel and resorted to an everyday routine of exams, no one could blame you for seeking solace.
Or maybe you weren’t free of blame.
I didn’t know.
What point was there in acting like I knew?
In any case.
In any case, I was─sitting on a cushion at a low table and staring with glazed eyes at a teacup that had been filled for me in Room 201, Tamikura Apartments, Senjogahara’s home.
This was her, so I’d expected to be told, “You wait outside,” but she’d invited me right in. She’d even made me tea. It was a bit of a shock.
“I’m going to break your every bone,” she said.
“What?”
“I’m sorry. Make yourself at home, I mean.”
“………”
“Well, maybe I was right the first time…”
“You nailed it your second try! You couldn’t have done better! That’s really impressive of you, Senjogahara, not everyone can correct their own mistakes like that!”
…But that was the extent of our conversation, so I was flummoxed. It wasn’t like I could utter some naive line about barging into the home of a girl I’d just gotten to know. All I could do was stare at my tea.
Senjogahara was taking a shower right then.
As a rite to cleanse herself, or something.
She was to wash her body with cold water and change into a clean set of clothes, new or old would do─according to Oshino.
Essentially, she had taken me along for this. Well, she almost had to because we’d gone from school to Oshino’s place on my bike, and he’d advised as much.
Having glanced around the spartan hundred-odd square feet that looked nothing like a young woman’s room, I leaned back on the small clothes drawer behind me─and thought back to what Oshino had said.
“The omoshi-kani. A Crab of Weight.”
After Senjogahara had conveyed her circumstances─not her life’s story exactly, but still, her situation from start to finish─Oshino nodded with an “I see,” looked up at the ceiling for a bit, and spoke those words as if they’d just come to him.
“A Crab of Weight?” echoed Senjogahara.
“It’s a piece of folklore from the mountainous areas of Kyushu. Depending on the locale, it might be called the weight crab, the heavy crab, the stone-weight crab, or even the omoishi-gami. That last instance is playing on kani, ‘crab,’ and kami, ‘god.’ The details vary, but what the stories have in common is people being deprived of weight. Encountering it─encountering it in the wrong way apparently makes your presence fade, too.”
“Your presence…”
Evanescent.
So─evanescent.
And─so much prettier now.
“Not just your presence,” Oshino elaborated. “In some nasty cases, your entire existence. They’ve got something in the Chubu region called the ‘stone-weight stone,’ but I think that’s something totally different. I mean, that’s a stone, and this is a crab.”
“A crab? Is it really a crab?”
“Don’t be silly, Araragi. They don’t catch too many in the mountains of Miyazaki and Oita. We’re talking about a legend.” Oshino sounded thoroughly appalled. “Sometimes being absent better lends itself to talk. Don’t delusions and backbiting tend to get people going?”
“Are crabs Japanese to begin with?”
“Araragi, are you thinking of crawfish? From America? Are you not familiar with Japanese folktales? The Crab and the Monkey. I believe there’s a famous crab aberration in Russia, and a good number of them in China, too, but Japan can hold its own.”
“Oh, yeah. The Crab and the Monkey. I guess, now that you mention it. But Miyazaki and─why something from those parts?”
“Don’t be asking me when you were attacked by a vampire in a backwater in Japan. It’s not as if the location means anything, really. Given the
right situation─it arises there, that’s all.”
Of course, geography and climate were important factors, Oshino supplemented.
“In this case, it doesn’t even have to be a crab. Some say it’s a rabbit or a beautiful woman─not to bring up little Shinobu.”
“Huh, it’s like the face of the Moon.”
And hold on. He just called her “little Shinobu.”
I felt a pang of sympathy for her, despite myself.
She was a legendary vampire, and yet…
How poignant.
“But since the young lady says she came across a crab, we must be dealing with a crab. That’s standard, at the end of the day.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Senjogahara asked Oshino unshrinkingly. “What it’s called is all the same to me, but─”
“I wouldn’t say so. Names are important. As I just told Araragi, there aren’t any crabs in the mountains of Kyushu. It might be different up north, but they’d be rare down south.”
“You can probably find freshwater crabs, though,” I noted.
“Maybe. But that’s not the real issue here.”
“Then what is?” demanded Senjogahara.
“It’s that it may have originally been a god, not a crab. That omoshi-kani derives from omoishi-gami─but this is my personal theory. Most people think it’s a crab first and the god bit is an afterthought. True, the straightforward view would be that they emerged simultaneously at the latest.”
“‘Most people’? ‘Straightforward view’? I don’t know of any such monster,” Senjogahara objected.
“You wouldn’t not know. After all,” Oshino said, “you’ve encountered it.”
“……”
“And─it’s still right there.”
“Are you saying you─see something?”
“I don’t. Not a thing,” Oshino replied with an all too cheerful and lighthearted laugh that seemed, indeed, to bother Senjogahara.
As it did me.
Anyone would think he was mocking her.
“It’s quite irresponsible of you to admit that you don’t,” Senjogahara said.
“Is that so? Spirits and such are basically invisible to the human eye. No one can see them or in any way touch them. That’s the norm.”
“That is─the norm.”
“They say that ghosts don’t have legs or that vampires don’t show in mirrors, but that’s not the point. Basically, things of their kind aren’t identifiable in the first place. But I have a question for you, missy. Do things that no one can see or in any way touch really exist in this world?”
“You’re asking me? You said yourself that it’s right there.”
“Why yes, I did. But isn’t something that no one can see or in any way touch as good as nonexistent, scientifically speaking? Its being there and not being there are exactly the same.”
That’s what I mean, Oshino said.
Senjogahara hardly looked convinced.
It certainly wasn’t a convincing line of reasoning.
Not from her standpoint.
“But, missy, consider yourself as being on the luckier side of misfortune. Araragi over there didn’t just encounter something, he was attacked. By a vampire, at that. What a disgrace for a modern-day human being.”
Get off my case, man.
As far off as you can.
“You’re in fine shape compared to that, missy.”
“And why is that?” Senjogahara asked.
“Because the gods are everywhere. They’re everywhere, and they’re nowhere. It was around you before you became the way you are─and we could just as well argue that it wasn’t.”
“That almost sounds like a Zen koan.”
“It’s Shinto. Maybe Shugendo,” Oshino said. “You’d be wrong, missy, to think that you became the way you are because of something you did─it’s just that your perspective shifted.”
It was so from the beginning.
That─but that was barely any different from what the doctors who’d thrown in the towel maintained.
“My perspective? What are you trying to tell me?”
“I’m saying that I can’t stand you playing the victim, missy,” Oshino abruptly unleashed some harsh words.
Just like he’d done with me.
Or like he’d done with Hanekawa.
I was concerned about how Senjogahara would react─but she didn’t reply.
It almost seemed like she was meekly accepting it.
“Huh.” Oshino sounded impressed as he took in her state. “Not bad. I was sure you were some stuck-up princess.”
“Why─did you think so?” Senjogahara asked.
“Because most people who encounter the Crab of Weight are like that. You don’t come across it by choice, and it’s normally not a harmful god. It’s not like a vampire.”
Not harmful?
It’s not harmful─and doesn’t attack?
“Nor does it actually possess people. It’s there, that’s all. Unless you, missy, have some wish, it doesn’t manifest. Mind you, I’m not gonna dig that far into your circumstances. It’s not as if I want to save you.”
“……”
She was─going to get saved all on her own.
Oshino always said that.
“Stop me if you’ve heard this story, missy. It’s a fairy tale from another country. There was once a youth. A virtuous lad. In town one day, he comes across a strange old woman, and she asks him to sell her his shadow.”
“His shadow?”
“That’s right. The very shadow that grows from your feet when you’re in the sun. Sell it to me for ten pieces of gold, she said. The lad agreed without a moment’s hesitation. For ten pieces of gold.”
“…Then what happened?”
“What would you have done, missy?”
“Who knows─it’s hard to say without being in that situation. I might sell it, and I might not. It would depend on the price, too.”
“That’s the right answer. People sometimes ask which is more valuable, your money or your life, but that’s a flawed question. ‘Money’ could mean one yen, or it could mean a trillion, while on the other side, not all lives are equal across individuals. I utterly detest the vulgar dictum that all life is equal. But putting that aside─the lad couldn’t imagine that his shadow was more valuable than ten pieces of gold. Why would he? In what way does not having a shadow inconvenience you? It wouldn’t handicap you in any way.”
Oshino continued, gesticulating. “But here’s what happened as a result. The lad is persecuted by the townspeople and his own family. It creates discord with those around him who say─it’s creepy not to have a shadow. Of course they would, because it really is. People talk about a creepy shadow, but not having any is much creepier. Something that ought to be there not being there─right? In other words, the lad sold what ought to be for ten pieces of gold.”
“……”
“He searched for the old lady to get his shadow back but couldn’t find her no matter how long or hard he tried─so tells the tale, flourish of music.”
“And─” Senjogahara responded, her expression unchanged, “and what’s your point?”
“Eh, there’s no point. I just thought that, well, maybe it would strike a chord with you. The lad who sold his shadow and the lass deprived of her weight, you see?”
“It’s not─as if I sold it.”
“That’s right. You didn’t sell it. It was a barter. Losing your weight might be more inconvenient than losing your shadow, but in terms of not fitting in, it’s the same. Still─is that all?”
“What do you mean?”
“Is that all, is what I mean.” Oshino clapped his hands before his chest as if to say he was done with the topic. “Okay. Understood. You want to recover your weight, and I’ll help. You obtained Araragi’s introduction, after all.”
“…You’re going to─save me?”
“I’m not saving you. But I can help.”
Let’s see, Oshino sa
id, checking the wristwatch on his left arm.
“The sun is still up, so go back home for now. Once you’re there, cleanse your body with cold water and change into a clean set of clothes, okay? I’ll make my own preparations in the meantime. Since you’re classmates with Araragi, you must attend that buttoned-down school, but will you be able to leave home in the middle of the night?”