by Nisioisin
“…Well, I do think it was too facile of me.”
It was easier─and I’d been reluctant about the option.
Still─it was also true that it was the only option.
“I wish you wouldn’t treat me in such a casual way. You normally wouldn’t have someone like me around when you encounter an aberration. And, though this is such a plain and commonsense thing to say that it’s out of character for me to be saying it, I don’t think it’s very admirable of you to be sending a fine young woman into a more-or-less-abandoned building where a suspicious man is camped out.”
“Oh, so you do realize that you’re suspicious and that you live in a more-or-less-abandoned building…”
But─I had to admit, he was right. Absolutely right. Senjogahara had agreed to go so readily─she pretty much volunteered─that I failed to be considerate in that regard.
“It’s not like you’re going to do anything to her.”
“While I appreciate the trust you put in me, you do have to draw lines. That’s why we have rules. Let them slip out of your hands and soon you’ll find yourself in a sloppy situation. Got that? You need to establish boundaries that say no matter the circumstances, this is off limits. Because if you don’t, you’ll find yourself slowly ceding your ground. You hear people say that rules are made to be broken, but they’re not supposed to be. They’re rules. Not only that, you won’t have anything to break if you don’t have rules in the first place. Ha hah, I’m starting to sound like li’l missy class president.”
“Mmgh…”
Well─he was right.
Absolutely right.
I’d apologize to Senjogahara later.
“Araragi, it’s not as if she trusts me as much as you trust me. All she has is a provisional trust based on the fact that you trust me─so remember, that means if something happens to her, the responsibility falls directly on you. Not that I’d do anything, of course. No, really, I won’t! Whoa, please, put down that stapler!”
“……”
So she still carried one of those around.
Then again, that wasn’t the kind of habit you got rid of overnight.
“Phew… What a surprise. I guess missy tsundere is a scary missy tsundere, huh? What a case we have here. Well, okay… Eh, you know, I don’t like phones after all. It’s so hard to talk on them.”
“Hard? Seriously? I know some people are bad with technology, but Oshino, that’s pushing it.”
“Sure, that’s a part of it, but it’s just that while I’m over here being all serious, you might be lying down, drinking a soda, and reading a manga over there. Everything feels so empty when I think about that.”
“Wow…I never knew you were that sensitive.”
Apparently, people who minded such things really minded them.
“All right, Araragi, then this is what I’ll do. I’ll tell her how to deal with the Lost Cow, and you can stay right there.”
“How to deal with it? So secondhand knowledge is all we’re going to need here?”
“If you’re going to put it that way, the Lost Cow itself is oral tradition.”
“That’s not what I’m trying to get at─um, we don’t need some kind of ceremony like we did for Senjogahara?”
“Nope. The pattern here is the same, but this snail isn’t as tough to deal with as that crab. It’s not a god, after all. It’s just a monster, so to speak. And not as in a ghoul or a goblin. It’s sort of like a ghost.”
“A ghost?”
In this case, I didn’t see much of a difference between gods, ghouls, goblins, and ghosts. But this was Oshino I was talking to. I knew that the differences between each were important.
Still─a ghost.
“Ghosts are a kind of yokai, too. The Lost Cow itself isn’t unique to any one region, it appears all across Japan. An aberration that’s been handed down in every corner of the country. It’s not a well-known one, and its name changes here and there, but it started out as a snail. Umm, and one more thing, Araragi. Hachikuji is actually a term that originally referred to temples that stand in bamboo groves. The ‘ji’ means temple, of course, but the ‘hachi-ku’ isn’t the numbers eight and nine that we tend to write that with. Correctly, it derives from the word for black bamboo. You know that there are two major types in Japan, don’t you? Black bamboo and tortoise-shell bamboo. Anyway, this got changed to the characters for ‘eight’ and ‘nine’ as, well, just a play on words. Do you know about the eighty-eight-temple pilgrimage in Shikoku, or the thirty-three-temple pilgrimage in the western region?”
“Oh… Well sure, even I’ve heard of that.”
You hear about those all the time.
“Okay, so that’s the kind of thing that even you’ve heard of─sure, I guess it would be. Well, there are a lot of similar pilgrimages, just not all as famous. And one of them is a ‘Hachikuji’ pilgrimage─with a list of eighty-nine temples. It also has to do with bamboo groves like I said, but in terms of things getting tacked on, they wanted a pilgrimage with one more temple than Shikoku’s eighty-eight.”
“Huh…”
So it had something to do with Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four major islands?
But Hanekawa had said something about the western Kansai region of the main island.
“Yep,” Oshino said, “because these eighty-nine temples are mostly in Kansai─in that sense, you could say it’s closer to the thirty-three- temple pilgrimage than the eighty-eight. But─and here we get to the crux of the story, to where the tragedy begins─you can also easily read the characters for ‘eight’ and ‘nine’ together not as ‘hachiku’ but as ‘yaku,’ misfortune. Slap that title on your temple and you’ve added a negative prefix. It wasn’t a good idea.”
“…? Now that you mention it, I wasn’t able to read that part of her name at first and thought it might be ‘yaku,’ but…it’s not as if they meant it that way, right?”
“No, but without meaning to, they gave it that sense. Words are scary things. Without any intention involved at all, things can turn out a certain way. Language is alive, though people say that too casually these days. In any case, the interpretation spread, and it wasn’t long until the eighty-nine temples stopped being grouped together. Most of them shut down during the anti-Buddhist movement in the 1800s, anyway, and only about a quarter still exist today─in addition, nearly all of them hide the fact they were ever a part of those eighty-nine temples to begin with.”
“……”
His explanations were so offhanded, which made them easy to follow, but I also got the feeling that repeating them to anyone ran the risk of getting mud on my face.
This was the kind of knowledge that didn’t turn up a single hit when you searched it online, and I had trouble deciding how much of it I should swallow in the first place.
It called for a grain of salt.
“And so, if you look at the name Mayoi Hachikuji against that background─that history─it seems, well, a little too meaningful for comfort. The names are connected─you see? You find that sort of thing in classical literature, like in The Great Mirror, which must have come up in class. Still, I’m not sure about her given name. Mayoi─‘lost’? It seems too obvious. If anything here is facile or simplistic, that’d be it. Whoever came up with it doesn’t seem to have a knack for names. Hm, it’d have been good if you sensed this from the beginning, Araragi.”
“Good? What? And also─”
Hachikuji was sitting on the bench, waiting patiently for me to finish the call. It didn’t look like she was listening in on me─but she had to be. The conversation was about her, how could she not?
“It wasn’t until recently that her last name became Hachikuji. It was Tsunade before that.”
“Tsunade? Huh, really now… Throw that kink into the mix─and the thread starts to get tangled. Frayed, you could say. That’s a little too much, even for fate. Like there’s a man behind the curtains pulling the strings so that all the dominoes can fall. Hachikuji and Tsunad
e… I see, and then Mayoi. So that was the important one here. Ma-yoi─‘true twilight.’ Phew─gimme a break.”
How ridiculous, Oshino muttered.
He said it as though to himself─but it was intended for me.
“You know what, Araragi, it doesn’t matter. This is a really interesting town, I have to say. A motley crucible. I get the feeling I won’t be able to leave for a while… Well, I’ll tell missy tsundere the details, so you get them from her.”
“Hm? O-Okay.”
“That is─” Oshino wrapped up in a tone so sarcastic I could practically see his smirk, “if you’re lucky enough for her to come out and tell you.”
And then─the call ended.
Oshino had a rule about never saying goodbyes.
“…So, Hachikuji. Looks like there’s a way.”
“It didn’t sound like there is, going by your conversation.”
So she’d been listening.
Well, she couldn’t have figured out the important parts if she’d only heard my side of it.
“At any rate, Mister Araragi.”
“What is it?”
“You do realize that I’m hungry, right?”
“………”
Okay, so what?
Don’t say that, I thought, like you’re gently trying to let me know I’ve forgotten to fulfill an important obligation.
But now that she mentioned it, I’d forgotten thanks to this snail business that I hadn’t seen to Hachikuji’s lunch. Senjogahara, too… In her case, though, she may have gone off to eat somewhere on her own before heading to Oshino’s place.
Huh, it hadn’t occurred to me.
Because my body no longer required me to eat much.
“Okay, then let’s go somewhere to eat once Senjogahara gets back. Actually, there’s only homes around here─but you can go to places as long as they’re not your mom’s house, right?”
“Yes. I can.”
“Okay, we’ll ask Senjogahara─she should know the closest restaurant. So, is there any kind of food you like?”
“I like anything as long as it’s food.”
“Hunh.”
“Your hand was delicious too, Mister Araragi.”
“My hand isn’t food.”
“Oh, you don’t need to be so modest. It really was delicious.”
“………”
She’d probably ingested more than a little of my flesh and blood, so it was no joke.
The cannibal girl.
“By the way, Hachikuji. It’s true that you’ve gone to your mom’s home before?”
“It is. I don’t tell lies.”
“I see…”
But she got lost on her way─and not because it’d been so long. She’d come across the snail, so even if she’d been before─but wait, why did Hachikuji come across that snail in the first place?
A reason.
There was a reason I was attacked by a vampire.
There was one for Hanekawa and Senjogahara, too.
So─there had to be a reason for Hachikuji as well.
“…Hey. I know this is a simple-minded way to look at it, but it’s not like your goal is to get to where you’re going, it’s just to meet your mom, right?”
“It’s very insensitive of you to say ‘just,’ but yes.”
“In that case, can’t she come and meet you? Even if you can’t go to Miss Tsunade’s home, it’s not as if your mom is locked inside. I’m sure parents have the right to meet their children even after they get divorced─” I was no expert in the field. “Or so I’ve heard.”
“That’s impossible. Actually, it’s pointless,” Hachikuji replied at once. “I would have done that from the beginning if I could. But I can’t. I can’t even call my mom.”
“Hmph…”
“The only thing I can do is visit her like this. Even if I know I’ll never get there.”
She was saying it in a roundabout way, but did that mean it had something to do with her family situation? It seemed complicated. Then again, I should have guessed as much from the fact that even on Mother’s Day, she was having to come all the way to an unfamiliar town by herself. But there had to be a more logical method… For example, Senjogahara could go ahead of us and get to Miss Tsunade’s home first… No, a direct strategy like that wouldn’t work on an aberration. It wouldn’t let us get to where Hachikuji was trying to go, just as it caused Senjogahara’s phone to go out of service when she tried to use its GPS. I was able to talk to Oshino on my phone because he and I speaking was fine.
Aberrations─are the world itself.
Unlike living things─they’re connected to the world.
Science alone can’t shine light on aberrations. Just as people will never stop being attacked by vampires.
There may be no darkness in the world that cannot be illuminated.
But darkness itself will never disappear.
That meant our only option was to wait for Senjogahara to arrive.
“An aberration…” I said. “Though I’m not very clear on the details, to be honest. What about you, Hachikuji? Do you know much about yokai and monsters and that kind of stuff?”
“…Hm?” she paused weirdly before replying, “Oh, no, not at all. Just the noppera-bo, I guess.”
“Oh, Lafcadio Hearn’s faceless monster…”
“Yes, I could really sink my teeth into that story.”
“Good for you.”
I was sure she could.
Then again, just about anyone in Japan has heard that one.
“Scary, yeah?”
“Yes. But─I don’t know any others.”
“Right, makes sense.”
A yokai, it may have been.
But my case, the vampire─no, it didn’t matter.
They were all similar for humans.
It was a conceptual problem.
The deeper part of the problem was─
“Hachikuji─I don’t know the details here, but are you really that desperate to see your mom? I honestly don’t get why you’re willing to go this far.”
“I think it’s normal for a child to want to see her mother… Am I wrong?”
“No, of course that’s true, but…”
Of course that’s true. But.
If there was some reason involved that wasn’t normal─then I thought we might be able to figure out why Hachikuji had come across the snail. But there didn’t seem to be anything definite enough to be called a reason. It was simple, impulsive─a principle akin to nonlinguistic instinct in the edifice of desire.
“Mister Araragi, you live in the same home as both of your parents, don’t you? That’s why you don’t understand. You don’t think about what it’s like to be lacking something while you’re fulfilled. People want what they lack. If you had to live apart from your parents, I’m sure that you’d want to go see them, too.”
“Is that how it is?”
That’s how it is─I suppose.
A nice problem to have.
─You know, Koyomi, that’s why.
“If you don’t mind me saying so, Mister Araragi, from where I stand, I’m jealous of the simple fact that you have both of your parents.”
“Oh…”
“Jealous as a blue-eyed goblin.”
“Oh… You know you got both sides of that kind of wrong.”
What would Senjogahara have said in the situation? If she’d heard about Hachikuji’s issues, then─no, she probably wouldn’t have said a thing. She probably wouldn’t have even compared herself to Hachikuji like I was doing. Even if she was in a much closer position to her than I was.
A crab and a snail.
Organisms that lived by the water’s edge─was it?
“Judging by your words, Mister Araragi, I get the impression that you aren’t very fond of your parents. Is that really the case?”
“Oh, no, it’s not like that. It’s just─”
Before I continued, the thought crossed my mind that maybe it wasn’t someth
ing I should be telling a child. Then again, I’d already pried into Hachikuji’s circumstances, so even if she was a child, it didn’t seem right for me to just trail off.