by Nisioisin
“Uh oh,” she muttered, “I’m getting a bad feeling.”
“Stay vigilant, Hachikuji. I’ve been casing your breasts for ages, waiting for the slightest opportunity to touch.”
“I thought you said you didn’t care for flat chests. In fact you’ve been mapping every nook and cranny.”
“Assume that every male in this country is after your nearly nonexistent breasts.”
“I can’t ever step outside…”
Actually, that country is doomed, Hachikuji noted.
My favorability rating probably was, our country’s fate aside.
Were there at least some percentage points left? Where did I stand if we took a poll?
“When we come down to it,” Hachikuji lamented, “Miss Kanbaru, Sengoku, and Shinobu are also quite problematic in terms of broadcast standards.”
“Yeah…”
It was the quiet Sengoku who might pose the greatest issue.
You just didn’t visit a shrine in your school bathing suit.
What kind of centerfold photo shoot was that?
When I stopped to think about it, all of the members were pretty awful. There wasn’t a single decent character among us.
“Only Hanekawa will survive,” I predicted.
“But in her case, her upbringing is way too out there in being so dark and gloomy.”
“Yeah…more like pitch-black.”
Did this story only feature dark pasts, black hearts, and murky libidos?
“As far as Hanekawa goes,” I remarked, “there’s also the cat problem.”
“Ahh, Miss Toyama Black.”
“You mean Miss Black Hanekawa.”
Not only did it sound completely different, Toyama Black was no household name. Unless you were from Toyama Prefecture or a ramen aficionado, you could only scratch your head at the farfetched reference.
“Ah, speaking of which,” Hachikuji said, “I saw the design for the anime version of your character the other day.”
“What?”
“They made you handsome. For my own part I find that kind of disappointing and boring, but you should be glad. It looks like you dodged the bullet on this one.”
“Huh…”
I wasn’t sure how to respond.
I hadn’t seen it.
Made me handsome…
“You know,” she went on, “not like Sengoku back in the day, but your hair was hiding your left eye. Kind of a nihilistic vibe.”
“Nihilistic? Ah, come to think of it, that was my characterization at the outset…”
An acerbic wiseass. You’d never know it now.
I feel like I abandoned that side of my personality pretty early on. I guess once I started hanging out with Hachikuji.
An elementary-school temptress.
“Your nickname is going to be Kitaro without a doubt,” she declared.
“Without a doubt…”
Our tale did have to do with yokai. I could see that happening. Hanekawa would be Cat Girl, then. And Senjogahara…
……
Would she be the human heroine Yumeko?
Are we sure about that?
“It really does suit you almost like it was custom tailored,” Hachikuji remarked. “I mean that tiger-print geezer house vest of yours.”
“I’m not wearing one!”
What kind of teenager would that make me?
I wasn’t wearing remote-control clogs, either! My hair didn’t stand like an antenna in the presence of monsters, for that matter!
“Mister Araragi, you need to be more faithful to the concept. Don’t be so obstinate.”
“The real me has to adapt my design to some anime?!”
“It’s known as the law of ‘When the Adaptation Begins, the Original Suffers.’”
“What a scary law!”
“Well, I suppose it’s not so much the original, but the original creator, who suffers.”
“Way too scary!”
“Hey, Koyomi!”
“You sound just like him!”
In print, though, you couldn’t even tell it was an impression. She was just being overfriendly for all you knew.
“It’s impossible,” she observed, “to do a bad impression of his Eyeball father.”
“True… Anyway, I like Kitaro and all, but I’m not sure how I feel about it being my nickname.”
“Is that so.”
“Anyway, putting aside whether they made my character handsome, the height, what about the height? What did they do with my height?”
“Mm. They stayed faithful to the original.”
“Nkk…”
Okay.
Okay, then.
I knew this day would come, when my height (or lack thereof) would be exposed to the world… They say you have to know when to throw in the towel, but I was crestfallen.
Sigh.
Maybe I should spend the rest of my days riding around on Karen’s shoulders.
When it came to overcoming complexes, aberrations were one thing, but I didn’t see how I’d ever get over how I felt about my height.
I could just stop caring so much, I know.
“Because you’re no stranger to me, Mister Araragi, I tried talking them into changing your height to seven feet, but no luck. The truth is the truth, they told me.”
“Now I’m more worried that you have such a say in how the anime turns out.”
Was she the producer or what?
Hachikuji Pro?
“Well, my only real concern,” she confessed, “is what kind of dance we’ll be doing for the ending theme.”
“You really are fixated on that.”
“Usually I might go for something like break dancing, but what if we went really out of the box and did the Awa Dance?”
“How avant-garde…” Traditional yet funky moves. But we’d probably made enough meta-comments. We were trying some people’s patience at this point.
“Ahaha! It’s written into my character. I’m allowed to get meta.”
“I suppose.” She really was like a producer. I envied her, but I couldn’t leave it at that. What to do with this girl? “You know, you spouted some pretty foreboding stuff, but you’re still hanging around town. In fact, I’m running into you more often now. Since August started, I feel like I’ve been bumping into you everywhere.”
“Yes, you’re right. I dropped a foreshadowing bomb on a whim, but I have no idea where to take it from there.”
“Like a newspaper serialization in its last gasps…”
Why draw it out at all, then? Could she stop being so misleading?
“Well, I tried negotiating with the director of programming,” she shared. “No good ever comes of dragging out the original on account of the anime. No good, plus it’s just unnecessary. There’s always room for an anime even if you’re finished with the original.”
“You make it sound like you’re ordering dessert.”
“They didn’t listen, though. My opinion fell on deaf ears. Needled from above and prodded from below. I tell you, the TV business is rough.”
“So you let them gang up on Hachikuji Pro.”
“Go big or go home. The only option left is to put out another sequel…from a different publisher.”
“From a different publisher?!”
“You see, the original suffered.”
“No, it didn’t! It did not!”
“How about from Paperbacks?”
“Why black it out?! That only gives off an air of impropriety!”
“How about from Fujimi Fantasia Paperbacks?”
“For the love of God, do censor it, actually!”
“By the way, Mister Dusteragi…”
“While I indeed have plans to go clean up Kanbaru’s room tomorrow, don’t make it sound like I’m some cleaning aficionado who just loves to clean and consistently opts for a method that doesn’t involve any moisture. It’s Araragi.”
“Sorry, a slip of the tongue.”
�
��No, it was on purpose…”
“A slip of the teeth. Chomp!”
“That better be a love bite?!”
Yes! I managed to keep up with the adlibbing!
I wasn’t the type to be outwitted at every turn!
You’ve grown, Koyomi Araragi!
“To change the subject,” Hachikuji continued without pausing to praise me. I seemed to have a producer who believed in negative reinforcement. “Are you familiar with the urban legend about the Rolls Royce?”
“Huh? Rolls Royce… You mean the car?”
“Yes. Um, judging from your reaction, you’ve never heard it?”
“Nope. Well, not that I’m aware of.”
“Ahh. I’m not surprised. I bet the only urban legend you do know is the one about the axe-man.”
“You think I’m that pathetic?”
Urban legends. Whispers on the street. Secondhand gossip.
Sure, I was nowhere as knowledgeable of such things as Oshino.
“Don’t put on a front, Mister Araragi. Trying to act smart will only embarrass you later. Quoting game theory like a know-it-all when you’ve only heard of the Prisoner’s Dilemma is just painful.”
“I know the Rational Pigs, too!”
It was only because Hanekawa talked about it once, though. I’d already forgotten the details. All I remembered was getting flustered at the prim Miss Hanekawa going, “Pig… Pig… Big pig… Little pig… Pig eats… Pig wants to eat… Pig wants to eat and presses lever.”
What an unfortunate memory I had.
“A Rolls Royce breaks down in the middle of a desert road,” Hachikuji backtracked and started telling me the so-called urban legend. “With no solution in sight and at his wits’ end, the driver decides to call the manufacturer for repairs. Unexpectedly, despite being in the middle of the desert, an aircraft soon delivers a brand-new Rolls Royce of the same model.”
“Wow, that’s amazing.”
“No, the amazing part is yet to come. The driver gets home safely, but after waiting and waiting, no bill arrives from the manufacturer for services rendered. Since it’s a luxury car, he wants to be clear about the cost, grows impatient, and calls the manufacturer again. But the company says it doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
“Doesn’t know? After delivering a friggin’ Rolls Royce by air? Or did some other company send the new car?”
“Naturally, the driver has the same question. Confused, he begins to explain, ‘But the other day, when my Rolls Royce broke down in the desert…’ The representative curtly interrupts, ‘Rolls Royces don’t break down, sir.’”
“So cool!”
Wow.
The customer support for fancy companies was on a different level!
“No, Mister Araragi. It’s just an urban legend.”
“Oh…right.” She’d told me so at the start, but I’d gotten too wrapped up in the story. “And? It was pretty interesting and all, but why bring it up now?”
“No reason. I thought it’d make for good small talk.”
“You… Don’t introduce random bits just so you can mispronounce my name.” Maybe a rival company like Rolls Royce was on the mind of a Harley Davidson like her.
“Well, if you don’t care for small talk, then how about a riddle, Mister Doalagi.”
“Let me resist the urge to point out that I was right and you clearly just want to mispronounce my name and instead ask you not to make it sound like I’m the Chunichi Dragons’ mascot! It’s Araragi!”
“It wasn’t a slip of the tongue. You’re Mister Doalagi.”
“You sound so sure!” Another curveball! It broke so hard I was ducking!
“The only person who thinks your name is Araragi is you. Everyone else thinks you’re Mister Doalagi.”
“Huh. They do?”
“Don’t go around thinking you own your name just because it’s your name. Ninety-nine out of a hundred people are saying that it’s Doalagi, so don’t be obtuse and insist that it’s Araragi.”
“Uh, umm…”
When she put it that way, I started doubting myself.
Weird, was I mispronouncing my name all this time? Wasn’t Araragi─
“You’re very popular in Nagoya,” Hachikuji assured me.
“Like a hometown idol…”
“If I mispronounced it as Ayaragi, you’d be very popular in Yamaguchi Prefecture.”
“That minor place name at least sounds more similar, but Hachikuji, what about the riddle? If you aren’t just out to mangle my name, then get on with it already.”
“Hm? Oh, uh…”
“You’re clearly trying to think of something only now.”
“Ah, there’s a good one.” Pam, she struck her palm with her fist. “Hmm, you might know this one already. It appeared in Die Hard 3.”
“Die Hard 3. Yeah, I’ve seen it so I probably do. The villain poses all sorts of mean riddles to the cop who’s the hero, right?”
“I’m not sure if I remember it right, but I think this is how it goes. ‘Imagine a dog enters a forest. How far can that dog walk into the forest?’”
“……”
Hold on, was that in the movie? Honestly, I hadn’t experienced that masterpiece since it was on TV when I was in middle school, so I didn’t remember very well, either.
“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” Hachikuji apologized. “This riddle only appears in the novelization.”
“Then how’d I possibly know?! You think I’ve checked out the novelization of a movie from more than ten years ago?!”
The riddle itself was the blind spot! Most people in Japan didn’t even know that the first two Die Hard movies were based on novels!
“Oh, but this might spoil it for people,” Hachikuji cautioned. “Anyone who doesn’t want to know the answer should skip ahead a few pages.”
“How thoughtful of you…” That is, if the book could still be hunted down in the first place. “What are you a buff of, anyway? Well, fine. And the answer is?”
“Don’t be so impatient. Try thinking for yourself a little.”
“The truth is, I’m not good at riddles. I’m not very witty.”
“I wouldn’t say that…but okay, in that case, time’s up. The answer is that the dog can walk halfway into the forest.”
“Huh. Why?”
“Because for the remaining half, he’s walking out of the forest.”
“A-ha!”
It was a pretty neat answer. You could even say witty.
I let myself feel impressed. Yes, old movies had a thing or two to teach us, this was how culture got carried down from one generation to the next─
“Right, it was pretty interesting and all, Hachikuji, but why bring it up now?”
“Please don’t repeat yourself. When you do that, you’re forcing me to do it again.” If you were going to repeat a gag, up to three times was the iron rule. “I promise to make it seem like it was actually foreshadowing in the guise of small talk, so could you let me off the hook just this once?”
“How could that riddle possibly turn out to be foreshadowing?”
“Let’s see. Here, how about this. On the road of life, you’re living for the first half, but proceeding toward death for the second half─that makes sense, doesn’t it?”
“Sort of…” Framing it as a life lesson was so phony, though. She was starting to sound like a conman I knew. “But that doesn’t apply to immortal beings, like vampires.”
“Right. There’s no beginning or end for immortals.”
And they obviously don’t break down, tied in Hachikuji.
True. Going on living and going on dying being synonymous─that defined immortality. No breakdowns, no replacements, and needless to say, no guarantees.
“Still,” Hachikuji said, “if I don’t mix in a little nonsense, everything would be foreshadowing, and that could spoil the second half.”
“What an icky kind of foresight…”
If she was going to be so mindful, she migh
t have directed the scene differently. What an amateur. For all her strategizing, who was ever going to suspect that a Rolls Royce in the desert and a dog wandering in the forest were clues?