Onimonogatari

by Nisioisin

  She was going to go already?

  She wasn’t dragging this out at all─and was actually satisfied?

  Did she really need nothing more?

  It wasn’t my place to say anything if so─I don’t believe that the only right thing for a ghost to do is to move onto the next world, but that’s just what I think.

  If our world’s rules didn’t think so─and more importantly, if Hachikuji didn’t think so, I couldn’t selfishly force my own house rules on them. That would make me no different from the Darkness.

  What I needed to do here was probably to stop being stubborn, to turn around and see Hachikuji off with a smile─well, I could do it crying, too, but I was probably supposed to give her a proper sendoff.

  That’s how I needed to see her off.

  At the very least, I wasn’t supposed to be acting this obstinate and half-angry… I shouldn’t be seriously angry at the Darkness, at Gaen, at Ononoki, at Hachikuji.

  I’d probably regret parting with her like this.

  I’d carry it around with me for the rest of my life.

  I knew that but─I couldn’t do it.

  It made me feel like a petty human, even if I’d become a half-vampire and experienced all kinds of ghost stories─it made me see how small and empty a person I was.

  It drove home that I’m just me.

  I couldn’t even humor one girl.

  Ononoki was exactly right─I could barely tell which of us was the child here.

  “Oh, that’s right, Mister Araragi. Why don’t we end by doing that thing we always do. You know the one.”

  “…”

  Not that I had the mental fortitude to ignore Hachikuji when she called my name. After a pause, I still didn’t turn around as some small form of resistance.

  “What thing?” I said, keeping my reply short.

  “You know, the routine that starts with me saying, ‘A slip of the tongue.’”

  “…Really?”

  I wasn’t able to smile, but nor could I stop this urge to smirk from welling up.

  I couldn’t believe it. Really, at a time like this?

  Entertaining me.

  Hachikuji was still entertaining me.

  “So you were doing it on purpose after all.”

  “Of course I was. No tongue would ever slip like that,” she smoothly admitted. “You know, Mister Araragi. Now that I think of it, we haven’t done it a single time this story.”

  “…”

  “Please, Mister Araragi. Think of it as your farewell gift to me.”

  “Fine, then.”

  I wondered if this was really a time for a slip of the tongue after all the times she’d spoken my name already─but in my current state, I didn’t think I could give her a proper sendoff.

  And I couldn’t keep this up and give her a sulking sendoff, either─then at least, I might try a way that suited me.

  Not soppily, but childishly, inappropriately.

  We’d end our tale with a frivolous farewell.

  The tale of a lost child and me.

  Ah, geez.

  Now I had a good excuse to turn around.

  Ten-year-old girl or not, she really was like an older sister to me.

  I wondered what was wrong with me, letting myself be the one getting humored─but while I say all this, to tell you the truth, a little part of me was looking forward to it.

  Mayoi Hachikuji’s once-in-a-lifetime, final slip of the tongue.

  I wondered how it would slip.

  To be honest, the bar was just getting higher and higher.

  I’m sorry, but I wasn’t going to quip back this time if it was a run-of-the-mill slip. I would just let it drop with a clunk. I’d simply reply, Huh, what? Did you ask for me?

  That said, if she went for something too novel and a bit forced, I wasn’t going to say anything. I’d just sit there “looking baffled.”

  Expecting so much from her might be cruel, but this was our last time.

  I wanted her to rise at least that much to it.

  I wanted at least that much license, too.

  Okay.

  With my mind made up, my feelings firm, and most of my nerves taut, I slowly turned to face Hachikuji, careful not to show any emotion.

  “Smooch.”

  Hachikuji should have been behind me, but for some reason she was right next to me when I turned. Even more confusingly, her face was far higher up than where her height should have put it.

  And she placed her lips on mine once I turned.

  “………?!”

  “Sm…oooo─oooch!”

  After tasting my lips, while I was frozen in shock, for a few seconds, she moved back.

  No, it technically wasn’t Hachikuji who did the moving back. It was Ononoki, who had Hachikuji on her shoulders, who retreated.

  Hachikuji matched my height by riding on Ononoki’s shoulders─what had sounded like Hachikuji wearing her backpack was in fact the sound of the two of them getting ready.

  Still in that position.

  Mayoi Hachikuji said coyly:

  “I’m sorry. A slip of the tongue.”

  Her cheeks were stained.

  But not because she was blushing. She was crying, large tears dribbling down from her eyes.

  Her cheeks, her eyes, it was all bright red.

  But she was still smiling.

  Hachikuji smiled until the very end.

  “I loved you, Mister Araragi.”

  033

  “So─what happened after that? What’s the epilogue here, or the punch line, maybe?”

  Ogi seemed eager to know more as we sat in the empty classroom after school, our desks facing each other.

  “Nothing happened, really,” I replied.

  I’d grown languid in part because I was tired from all the talking, but my mood must also have grown a little dark after having to recall everything that had happened.

  Dark?

  No, that’s not it. It wasn’t getting dark.

  Hachikuji arranged things─so that it wouldn’t.

  So that my mood would never grow dark, so that I’d never find myself in a bad mood when I remembered her or talked about her like this.

  That capable producer had arranged things.

  So I guess what I had now was fatigue from talking and just a bit of guilt over having spoken about her so casually.

  It struck me as odd that I’d gone on and on about her─why was I telling this to a fresh transfer to our school, even if she was my junior?

  Ogi Oshino.

  Just because she shared a last name with that expert didn’t mean she was worthy of my trust─in fact, it should have been a reason to view her with suspicion.

  “After that, Hachikuji happily passed onto the next world, Ononoki and I returned to this town, and I helped Gaen with her work, just like I promised. As far as cases go, that was the bigger one by far… I never imagined I’d fight alongside Episode, of all people.”

  “What about Shinobu and Kanbaru?”

  “Oh… I met up with Shinobu as soon as I got back to town and we restored our link. Actually, Gaen restored it for us─so she’s still in my shadow. For her part, though, it does sound like she searched pretty hard for me. I don’t really know. I feel bad for what I did to Kanbaru then─I mean, I did introduce her to Gaen, just like I promised, and she ended up getting pretty mixed up in the job I had to do…”

  “Ah─that must have been tough. I can imagine,” Ogi marveled in an exaggerated tone before beginning to clap for some reason.

  It didn’t feel like I’d told a story so moving that it deserved applause─if anything, it seemed ridiculous and more like some kind of funny story.

  I didn’t do a thing in the end.

  I didn’t do a thing, and I wasn’t allowed to do anything.

  It was one thing after another being done to me. I was being led from start to finish.

  By Hachikuji─and by fate.

  “But I still think─wasn’t there
something else we could have done? Some way to deal with the Darkness─if that thing wasn’t an aberration, maybe there were different experts on things like it, the same way there are experts on aberrations. At the very least, I feel like Hachikuji made her decision too quickly. It couldn’t have hurt to give it a little more thought before─”

  “No, you just barely made it. Shinobu just barely made it in her story too, but you can’t say the same about everyone around her. Compared to that, Mayoi did an incredible job reaching a decision as fast as she did. What wisdom, to decide to move onto the next world yourself before vanishing into the Darkness. I’d like to learn from her example. If you put the two side by side, probably because Shinobu is an immortal vampire, she took things a little too easy─oops! That was just a guess, of course.”

  “…? Uh huh.”

  Why had she rushed to add on that last part?

  It wasn’t like Ogi was there. Of course everything she said was just a guess or a simple conjecture…

  “That’s too bad, though,” she lamented. “If only Hachikuji had the power to turn lies into truth like Hanekawa. You know, the kind of power to turn a cat into Black Hanekawa─heheh. I guess the world is a harsher place than that.”

  “Well, if I had to follow that story up with anything… It would be the way I ended up having to apologize naked on all fours to Senjogahara after I was unable to withstand my guilt over kissing a little girl, a young girl, and a tween girl over the space of a few days…”

  “Er, um, that’s actually a little too much information for me…”

  “While I felt bad about burdening her with the responsibility of forgiving me, it ended up being an unfounded worry because she didn’t forgive me… As my punishment, she forced me to watch a love scene between her and Hanekawa.”

  “Are you sure that wasn’t a treat for all your hard work?”

  In any case, I did get to hear a good story, Ogi said as she stood.

  “Thank you very much.”

  “Oh, no, it’s nothing worth thanking me for. I feel better too, having talked about it.”

  I still felt guilty over how casually I’d told the whole story, but now that I’d finally been able to talk about her like that, part of me might have been soothed.

  Of course, it was kind of strange that the first person I’d told about Hachikuji no longer existing anywhere wasn’t Senjogahara or Hanekawa or Kanbaru, but a high school girl I hadn’t known for very long.

  “Oh, no, at least allow me to thank you. Why, I nearly want to kiss you myself.”

  “I’m, uh, happy to hear that, but I’m going to have to ask you not to. Even if I wasn’t going out with Senjogahara, I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself if I kissed a girl who’s over fifteen.”

  “That’s the opposite of what a normal person’s values would be. But thanks to you, now I know why things didn’t work out. Both four hundred years ago and four months ago. Maybe what happened last month with Sengoku could have gone a little better if only we’d known why in advance.”

  “Last month? Sengoku─wait, you know about Sengoku?”

  “Oh, uh, no, not at all. Umm, you know─she came up in your story just now. You said something about a girl who got in lots of trouble last month─”

  “…”

  Had I?

  I’d said something about Sengoku? That, if anything, was something I shouldn’t have been casual about.

  The situation she was in right now was─

  “Well, I think I have a good idea about what’s going on in this town─Koyomi Araragi, Tsubasa Hanekawa, Hitagi Senjogahara, Suruga Kanbaru, Nadeko Sengoku, Karen Araragi, and Tsukihi Araragi─oops, and I guess there was Roka Numachi, too? Though you can take Mayoi Hachikuji off the list now─she really went away after that. She passed away.”

  “Did you just say something, Ogi?”

  “Oh, no, Ogi didn’t say anything─well, I have a lot of work to do, so that’s it for me today.”

  For today.

  She almost made it sound like our relationship was going to stretch far into the future as she began to leave the classroom─come to think of it, her nerves were a lot tougher than her slim figure might lead you to believe, given how she waltzed into a third-year classroom, empty or not, as a first-year student.

  “Hey, Ogi. What do you mean by work?” I felt conflicted about stopping her as she tried to go, but I had to ask. I was curious because her words sounded so out of place coming from the mouth of a first-year who’d just transferred to our school. “Naoetsu High doesn’t allow you to take part-time jobs, you know.”

  “Oh, I know I called it work, but I don’t mean something like what a laborer would do─call it part of the family business. Maybe you could say it’s a distinguished task that my family has carried out from generation to generation.”

  “So the same kind of job as Oshino? Working as what, an expert? As a balancer?”

  “Oh, no, Uncle Mèmè is like the black sheep of the family─I do like him, but I’m a good girl who listens to her parents.”

  “Hm.” True, I didn’t imagine Oshino was adept at communicating with his parents and relatives and such. “So then what kind of work is it?”

  “Just regular work. You could compare it to the overwhelming darkness that makes up the majority of space─the kind of work you can find anywhere. Righting what’s wrong, ending what needs to be ended─if you really want to go there, I guess you could say it’s punishing those who lie.”

  “…”

  What was that supposed to mean?

  Her explanation wasn’t helping me out at all, no matter how far she went.

  “Think of me as a herald of the end who allows no extensions─don’t worry, you’ll understand soon enough. I might even ask for your help in the future─bye, then!” Ogi said cheerfully before exiting the after-school classroom─leaving me all alone there.

  “It kinda feels like everyone’s disappearing and abandoning me. It’s like I’m being deserted,” I mumbled, but of course that wasn’t the truth. My words were so sentimental that I wasn’t even fooling myself.

  I wasn’t being deserted.

  I─just wasn’t moving forward.

  It felt like I’d been stopped in my tracks at some point─I knew there were things I needed to do, but I wasn’t moving my own life forward because I was so preoccupied with other people’s lives.

  I wasn’t making great progress on my exam studies, either.

  It always felt like I was failing to see something incredibly important, like I could never be at ease. Especially─since what happened with Sengoku. I couldn’t focus on anything.

  When I thought, I only thought about pointless things.

  It felt like I’d given up on many things I shouldn’t have given up on─and that even my sorrow over the fact was about to fade.

  That’s how it seemed to me.

  It did seem that way to me.

  “It’s like there’s so much I’m lacking─like someone’s cleverly getting one over on me─like everything we worked together to gloss over and deal with, all of the little things we’ve agreed to ignore, are being pored over and examined with a fine-toothed comb and being thoroughly denounced─”

  “Are ye aware?” a voice came from inside my shadow.

  Right. I wasn’t alone, was I?

  She was there in my shadow.

  She wasn’t going to show herself at school, but I could hear her voice clearly.

  “I assume ye are, but that woman─most likely is something.”

  “Well, yeah─she might be.”

  “Oh, so ye did know?”

  “No─it’s all a mystery to me.”

  I wish I knew. About all sorts of things, I said, standing up.

  “For now, though, I want you to keep Hachikuji’s disappearance a secret from everyone─let’s see what happens if I only tell Ogi.”

  “Ah. And just when I thought thou were prattling on and on. Was this thy plan all along? Or did it come afte
r the fact? So, for how long?”

  “I dunno, until something happens─we’ll need to keep Ononoki quiet, too. Hanekawa might figure it out right away, but let’s keep pretending that Hachikuji still graces this town.”