Kabukimonogatari

by Nisioisin

  Yes. That was our fate, I said─fiercely, forcefully.

  Taking no lessons from history about the tragic ends that await those who invoke fate as a justification.

  010

  Treading the paths of memory.

  Drawing out pieces of information, one by one.

  I was fairly certain Hachikuji’s mother’s surname was Tsunade─I recalled hearing that.

  I was also fairly certain that Mrs. Tsunade’s place wasn’t that far from Hanekawa’s and Senjogahara’s─near that park (whose name I still didn’t know how to read, Namishiro or Rohaku or whatever) where I first met Hachikuji.

  That was where she was headed─and it was in its vicinity that she suffered her accident.

  Did she say the car hit her while she was in a crosswalk?

  While the light was green─that much, at least, stayed with me, no need to dig around in my memory for it, just a briefing to bring everyone up to speed.

  But while her destination, that is, her goal, the last stop, was clear, I didn’t know the location of the place she’d called home while she was still alive.

  It could be in the next town over, in fact.

  A child carrying that gigantic backpack could walk the distance, so it couldn’t be too far, I conjectured, but that being said, she might have ridden a train or bus part of the way for all I knew.

  From how she talked about it, I had the image of her walking the entire way, but I couldn’t say for certain, and anyway, she might have been engaging in some fifth-grade bravado.

  Or maybe I was just remembering it wrong.

  It all sounded so easy, all we had to do was prevent a traffic accident─and I’d actually assumed it’d be easy to prevent one that we knew was occurring the next day, but faced with the reality of the situation, it started to seem unexpectedly hard.

  Hmmm.

  It wasn’t going as I expected. What to do?

  “I have an excellent idea.”

  “Oh? You mean it? If you’ve got a good idea, Miss Shinobu, you’ve got to tell me.”

  “Smash every traffic light at every crosswalk in town!”

  “Accidents would go through the roof! You want to be a terrorist?!”

  “Well, since thou art a terrololist.”

  “Did you just say that like it’s actually clever?!”

  Thus the process of trial and error reached an impasse.

  More of a dead end than a lost child.

  A blind alley.

  We still had a whole night, so there was no need to fret… For now, I decided to try and pin down the location of Mrs. Tsunade’s house.

  I figured that I could at least get some thinking done even as we walked or wandered.

  Hachikuji had told me Mrs. Tsunade’s address on that future Mother’s Day, and we’d even reached the place, but of course I didn’t remember, so we had to start from scratch.

  “Hark.”

  “What?”

  “One thing─” Shinobu, who’d gotten tired of walking and was clinging to me so I could carry her (normally, not princess-style in my arms), proposed along the way, “One thing we might do to prevent the accident might be to carry our warning directly to the lass’s mother who dwells in the house of Tsunade.”

  “Hm?”

  “We mean to confirm the location of the Tsunade residence in any event, so why not use the intercom to inform her?”

  “Your daughter who was taken to live with her father after your divorce is going to be in a traffic accident tomorrow. She’s secretly coming to visit you for Mother’s Day. Please telephone her and urge her to be careful. Oh yes, and since we’re here, do you think you could tell us where the Hachikuji residence is? Like that?”

  “Aye. Dost thou find fault with such a plan?”

  “Ah, well, let’s think about it for a second, shall we? If we jump to conclusions, our judgment might be faulty. Okay, hmm, are there or aren’t there any problems with that plan? Uh, yes!”

  Problems and nothing but.

  If she reported us, the jig was up.

  It was more realistic than smashing all the traffic lights, but─

  “It’s probably not advisable for me to meet Mrs. Tsunade.”

  “For what reason?”

  “For every possible reason… But I guess until her parents’ divorce, Hachikuji did live around here. Even if we can’t ask Mrs. Tsunade directly, we might be able to find out something from the neighbors…”

  And just as I was thinking, from someone passing by, for instance, Shinobu and I caught sight of a figure approaching us head-on. Perfect timing─no, actually, it was hardly good.

  More like the worst imaginable.

  Not only was I carrying a little blond girl.

  The person approaching us was also a little girl.

  A little girl of about six─walking along reading a book.

  Wearing glasses.

  With a single braid in back.

  You could tell she was the serious type just by looking at her.

  “What an exceptionally adorable little girl─wait, it’s Tsubasa Hanekawa!”

  “Eek!”

  Loli Hanekawa shrieked and put some distance between us. As she did, she hurled the book she’d been reading.

  A direct hit─on Shinobu’s head.

  “Arghh!”

  Shinobu fell to the ground like a bug sprayed with insecticide.

  All of this in the space of a single second.

  “Wh-Who are you?! And how do you know my name?! No, don’t answer, I can see for myself. You’re a deviant!”

  “…”

  Loli Hanekawa despised me instantly.

  The shock was enough to make me want to fall to my knees.

  But this was amazing. Even at six years old, Hanekawa was obviously Hanekawa.

  I thought I’d only been able to recognize seven-year-old Koyomi Araragi because he was me, Koyomi Araragi, but no, it was surprisingly obvious─or it might just be that I recognized her because she was Hanekawa and I was so deeply attached to her.

  Looking so serious even eleven years ago?

  But wait. Koyomi Araragi─was laying eyes on Tsubasa Hanekawa in civilian clothes. For the first time.

  She was in elementary school, so she didn’t have a uniform!

  “Hubba-hubba! Hanekawa’s civilian clothes are the cat’s pajamas!”

  “Eek!”

  “And tsurupeta Hanekawa is the bee’s knees! Wow, Hanekawa is as flat as a board!”

  “Eek! Eek! Eek!”

  Loli Hanekawa ran around madly trying to escape.

  Hanekawa, frightened!

  Of me!

  “Calm thyself. I am receiving thine emotions painfully clearly, but do not lose sight of thy original objective. If thou art arrested here, ’twill be impossible for thee to be released by the morrow…”

  “Urk.”

  Shinobu’s warning, delivered as she crouched upon the pavement, came in the nick of time and kept me from flinging myself on Loli Hanekawa.

  With all my might I clung to a mental picture that my shoes were sewn to the ground.

  What I really wanted to cling to, however, was Loli Hanekawa.

  Self-control self-control self-control self-control self-control!

  “Such a scary guy… Standing stock still, shedding bitter tears… If there are high school students like him, then the world is a pitch-black place after all…”

  Loli Hanekawa’s fear knew no bounds.

  Trauma now under construction, to critical acclaim.

  “Y-Young lady…” I addressed Loli Hanekawa, doing everything I could to sound like a sincere gentleman and no doubt failing. Give me an E for effort, though. “Well, uh, I know your name because of your nametag. Oh, and I’d like to ask for some simple directions.”

  “…”

  A skeptical stare.

  No helping that Loli Hanekawa wasn’t wearing a nametag.

  What a pointless lie.

  Damn, little girl though she was
, it hurt to get the “looking at a stranger” eye from Hanekawa. The “looking at a loser” part of it, on the other hand, felt kinda good.

  “Is there a Tsunade residence in this neighborhood?”

  “…”

  Still tight-lipped, Loli Hanekawa pointed to the right.

  Well now.

  She did know. Even as a little girl Hanekawa never did things by halves.

  “Thank you. You know everything, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know everything. I just know what I know.”

  With that, Loli Hanekawa took off, her feet pattering.

  Like she was running away from me. Okay, she really was.

  “─Do you think I just altered history?”

  “’Tis unlikely.”

  All that altered was thy favorability rating, quipped Shinobu, getting up off the ground.

  Being hit by the book and falling off me, without having done anything to deserve it, she’d gotten a raw deal with that bit of slapstick.

  And she wasn’t even angry, though I suppose such forbearance is to be expected of a 600 year old.

  “Not with such a minor brush.”

  “Still,” I said, “I can’t help but worry about the ramifications of meeting a past version of someone I know. Was the fact that it was Hanekawa good or bad? Do you think maybe she’ll become my girlfriend in the future because of this?”

  “Not a chance,” Shinobu laid it out for me. More forcefully than necessary, for some reason. “And in the unlikely event that there were a chance, when that girl prefers not to remember something─”

  “Hunh?”

  “No, ’tis nothing. Anyway, ye need not fear. Anyway, we know which way this Tsunade residence lies, so let us make haste.”

  “Right.”

  Then, while we were on the path indicated to us by Loli Hanekawa, our sights set on the Tsunade residence─I remembered.

  That eleven years later, I tossed the same question at Hanekawa, at which time she flatly answered no.

  Is it possible to know, eleven years in the past, something that you don’t eleven years in the future? Or maybe eleven-years-later Hanekawa only acted like she didn’t know because of the circumstances, I thought as I kept walking, trusting in Loli Hanekawa’s words.

  No matter how far we went, there was no Tsunade residence to be found.

  What we ultimately reached was a police box.

  “She tricked us…”

  Even as a little girl, Hanekawa had it all under control.

  011

  And yet, this might be an appropriate time to say, “God works in mysterious ways” (although honestly I don’t care for that saying) because thanks to that police box we learned the locations of both Mrs. Tsunade’s house and the Hachikuji place.

  There wasn’t much to it. I asked the officer on duty, “Excuse me, I was wondering if you could give me directions.”

  No tricks, just a request for assistance. Rather than a desperate, high-stakes gamble, it felt more like there was nothing to lose, like my approach was more a gag than anything, but the policewoman quickly responded, “Mrs. Tsunade’s place? Let me see…”

  I thought, For real? but realized that this was a time when people were terribly free with personal information, at least in comparison with now (the present).

  “Things are really tough for poor Mrs. Tsunade, aren’t they? After the divorce, she seemed to age overnight. She puts on a brave act, but you can see the weariness in her face. No surprise there, that woman really loves her only daughter. Now what was her name? Give me a second, I’ll remember. I’ve got a great memory, comes with the territory. Mayoi, that’s it. Cute kid, but it seems like she never comes to visit. Well, I’m a neutral party, and I don’t want to criticize the father, but…”

  I listened as she went on and on like that.

  For almost an hour.

  In the course of which I became an expert in the internal affairs of the Hachikuji (that is, the Tsunade) family.

  No matter how lax protections were for personal info during these years, the policewoman’s lips were a little too loose.

  She’d be liable to be sued in the present.

  “By the way, what’s your relationship to the Tsunades?” she asked at the very end, finally minding her duties.

  And my response?

  “I’m a friend,” I said. “A friend of Mayoi’s.”

  …I tried to play it cool, but sensing the policewoman narrowing her eyes at the suspicious profile of a high school student claiming to be friends with a very young girl, I beat it as fast as I could.

  The pell-mell retreat of a half-vampire boy.

  Not the sort of thing you see every day.

  “All right, that policewoman drew me a map of the neighborhood! With this I’m invincible. Like Mario after he gets a star in Super Mario Brothers!”

  “Is thine analogy so vivid that thou must utter it so forcefully?”

  The pell-mell flight came to an end─at that park.

  The park with the name I couldn’t read.

  We sat down on a bench and opened up the (really excellent) hand-drawn map, and while we were perusing it, Shinobu asked, “Which came first, Super Nintendo or Super Mario?”

  “Mm?”

  No, hang on.

  I got confused for a second, but it’s obviously Super Mario.

  In fact, it might even be that Super Nintendo was Super Nintendo because of Super Mario.

  “At any rate,” Shinobu said, “one cannot but admire the sensibilities of those who refer to the Super Nintendo as the SNES… I ever wished that mine own former name might be abbreviated in some similarly ingenious fashion…”

  “You mean that one?” I’d sworn never to call her by that name again, so I ended up just using a vague demonstrative.

  “Heh, a vampire who hath forgotten her true name…”

  “Don’t try to make it sound cool.”

  She just had a bad memory.

  We were checking the map as we exchanged this idle banter.

  Mrs. Tsunade’s house.

  And Hachikuji’s house.

  “They’re not as far apart as I thought… It might be kind of tough on the legs of an elementary school kid, but you wouldn’t even need a bicycle to cover this distance.”

  At least I was liberated from worrying what to do if she’d taken public transportation.

  Forced to consider every contingency, I might not know what to do if she’d ridden in a taxi like a celebrity, but if she had, saving her was beyond me.

  You’ve gotta be kidding me.

  Is what I would think.

  “Okay─so all we have to do is find the shortest distance between the Hachikuji and Tsunade residences and keep an eye on the crosswalk between them.”

  “Well, I wonder, my lord…”

  Just as I was feeling like I had settled the matter for the moment─feeling, to put it simply, like we were over the hump─Shinobu offered me this bitter pill.

  Incidentally, she wasn’t sitting next to me on the bench but in my lap.

  Her shoulder blade pressed against my chest.

  “What?” Would she be surprised if I licked the nape of her neck, I thought aimlessly. “There some problem with my idea? I was also thinking we need to find somewhere to sleep and get ready for tomorrow. Like maybe that abandoned cram school.”

  “Listen…” Shinobu suddenly raised her head so she was looking up at me and said, “However short the shortest Tsunade residence-Hachikuji residence route might be, there is bound to be more than one pedestrian crossing betwixt them.”