Nekomonogatari (White)

by Nisioisin

  It wouldn’t be ready─in time.

  No, I didn’t know what was supposed to be ready in time or not for what here. The house I had lived in for fifteen years was burned to the ground now─it would be a different house, rebuilt.

  Everything had been lost.

  That was all.

  There was no making it in time or not─it was simply the wrong time to make anything of it.

  “Well, let’s forget about six months from now. You’ll have somewhere you can stay if they hurry to find a place to rent, right?”

  “Yes, a hallway.”

  “A hallway? Oh, right,” she reacted, seemingly having forgotten what I’d told her. That was the only reaction, though. “Well, a lot of things happen─in every house.”

  “Yes. In every house.”

  “Which means…” Extending her arm to snatch her phone off the charging station, Miss Senjogahara opened its calendar. “You’ll need a place to stay until that rental gets figured out─did your textbooks and notebooks go up in flames, too?”

  “Up in flames,” I nodded. “The only things that made it out were what I’d brought to school that day, my writing tools and my wallet. But I think our teachers will let me borrow a textbook if I asked.”

  “I see. So there’s no need for me to worry about that, either.”

  As she said this, Miss Senjogahara operated her cell phone with one hand─I couldn’t see what she was doing from my angle, but she didn’t seem to be using the calendar anymore judging by how fast she was hitting its keys.

  Was she writing an email?

  “Miss Hanekawa. I just had a good idea, would you like to hear it?”

  “A good idea?”

  “You could even call it a scheme. Call me Hitagi the Schemer. A series-spanning collaboration that readers could only dream of.”

  “……” Seems more recycled than collaborative to me.

  “So it should take a week at the very longest until your parents find somewhere to rent─and if that’s all, I think I could make something happen.”

  “Hmm.”

  To be honest, this idea, scheme, or whatever it was didn’t feel particularly enticing─in the worst case, I just had to go to the hotel where those two were staying. In other words, this was about me being selfish, not something worth having Miss Senjogahara fret and ponder over.

  So it wasn’t the idea itself.

  Rather, the fact that she’d thought one up made me so happy that I said:

  “I’d like to hear it. Would you please tell me?”

  “Oh, I’m not so sure. Should I, or shouldn’t I?”

  “……”

  Over the course of her rehabilitation, Miss Senjogahara’s once-subdued personality had grown the slightest bit obnoxious.

  017

  After that, the two of us had dinner (for your reference, we cooked rice. Not only did the kitchen have a bread maker, it had a very nice rice cooker. “Square meals are important, but so are rounded diets,” apparently) before taking another shower together and washing each other. From there, Hitagi Senjogahara and Tsubasa Hanekawa went to bed before the clock struck ten, in part to help foster our bravery for the coming day.

  And nyow it was my turn to wake up.

  By “my,” I of course mean the nyew aberration based off of the Afflicting Cat that you all nyoh, “Black Hanekawa” as that Hawaiian-shirted jerk nyamed me.

  I snyuck out of the sheets without making a nyoise (unlike vacuum cleaners, cats specialize in moving around silently), and then─

  “Mmh, myow!”

  I stretched my paws.

  I think this goes without saying, but the reason we’ve been skipping chapters when my myaster, Tsubasa Hanekwa, goes to sleep, is that I’ve been showing up like this. I’m a nyaberration, so it’s nyot something I’m familiar with, but according to my myaster’s knowledge, sleep is important to rest nyot just the body but the psyche, too─I don’t think much about anything, and I don’t have anything close to a psyche, so it really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, but it sounds like thinking can be a pretty big burden.

  And that’s why humans have to spend thirty-three purrcent of their time sleeping, a third of their lives.

  Everyone sleeps.

  Even my myaster sleeps.

  But you see, with all that happened, what would be called nyormal “sleep” is nyo longer enough rest for my myaster. I don’t nyoh how much of this my myaster realizes─nyo, actually, even an idiot like me realized this one. But my myaster is just so dull to her own pain that she doesn’t realize the incredible shock dealt to her psyche, which is to say her heart, when the house she lived in for fifteen years burned down.

  Which is why I came out.

  Black Hanekawa, nyow here for a third appearance.

  There was Golden Week, then before the culture festival (what’s that, anyway?), and nyow this, which makes three.

  Of course, you could say that the me that showed up during Golden Week, the me that showed up before the culture festival, and the current me are all different cases─or different people, if you want to say it like a human.

  Or different cats?

  Of course, every change in pattern of a Black Hanekawa would seem so mewniscule to a human that there’d be no nyeed to identify each one─just like how I can’t tell humans apart.

  In other words, if you were going to use a nyarticle to talk about me, it would be “a,” not “the.” Maybe it’d be easier to understand if I said there’s nyo plural form for “Black Hanekawa”?

  If a human saw three Yeti, they wouldn’t say “Yeti A,” “Yeti B,” and “Yeti C.” Nyo, they’d just call them all “Yeti.”

  So it’s the same with me. Nyot Black Hanekawa C, and nyot Black Hanekawa Three─just Black Hanekawa.

  Nyice to meetcha.

  “Meow, meow, meow,” I said as I went to the bathroom.

  I took a look at the mirror.

  My hair had turned bright white.

  Ears had grown from my head.

  I had the piercing eyes of a cat.

  I nyever had a mirror or anything nyear me when I first woke up at the abandoned cram school, and I was so busy figuring out my situation anyway (in case you’re wondering, even as someone purrsonally devoted to my myaster, it didn’t take a mirror to think there was something weird about her taste in sweats). And when I “woke up” this morning, I was too sleepy to do anything. I’m nyocturnal, so my brain doesn’t work that good when the sun is out.

  So this was my furst time seeing myself in a mirror.

  “Hmm. The ears are charming in an all-nyew way nyow that my hair’s short,” I checked out the important stuff as I washed my face.

  I nyoh humans say rain’s on the way if you see a cat wash its face, but this didn’t have anything to do with the weather.

  I left the bathroom and grabbed the key sitting on top of the dresser. I think it goes without saying that it was the key to the room.

  That annyoying little human they were calling Koyomi Araragi seems to have thought I was such an idiot that I couldn’t even use a key. Gimme a break! I can at least use a key. Don’t you underestimate human-based aberrations.

  I snyuck around─so that I wouldn’t wake up Hitagi Senjogahara, this woman who seems to be my myaster’s friend, and silently opened the door before locking it just as silently.

  Well, I say friend, but I think she was supposed to be my myaster’s enyamy, too. It seemed silly to move around so carefully when I thought about that, but I was just going to do as my myaster wanted here.

  Because my myaster, at least, nyever once resented this woman.

  Nyot once.

  Meow.

  I didn’t wear shoes.

  They’re so hard to prowl around in.

  Why would you ever wear something that keeps you from using your fingers?

  “Meow, meow, meow, meow.”

  Nyow, I’m sure some of you are worried that my myaster isn’t getting any rest at all if
I’m nyout and abyout while she’s asleep.

  Thank you for your concern.

  But nyot to worry.

  It’s all okay.

  Because, as I’d put it, I balance out my myaster’s mental state─if anything, my myaster’s psyche is soothed merely by me coming out. Physical fatigue isn’t a problem, because I’m a nyaberration. Even when I’m in a human body, I mewve it using a different set of rules than a human. So my myaster’s body should actually be getting even more rested than if she was just sleeping.

  Really, just think about it.

  Nyo myatter how good of a bedmaker my myaster is, nyo one can get a good nyight’s rest and wake up ache-free after sleeping on cardboard boxes wrapped around a desk─that’s nyo bed, it’s a bedhead generator. And even if sleeping on the same futon with a friend who’d cry for you is better beyond comparison, even if it would be moving if you got a good nyight’s sleep that way, you nyormally don’t sleep as well when you use an unfamiliar pillow and bedding.

  But nyo, she slept soundly and got a nyice and healthy rest. Nyot to brag, but that was because I came out like this.

  I’m an embodiment of my myaster’s stress, which is to say a symbol of her fatigue. Just being cut loose like this is enough to give my myaster peace of mind.

  So I may nyot be able to take all the credit, but you can at least say that it’s partially thanks to me that my myaster doesn’t know what it means to be “still asleep.”

  I’m sure it was a coincidence, but whatever dirty little human compared me to a nyightmare made a keen-eyed point─because I’m like sleep itself to my myaster.

  A dream.

  Sure, I went around draining the enyergy of every human I could get my paws on over Golden Week because I couldn’t do enough to relax my myaster─but nyo need to worry.

  I wasn’t planning on doing anything that meowtrageous this time around.

  There’d be no point, anyway.

  To put it like that annyoying little human, I only appear like this as a nyaftereffect of a nyaberration, as something like a nyecho─just a phenyomenyon in the end.

  Like El Niño. Or La Niña?

  There’s basically nyothing I can do.

  I can keep her from being terrorized by her nyightmares by coming out like this. That’s it.

  It’s all I can do to care for my myaster’s mental health─which is to say, I’m as good as nyothing.

  But then again, “There’s a reason for every aberration,” according to that Hawaiian-shirted jerk─so even if there is nyothing I can do, I think there’s meaning in me being here like this, like a nyecho, like a simple illusion.

  I can’t do the things that I can’t do.

  So I just have to do the things I can, meow.

  As much as I can.

  …Hrmph.

  Nyow that I say this, this me and the previous me really were different cases─I harbored nyo feeling whatsoever of wanting to force things forward, of wanting to solve things with violence.

  I was warmer now, if I do say so myself.

  I guess it’s nyormal for a cat to be warm, though.

  Nyo, maybe nyot.

  Maybe it was my myaster who grew warmer.

  We can talk about humans and aberrations all day, but in the end, my myaster and I are one and the same. So if she gets softer, I do too.

  Nyo need to wait for the sun to come out.

  Nyo need for a foot warmer.

  I nyoh my myaster has doubts about that Hitagi Senjogahara woman’s rehabilitation, and I nyoh she’s wild about rehabilitating that annyoying little human Koyomi Araragi (he even makes fun of the fact and calls it a rehab program), but I think my myaster has also been pretty rehabilitated compared to nyot too long ago.

  Rehabilitated, or maybe restructured?

  I can observe my myaster from inside her heart, from her inner mind─so I feel like I nyoh what I’m talking about.

  Her family situation was her family situation, after all.

  It would be a miracle if she nyever went off the rails.

  Becoming a model student as a way of going off the rails is so very much my myaster─but she stopped acting too much like one ever since she cut her hair and took off her glasses.

  I’m sure lots of people think lots of things about that, but if you ask me, I’d say it’s nyothing short of great.

  That’s one place where I agree with Hitagi Senjogahara.

  I’m sure I’ll disappear some day, too.

  I’ll fade away into nyothingness.

  This was a transition─so that my myaster can fully become who she is.

  Me, I’m just like a nyadolescent fantasy.

  At the latest, by the time she comes back from traveling the world.

  I’m sure she’ll have forgotten me and left me behind, like the imyaginary friend that anyone dreams up when they’re little.

  I’d be lying if I said that doesn’t make me feel sad, but it was my role from the start. I’m nyot planning on defying that.

  There are partings just as there are meetings.

  It’s the same with aberrations.

  So I just have to do the things I can─

  “Meow, meow, meo─ver here?”

  Instead of going down the stairs, I leapt onto the roof of the Tamikura Apartments and looked all around me, three hundred and sixty degrees.

  “Nyo─maybe here?”

  So.

  If you’re curious why I slipped out of the futon and left the room─if you want to know what I wanted to do if nyot drain someone’s enyurgy, it of course wasn’t to go on a walk at nyight or anything.

  I nyoh I shoulda gone straight to “work” like this when I came out at the ruins and when I came out in the morning, but I had to make prepurrations, okay?

  Nyow.

  “Mm. Mmh? There you are.”

  Nyot long after, I found my target─and flew into the air without a sound as soon as I did.

  Cats can fly, you see.

  Okay, I nyoh that’s supposed to be birds.

  But Black Hanekawa can jump higher than a meowntain─careful nyot to make a sound, though, I wasn’t going to be leaping quite that high this time.

  And if I really tried to jump, it’d destroy the apartment under me.

  It was still enyough to jump about five hundred yards. I was far enyough away that I didn’t have to be silent anymore, and I landed with a thump, hard enyough to make you think my feet might get stuck in the nyasphalt.

  It was purrfectly dark on this street. Nyot a single car drove through at nyight.

  And in front of me.

  There stood a tiger.

  018

 

  The tiger─too impossibly big to be a real tiger, so enyormous it threw off your perspective─tilted its head at me, confused as it said this.

  A tiger tilting its head in confusion was a pretty rare sight.

  I wanted to snyap a photo and post it to my blog.

  “Afflicting Cat is close enough─nyot quite if you went into the details, or if you went into the fundamentals, but well, you’re nyot too wrong,” I replied with the biggest smile I could make to show my friendly intentions, but─

 

  The tiger nyarrowed its eyes and didn’t even grin.

  Hrmm.

  I nyow you shouldn’t judge aberrations by appearances, but my furst impression was that we weren’t going to get along.

  <─The aberration I know as the Afflicting Cat is a slight one, one with so little presence it may as well not be there. But you─>

  “Well─cat argue with that.”

  Nyothing I could say there.

  Afflicting Cats have so little there there it might be better to call them nyarrations than aberrations─and even if they didn’t, I got the feeling that in this thing’s view, most aberrations may as well nyot be there.


  Because as I assume you nyoh, tigers are sacred beasts.

  “We’ve all got a lot going on. Even someone like me.”