Koyomimonogatari Part 2

by Nisioisin

  “Broadly speaking, my uncle succeeded in dealing with the fallout from Hurricane Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade striking this town. He prevented a Great Yokai War from breaking out, which was definitely an achievement, a great achievement for him as an expert. But was that enough? Personally, I think my uncle’s too soft─he didn’t take any steps to deal with the next Heartunderblade-level aberration that shows up, did he?”

  “…”

  The person who entrusted the talisman to me─had said something similar. Or rather, said it and then entrusted the talisman to me.

  But…

  “Now that security has been ensured for the time being, I think the next step is to do something about this place itself─without a hangout, the ‘bad elements’ won’t have anywhere to hang out.”

  “Hmmm… Well, I see what you’re saying. But doesn’t that seem like too much for a private individual to handle? If this is about Oshino having to procure the funds to rebuild this shrine…”

  “Funding alone isn’t going to cut it. Ideally, this abandoned shrine would be rebuilt from the ground up and turned into a place where a ceaseless stream of faithful came to worship year in and year out… In other words, the cult of the serpent deity needs to be revived… Ha hah, but it’s just as you say, Araragi-senpai, that’s probably impossible for individuals…”

  Just because it’s impossible doesn’t mean we can give up, though, continued Ogi. “We can’t shirk our duty to correct what needs correcting─even if it’s meaningless, and even if it’s impossible. Don’t you think it’s wrong not to correct mistakes, even if doing so is meaningless?”

  “Well, as someone who’s constantly making mistakes in his exam-prep workbook, I have no choice but to answer that question with a yes. But the reality is that there are things we can and cannot do. Isn’t that reality in its proper form? I can’t get behind the idea that a world where anyone could do everything is proper.”

  “Nor can I. This is a question of will. A question of my determination to implement an offensive defense─ha hah, though ‘offensive defense’ makes my will seem pretty low-key. Um…should we get back to the topic at hand?”

  “Was there ever one to get back to? I still don’t have a clue what you’re trying to tell me, Ogi. You said that the fact that this shrine is on this mountain involved a poorly balanced mistake in the initial configuration, but that of all things isn’t something a high school girl like you could do anything about. It’s not like we’re going to move the shrine somewhere else at this point, after all this time.”

  “Yes, you’re right,” Ogi readily assented.

  This sudden reversal was redolent of her uncle─the conversation never quite turned into an argument.

  “Let me give you a little history lesson, Araragi-senpai. Originally, this shrine─Kita-Shirahebi was in another place altogether.”

  “Another place altogether?”

  “Yes. It also had a different name back then─but it had to be moved for a reason, to this mountain. It was jammed on here. At the summit, where I’m standing now.”

  “…”

  “If you want a slightly more in-depth explanation of what happened, at that time this mountain was considered highly sacred─and so the shrine was moved here to enjoy the benefits of its great spiritual power.”

  “When you say ‘moved here’…you mean they established a branch shrine?”

  “No, they moved the original shrine to this new location.”

  “You can do that? Okay, I don’t know much about how shrines work…but aren’t shrines and temples the kind of things that basically stay in one place?”

  “Not necessarily. Sometimes they’re forced to move by circumstances beyond their control, like hurricanes, for instance─but that’s not what I want to talk about.”

  “Huh? Weren’t you giving me a history lesson?”

  “No, no, the history is irrelevant. I discussed it, but it wasn’t what I wanted to discuss─there’s just one question I want you to consider, Araragi-senpai. How did they, by which I mean the people involved with the shrine back when it was in a different location─at the time it had a different name as well, but for the sake of convenience and clarity let’s call it the old Kita-Shirahebi Shrine─relocate it to the top of this mountain?”

  “How? Well, whenever it was, we’re talking about a super long time ago, right? Seems unlikely they had the technology to move the entire building as is─so I imagine they took it apart temporarily, then reassembled it at its new location. Smaller things like the offertory box they could probably bring as is…”

  “Mm-hmm. This kind of structure is built without using a single nail─it’s probably not all that troublesome to dismantle it. You know, the way you describe it makes it sound like a ship in a bottle. To get the ship through the narrow opening, you put the pieces in first and then assemble it on the inside… But a shrine wouldn’t necessarily be easier to transport once you’ve taken it apart.”

  “Huh?”

  “Look─back then, not even the road we took to get here existed.”

  As she said this, Ogi pointed beyond the torii to the steep mountain path, up which we’d climbed. Right, a steep mountain path. It seemed hard enough to get lumber and building materials up such a narrow, precipitous route─but even that wasn’t there?

  “Nope. It wasn’t there. The steps weren’t installed until after the war. Recently.”

  “I wouldn’t call it recently…”

  “In Kyoto, ‘after the war’ apparently means after the Onin War, over five hundred years ago…”

  “Well, I never believed that story. That can’t actually be true.”

  “Think about it. It has a certain logic. During a so-called world war, Kyoto emerged relatively unscathed from the bombings that decimated other major cities, so it doesn’t make sense for them to use that conflict as their yardstick. In light of that, it’s quite plausible for them to use the expression to refer to the Onin War.”

  “Interesting. Maybe you’ve got a point…” When I hear the phrase, it takes me a second to realize people aren’t referring to the time since spring break, so I guess I get it. “Anyway, the stairway was constructed relatively recently.”

  “Yes. So to put it in ship-in-a-bottle terms, the neck of the bottle was abnormally long and twisted, you see?”

  “In which case…isn’t the conventional approach to clear a road and use that for transporting the building materials up the mountain? Once it was finished, the road would’ve fallen into disuse and ended up obscured by the trees and plants that regrew there. At least until the stairway was constructed…”

  “That’s right. Anytime you want to build something, you have to build a road first. From the Silk Road on down, you could say the history of humanity has been the history of roadways. From roadways, to shipping lanes, to flight paths─I suppose the next step will be pathways into space? That’s still not the right answer, though.”

  “Huh? It’s not?”

  “No. As I told you a minute ago, this is a highly sacred mountain. That kind of large-scale construction would be out of the question. In the course of moving a shrine to the top of it, of course, a minimal amount of building would be inevitable, but doing everything possible to avoid harming the mountain was the humane route. Humane─or pious, I suppose.”

  “They didn’t build a road?”

  “Nope. Not an artificial one, anyway. Look, we came up that postwar stair, but if we plucked up our grit─we could’ve made it to the top without it, trekking through the foliage without the benefit of a real path, right?”

  “…”

  I wonder.

  If we plucked up our grit, probably, but then I just don’t have that much grit. Though it might be fine for a Patagonia type like Ogi…

  Well, the grit of our forbearers was nothing to sneeze at.

  Especially when it comes to architecture. They left behind all these unbelievable World Heritage treasures without recourse to Mister
Bulldozer or Miss Crane…

  I said I couldn’t necessarily get behind the idea of a world where absolutely anyone could do literally anything, and yet, once you ignore little things like human rights and labor conditions, people can probably accomplish just about anything.

  But even so.

  Even on those terms─how would you actualize this shrine’s “move”?

  I don’t know anything about the mountain’s great spiritual power at the time, but from a purely architectural standpoint, how would they have moved a building to such a wildly unfavorable location?

  “Are you saying they used some otherworldly skill? Supernatural superpowers, or spiritual ones… That really would take some great spiritual power.”

  “No, nothing like that. Just plain old human ingenuity. As far as I’m concerned, nothing could be more annoying than that ‘move’─in a way it was the whole reason I had to come here, to this town.”

  Kita-Shirahebi? What white snake of the north? she muttered.

  As if something bad had happened to her─though her expression didn’t change, she gave the shrine roof beneath her feet a gratuitous kick.

  004

  The epilogue, or maybe, the punch line of this story.

  In a truly unexpected turn of events, the person who unraveled the mystery of Kita-Shirahebi Shrine, the relocation of what Ogi referred to as old Kita-Shirahebi Shrine, was none other than my little sister’s friend Nadeko Sengoku.

  “Piece of cake, Big Brother Koyomi.” That night, for certain reasons, I’d hauled Nadeko Sengoku into the Araragi precinct for questioning, er, protective custody, and this is what she told me. “That’s easy mode.”

  “Easy mode?”

  No.

  Whatever the answer turned out to be, transporting a building up to the top of a mountain wouldn’t be a piece of cake, or easy mode─it wouldn’t be a game at all.

  But maybe it was precisely because Sengoku was a gamer, someone who could see it as a game, that the solution came to her so easily.

  “Sounds like they didn’t tackle any large-scale projects like building a paved road, but as far as I can tell from what you told me, Big Brother Koyomi, they did at least a minimal amount of construction, right?”

  “Hunh? Yeah…”

  Incidentally, I kept Ogi’s name out of it when I asked Sengoku about this─not just her name but the very fact of her existence. Considering everything that’d been going on, I was somehow hesitant to introduce them to each other.

  I can’t deny that I was maybe being overly cautious.

  Or reading too much into things, at any rate…

  But Sengoku had a right to know what I’d learned about Kita-Shirahebi Shrine─she was very much involved with that place, after all.

  “So they did do a minimal amount of construction,” she said.

  “Meaning?”

  “The people who did the construction, the people who were made to eff-eck-choo-eight it─”

  Her manner of speaking somehow ended up like Karen’s─why Karen’s, and not Tsukihi’s? Maybe it was a question of how influential they were or weren’t. Karen influenced easily, and Tsukihi was easily influenced…

  “─had to at least clear the land on top of the mountain, to create space to build the shrine, right?”

  “Uh huh. Well, clearing the land to make space… I guess that’s the minimal amount of construction? It’s not like that kind of open space would occur naturally in the middle of the mountains.”

  “Yeah. And they used the lumber they obtained to build the shrine.”

  Waste-free construction─Sengoku said.

  Waste-free, minimal.

  “Then they wouldn’t need to haul lumber all the way up to the top, right? In other words, they wouldn’t need to clear a path for that. They could just pluck up their grit and climb to the summit on whatever path, then lodge there while they were doing the actual construction.”

  “…”

  Well, you wouldn’t necessarily have to lodge there, but─huh. Since it’s a mountain, you’ve got all the lumber you need without having to transport it from somewhere else.

  A veritable mountain of it.

  A while back, I employed a falsehood about trees in the back courtyard of Karen’s dojo being used to build the dojo itself…but even if it was out of the question to harm such a sacred mountain for no good reason─using the lumber obtained from clearing a space for a shrine to build that very shrine was based in a spirit of keeping things local, or in contemporary terms, it was eco-friendly.

  Such a simple answer was so clearly true once you heard it, there could be no other possibility─if the question Ogi posed had been, “How would you build a new shrine on top of a mountain with minimum harm done to the mountain itself?” it might’ve taken me a while, but I probably would’ve arrived at the same answer eventually.

  But the question she posed had been…

  “Hang on, though, Sengoku. We’re talking about relocation, not new construction…‘moving.’ If you use new lumber to build a new shrine, then isn’t that a different shrine?”

  “They’d probably bring along their relish…I mean, their relic. But if you’re taking the trouble of moving to a new place, don’t you think you’d want a new building anyway?”

  “…”

  The ship of Theseus.

  If its pieces are replaced in the course of repeated repairs until ultimately all the original parts are gone─can you still call it the same ship?

  I think that’s how that one went.

  “So the building was completely replaced, switched out, and only the name was brought along─no, wait, the name was changed too. Speaking of which…”

  Whatever else may change.

  As long as the faith doesn’t, then nothing has─just like how people’s feelings don’t change in the face of reason?

  You can try to replace them, but they won’t change.

  Immutable─no, maybe that idea is exactly what Ogi saw as being problematic.

  Since, if I was to believe her, relocating the shrine to the top of that mountain had been a mistake.

  A mistake?

  No─what matters is the balance.

  Worshipping a god atop that mountain upset some kind of balance─

  “Speaking of which, Big Brother Koyomi. Your quiz made me wonder.”

  “Um, it wasn’t a quiz…”

  “That shrine is all falling apart, but do you think they’ll rebuild it at some point?”

  “Rebuild…”

  I hadn’t thought about it─but if they did rebuild it.

  Modern times being what they are, I doubt they’d use lumber from the site for the construction─and of course they’d clear a road up to the top.

  That’s how dilapidated the shrine was. Its reconstruction would be welcome─but in that case, what would happen to the balance Ogi was worried about?

  If a shrine that already had no worshippers, that had no god, were to be rebuilt─renovated, just what new kind of faith would be born there?

  No─not a new faith.

  A continuation of an old one.

  Whatever kind of logic you try to apply, whatever reason you employ.

  Faiths, like aberrations─abide.

  “It would be great if they rebuilt it,” Sengoku said. “If they did, I bet it wouldn’t be a hangout for ‘bad elements’ anymore. I bet by then, Mister Serpent─I mean the snake god would have returned to the shrine. Right, Big Brother Koyomi?”

  “Oh… Yeah. That’d be really great.”

  Would it?

  I had no way of knowing─but that’s what I told Sengoku.

  Either way, since a certain point in time, the balance in our town had gone into a one-way nosedive.

  And I had a bad feeling about where things were headed.

  No, it wasn’t just a bad feeling─a real feeling.

  The day when I would use, when I’d have no choice but to use, the talisman entrusted to me by Izuko Gaen was perhaps
not so far off.

  001

  For Shinobu Oshino, to speak of a road was once to speak of the road at night. And, as supreme ruler of the darkest hours, the night road was the royal road─of the immortal king of aberrations.

  That’s all in the past now, of course─way in the past, and her current domain consists solely of my shadow, an area not even ten feet square. I’m pretty sure that’s a source of a bit, or, a great deal of disgruntlement for Shinobu, but at present I’ve yet to receive any formal complaints regarding the matter.