Koimonogatari

by Nisioisin

  “All you have to do is listen,” she insisted. “If you tell me to take a hike, I will. Araragi and I will shut up and get killed─if that’s our fate then so be it. No, if I get down on my knees and beg, at least he might be spared. I’ll live out the remaining two-and-a-half months of my life with that one hope to console me.”

  “…”

  What a pest.

  When you take it too far, even an admirable attitude shades into sarcasm─but it had to be nothing but sarcasm to begin with. There was not a chance in hell that she was trying to arouse any sympathy in me of all people.

  “Sure, I’ll listen,” I said nonetheless. “Sometimes just talking about it can make you feel better. Sometimes it can take care of the whole problem.”

  As always, my mouth stabs my feelings in the back.

  I knew perfectly well even then that talking about it wasn’t going to make her feel better or take care of a goddamn thing.

  009

  “I said there was a person I want you to deceive, but Nadeko Sengoku is no longer a person.”

  Apparently, that was how Senjogahara had decided to begin her story.

  “A-ha, interesting. If she’s not a person, what is she?”

  “A god. She became a serpent god, this past November.”

  “…”

  For a moment I thought she was pulling my leg, but she wouldn’t have come all the way to Okinawa to do that, not her.

  I had to see where this was going. Maybe there was even some money to be made.

  You never know where you might unearth a hot tip on a profitable venture.

  “What I mean by became a god─”

  Still, her story leapt all over the place and was almost impossible to follow (I hadn’t expected the kid to be so bad at explaining, but in this case, at least, she didn’t seem able to speak objectively about the situation), so to make things easier on myself, instead of just nodding along I jumped in wherever necessary.

  Maybe she was inwardly delighted that I was so engaged by her tale, but the truth was just the opposite─I was fighting to retain any interest at all.

  I enjoy watching other people getting it all wrong.

  Which is why I can’t give up lying.

  “Is it fair to say─she’s afflicted with a mysterious ailment like you were?”

  “Right… A mysterious ailment, huh? Both of them are deities, at any rate.”

  For me─it was a crab.

  And for her─a snake.

  After adding this, she went on, “Even though both qualify as mysterious ailments, the situations are different insofar as I relied on a god, while she became one. Her condition is more acute, like an incurable disease. We can’t say they’re really the same.”

  What was she talking about, acting like she understood everything? Did she think her self-diagnosis made her cool? Just keep telling yourself that, honey.

  She must have noticed my unimpressed reaction because she revised and simplified her take. “So yeah, a mysterious ailment.”

  My feelings don’t really show, which made her an observant lady. Or maybe it was more like never forgetting how to ride a bike.

  “You were operating in our town, so you might know the place. A shrine up on the hill called Kita-Shirahebi. That’s where she’s enshrined.”

  “Nope, doesn’t ring a bell,” I answered─because it did. “Either way, I don’t totally follow when you say she’s enshrined there. I mean, is Nadeko Sengoku currently being worshipped as a living god?” Kita-Shirahebi, an abandoned shrine, one of those dilapidated and empty places Oshino likes so much. Hmm, why did it ring a bell, did Kagenui tell me about it or something? “A living god─an avatar of some kind.”

  “Not quite… She swallowed a god whole, so to speak… Anyway, Nadeko Sengoku is no longer human, she’s become some kind of monstrosity.”

  “Huh.”

  Just like you were, and like your boyfriend still is, I started to say, but thought better of it.

  Pissing her off would be fun, but also quite pointless. Who was human and who was a monster failed to interest me.

  If there’s money to be made, I’ll treat a dog as a human being and elevate a fish to godhood─what do I care about biological classifications? Not human? No one is more inhuman than me.

  “In a nutshell, Nadeko Sengoku has become freaking unreal. A destroy-the-entire-town-if-she-feels-like-it class of being,” Senjogahara summarized, roughly, no doubt leaving some things out─not because it was too complicated but because she couldn’t tell me, I’m sure.

  It seemed kind of highhanded to ask someone to listen and then not share everything, but demanding people to give you the whole scoop since they came to you wouldn’t be any better.

  All I needed was the bare essentials. To that end, I decided to put some supplementary questions to her.

  “How did this girl contract such an ailment? From what you say, it sounds like she’s your classmate─”

  “No. She’s in middle school.”

  Dear me, this time my guess was wide of the mark─I got a little carried away. Must have hurt my standing, but this raised more questions than it answered.

  “What year?”

  “Second… Listen, Kaiki, are you for real?”

  “Hm?”

  “I mean… Are you just messing with me, playing dumb like usual, or does it really not ring a bell? The name Nadeko Sengoku.”

  “…”

  That got me thinking. The way she said it, the way she quizzed me, could it be that I actually knew Nadeko Sengoku?

  But I’m a legitimate adult. Well, maybe not legitimate, even kind of half-assed, but of a certain age at least. I don’t know too many middle school students─oh.

  I see.

  That must be it.

  Got it.

  “If she’s in middle school in that town where you live, she must be one of the kids I conned last year.”

  That’s why Senjogahara had gone on about making it up to whomever. She’d put me on the spot and crazily told me to take responsibility because Nadeko Sengoku was one of my victims.

  What a load of shit. But it was Senjogahara herself who fine-tuned my understanding of the situation. “Strictly speaking, she wasn’t a direct victim─she was victimized by one of your victims. I guess she’s your indirect victim.”

  “Ah. Like a chain of bankruptcies brought on by a con. Right, it’s precisely due to these chains of victimization that fraud transcends individuals and is a social ill.” I meant it as a kind of look who’s talking joke but seemed to have touched a nerve with her ladyship.

  As soon as I noticed her grabbing the glass of orange juice that she hadn’t touched once, its contents were all over my face. It was such a fluid, seamless motion that I had no time to react.

  Since not just the orange juice but also the ice cubes in the glass exploded into my face, it hurt more than it was cold.

  Like someone had used Ice Shard on me.

  I was really glad I was wearing sunglasses─though my brand-new Hawaiian shirt was soaked.

  The waitress raced up fit to burst, but I beat her to the punch. “My apologies, she seems to have spilled her orange juice everywhere. I’m terribly sorry, but would you please bring another glass?”

  Faced with my total composure despite the fact that I was sopping wet, the waitress had no choice but to assent and withdraw.

  The saving grace here was that Senjogahara was quick to lose it but not prone to hysterics─she just coolly looked away by the time I was smoothing things over with the waitress. As if nothing that ever happened in the world had anything to do with Hitagi Senjogahara.

  I suppose not even the most veteran waitress would expect a cheerful guy in a Hawaiian shirt and a high school girl wearing Groucho glasses to be having a serious fight.

  As I wiped my face with a freshly supplied hand towel, Senjogahara finally broke her silence.

  “Don’t treat me like a kid.”

  Don’t treat me like a kid�
��she used to tell me that before, too, but since the age gap between us wasn’t closing, Senjogahara, at least as a minor, would sadly only ever be a kid in my eyes.

  Seeing as she said it after the fact, though, I didn’t think that was why she’d treated me to orange juice.

  No point in needling her about it, however. I understood why she was pissed─the joke had been a little over the line. I’d gone and done it, and belatedly my heart grew full. I have a bad habit of overplaying the humor card and am lucky the image hasn’t stuck.

  My looks never served me well, but personality-wise I’m not that different from Oshino─apart from not being such a chump, needless to say.

  “I’m sorry,” apologized Senjogahara, surprisingly, earth-shatteringly, once the new orange juice had arrived. “That wasn’t how someone with a favor to ask should behave.”

  “Don’t give it a second thought. An adult can’t get upset every time a child acts out,” I assured her─sarcastically, of course. I steeled myself against another helping of orange juice, or ice cube barrage, but Senjogahara just barely managed to control herself.

  I swear I saw her right arm twitch, but we’ll chalk it up to my imagination─just to be generous. Whatever the case, she’d learned how to hold back.

  No, maybe she was enduring it for the sake of her beloved boyfriend.

  How beautiful.

  Not that beauty does anything for me.

  At best I can comprehend that people might find the thing in question beautiful.

  “Anyway, you’re the one who dragged Nadeko Sengoku into the realm of aberrations, if only indirectly─in which case, doesn’t even a vile fiend like you feel some pang of responsibility?”

  “I do, I do. I feel crushed to death by my sense of responsibility. I absolutely have to atone for it. I’ll make it up to her, no matter what it takes. So tell me, Senjogahara, what should I do?”

  I tend to run off at the mouth, which was very much what happened here. I just said whatever popped into my head─even I have to admit it was weird. Did I want to be showered with orange juice that badly? I’m not on a championship sports team and have no reason to be doused with beverages.

  But Senjogahara was tenacious. And tough. She got on board with my joke, er, misstep. “Like I said. I want you to deceive Nadeko Sengoku and save me and Araragi.”

  Save.

  I’d heard the same word two years ago─from Hitagi Senjogahara’s lips. What the hell must she have been feeling to repeat it to the person who had betrayed her so cruelly?

  What must she have been feeling? To be honest, I can’t even imagine. Not that I know where in my heart this honesty resides. Or where my heart resides, period.

  Save, huh?

  Me, save Senjogahara, and Araragi.

  It sounded like a bad joke. Not being averse to bad jokes, I was starting to have fun.

  Hearing it justified this whole trip to Okinawa─now I just needed to pick up some local sweets before heading back to feel like I’d gotten my money’s worth. It was time to get going.

  “Are you telling me to pull one over on a god?”

  “You can, can’t you? When you claim, rightly or not, to be the greatest swindler under the sun, you ought to be up to it.”

  I’ve never claimed any such thing. Could she not go around fabricating monikers for me? I’m just a stingy swindler.

  “What’s the matter? Not confident you can pull it off?”

  It was a cheap provocation. Bargain basement.

  So I took Senjogahara’s question as just that: a simple question. Every once in a while, even I take what people say at face value─no idea why this was such a moment.

  “Oh, I can. In fact, pulling one over on a mere god doesn’t take any confidence. There’s no one I can’t con.”

  Ouch. I might as well have called myself the greatest swindler under the sun. What the hell was I saying?

  “So you can deceive the murderous little girl and talk her out of killing us so Araragi and I can live on?”

  “Sure.”

  Despite having realized my mistake, I somehow didn’t modify my approach, and my mouth just went and made it worse. Come on, mouth, whose side are you on?

  “Strictly speaking, it’s me, Araragi, and his little blond loli slave.”

  “Keep ’em coming. Add five more loli slaves, and it’ll still be a cinch.”

  My mouth’s out-of-control joyride finally stopped thereabouts. I really needed to get the brakes checked.

  “Okay. In that case─”

  “But,” I regained my footing before Senjogahara could finish, “all I’m saying is that I can. Whether or not I will is a different question.” I wasn’t going to be railroaded into anything, thank you. I’m the boss of me. “First off, the reason I con people is for money. Why deceive this Nadeko Sengoku if it won’t net me a red cent? A middle school girl, god or not, getting tricked is just heartbreaking, isn’t it.”

  “I…” Senjogahara seemed to falter, but continued, “will pay you. Of course.”

  “Hmph. ‘Of course’? As if you had the spending power.”

  “Don’t judge a book by its cover. I won the lottery since the last time you saw me and am immensely wealthy.”

  “Glad to hear it,” I assented half-heartedly, not interested in humoring her. I had other things on my mind.

  I was doing some preliminary calculations, just for fun.

  If I did swindle a god, just how much would that be worth? Even with that dilapidated shrine restored, I didn’t imagine the place had much in the way of assets. In fact, the land and buildings belonged to humans, and the god probably didn’t own anything.

  Plus she was in middle school.

  Fleecing middle schoolers of their pocket money might prove lucrative if it were on a large scale like last time, but a single mark wouldn’t yield much.

  In other words, squeezing any profit out of the target of the con herself, Nadeko Sengoku, was nigh impossible. The fruitless endeavor wouldn’t net me a red cent, and if you ask me, a fruitless endeavor isn’t work. It’s playtime. Why should I amuse myself by playing around with a bunch of kids?

  “I’ll pay you,” Senjogahara repeated─not to emphasize the fact, it seemed, but almost as though she couldn’t keep up a conversation with me otherwise.

  If that was her thinking, she was damn right. I’d never amuse myself by playing around with schoolchildren unless “money” was involved, but if I could get an hourly wage for it, I’d do any amount of babysitting.

  To put it in extreme terms, as long as I get paid, I don’t even care if it’s a good deal. Take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves.

  Incidentally, that proverb is pretty old, so what with inflation, maybe “pennies” should be updated to something a bit larger─though I value pennies nonetheless, and may the pounds take care of me in the end.

  “For the moment, I can give you 100,000 yen up front, in cash… That’s the same amount I paid Mister Oshino for his assistance. When he cured my mysterious ailment─”

  “Then take that money to Oshino and ask him to help you again,” I said curtly.

  Curtly─but I ended up feeling as if I had actually given her a piece of sound and sympathetic advice. Dispensing it for nothing, how mortifying! What kind of a swindler am I?

  “Well, Mister Oshino is nowhere to be found… We’ve been looking for him, and Miss Hanekawa even searched overseas.”

  “…”

  Hanekawa? My mask slipped slightly at the sudden mention of an unfamiliar name. In other words, I let some emotion show on my face. Somehow, I felt a meaningless─or maybe meaningful─antipathy towards the name.

  Senjogahara seemed to pick up on it and said, “Miss Hanekawa is my friend and classmate. A girl with big boobs,” adding the flippant bit in an utterly cool tone─whatever that was supposed to explain, it did get my attention.

  Or rather, thanks to it, I failed to properly conjure a character who even went overseas sear
ching for someone on behalf of her friend. Does breast size really carry so much weight? If I had huge tits, it might blast away my identity as a con man.

  In any case, Senjogahara had effectively kept this girl, Hanekawa, beyond my malign influence. Well done.

  “If Oshino”─this was information of a caliber that I’d have liked to be paid for as well, but since she had told me about Hanekawa, sharing this about him in return made us even. Inside me, an eleventh-hour deal was struck─“really wants to remain hidden, no one will be able to find him. He and I have extremely similar behavior patterns, but the difference is that he hates civilization. People who hate civilization don’t leave much of a trace and are hard to track down. A drawback of the world’s precipitous transformation into an information society.”