by Nisioisin
I mulled over her future. Even if she survived this, what might the future hold for her? Not that it had anything to do with me.
Not that I gave a shit.
“Are you positive that we have seventy-four days left? There’s that saying of ours about gossip lasting seventy-five days… But that count includes today, correct?”
“Yes─the Naoetsu High graduation ceremony is on March fifteenth. That afternoon, in other words after the ceremony, Araragi and I, and Shinobu Oshino, not even permitted to celebrate, will get killed.”
“This is definite? Absolutely definite? Might not Her Godliness lose patience and decide to kill you right now, for instance?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Why? To put it in stark terms, you, and probably Araragi as well, are attempting to ensure your own survival, whether through me or via some other plan. That must not sit well with a god. You can’t rule out the possibility that she might bring you both to a bad end in a fit of rage before the appointed day.”
I was dubious that this god was going to keep her promise just because she was a god, but Senjogahara declared, “I can rule it out. I can definitely rule it out. Nadeko Sengoku could not be any angrier than she already is─at this very moment. But Araragi and I are still alive. Which means she at least intends to keep her promise. She was at the peak of her anger when she made the promise, to begin with.”
“Okay, that’s what I want to ask you most. It’s the one thing I need to hear from your own lips. What the hell did you, the two of you, do to incur the wrath of Nadeko Sengoku? What did you do to warrant a death sentence?”
If I had victimized her, however indirectly, and that fact had fed into the present situation, shouldn’t she kill yours truly instead? No, if contracting a mysterious ailment and becoming a god, a great achievement you might say, was something that made this middle school kid happy, then maybe she ought to be grateful to me─but I found it a little hard to believe that a god would bother to kill a particular human being, let alone give advance notice.
For instance, destroying the Kyoto shrine I visited earlier that day might invite divine punishment, but surely I wouldn’t be struck dead.
So why?
Why were Senjogahara and Araragi going to get killed?
Killed by Nadeko Sengoku?
“I,” answered Senjogahara─or strictly speaking, didn’t answer─concluding her sentence with, “…don’t know.”
“Hey, hey. How can you not know?”
“I really don’t know. I mean, of course, how can I put this… There were things that might have caused it, failures, misconceptions, misunderstandings, mistakes, but…I’m not sure how we could really end up here because of them… There must be something behind the scenes that totally belies the way Araragi and I see it… I stole that idea from Miss Hanekawa, though.”
Hanekawa again. I tried once more to picture her but only conjured up an image of enormous breasts. Fearsome.
“Anyway, just to give you a jumping-off point, think of it as a romantic snafu. Before Nadeko Sengoku became a god, she had a crush on Araragi, but he had a girlfriend─that kind of thing.”
“…And what a vulgar thing it is,” I opined. I’m not sure if it was my honest reaction. I have a feeling that I did find it vulgar, and also a feeling that I didn’t. “Fine. That’s plenty. I’ll look into it on my own─but just to be sure… This goes without saying, so saying it feels stupid, but this time is an exception, right?”
“Huh? Exception?”
“Come on. I’m asking if it’s okay for me to set foot in your town. You can’t possibly be asking me to do this remotely, like some armchair detective─because I wouldn’t know an armchair if it came up and bit me on the ass.”
“Of course, obviously. This case is an exception, or let’s say, special, so feel free…but be careful. Plenty of people have a score to settle with you. Make sure you don’t end up as a John Doe who got viciously beaten to death by middle schoolers.”
Terrifying words, my lady. I was already leaving beautiful Okinawa for snow country, and her warning did not add to my enthusiasm.
I was relieving my Hawaiian shirt of its post, for sure. Oshino wears the things all year round… Must be the Endless Summer in that head of his. More Brazil, you might say, than Hawaii.
“This is also obvious,” added Senjogahara, “but please don’t let Araragi see you.”
“Hmph…right. Well, I don’t want to see him either. Araragi is one thing, but that loli slave of his is liable to kill me.”
Did I also need to watch out for his little sister? Karen, the girl with the ponytail─though she wouldn’t necessarily have one now.
“Okay. I’ll begin my investigation right away─but I don’t want you thinking this will be over in a day or two, Senjogahara. Not that I intend to take the full seventy-four, but expect it to take at least a month.”
“Sure. I’m ready for a long campaign. Or it’s already been a long campaign. Still, I’ll take the liberty of remaining in frequent contact. I may have commissioned you, but trusting you completely is, for me, an impossibility.”
“That’s fine. Don’t trust me. Be suspicious,” I said, before trying to drain my coffee cup at a gulp. I’d forgotten that it was empty since I’d thrown the contents in Senjogahara’s face. Remembering my claim to be vacationing in Okinawa, I muttered, “I guess my stay here ends today,” as I began to hatch my plans.
Hatch… What was I, a mother hen?
We’ll say a bit of fowl play suited me fine.
“I should be able to catch a flight that puts me in your town before the end of the day…but best if we took different ones. It’d be no joke if Araragi learned we’d been on the same plane.”
“Yeah, totally. By the way, Kaiki.”
“What?”
“Um…think you could lend me the plane fare home?”
011
At that point, I decided to abandon the five or six other cons I had going. To abandon and abjure them. To act as if they had never existed. After all, they might have been another one of my lies.
Either way, handing Hitagi Senjogahara her plane fare, I sent her on ahead of me then headed to a convenience store inside the airport.
I wanted to buy a pen and notebook─the 8 ½ x 11 variety, but unfortunately they didn’t have any that size, so I ended up with a memo pad, which was a little smaller than I would have liked. A Tokyu Hands or a Loft would have done the trick, but apparently neither chain has outlets in Okinawa.
I jumped right into my preparations while I waited for the flight─I clearly couldn’t stay in that town itself, so I made a reservation at a business hotel in a shopping district more than a half-hour away by train.
One week, to begin with.
I didn’t use a false name because I didn’t think it necessary, but Deishu Kaiki already sounds like a fake name, and since I don’t have a fixed home, I had to lie through my teeth to fill out the address section.
The cost of the stay would pretty much use up the 100,000 yen (strictly speaking, Senjogahara’s plane fare had already taken care of some of it), but travel and hotel expenses are something that I always have to contend with anyway, so in this instance I decided not to include them.
Oh, but Senjogahara.
How reckless, to come to Okinawa without enough money to get home─or maybe it was that unexpected for her that I actually took the job. If I refused, she would still have the entire 100,000 yen available, but perhaps she was simply terrible with money. She was the only daughter of a formerly wealthy family even if they had fallen on hard times.
As I made phone calls, laying the groundwork and getting the ball rolling on gathering info, it came time for my flight to depart─I would arrive there before the end of the day, but only just. It would be quite late at night, so while it was true that I was getting underway today, the real investigation wouldn’t start until tomorrow.
In which case, I wanted to work on my plan in the
meantime.
I love planning any con, let alone a huge job like this. Pulling one over on a god? I was like a kid in a candy store.
Unlike the stream-of-unconscious lies that flow out of my mouth, a systematic con is an art form─yikes, that came out sounding like a lie.
How embarrassing.
It’s really just a matter of prudence… But since my student days, I’ve always enjoyed making plans for summer vacation and so on. This is truly true. It might be a lie, but it’s true. A lie that might be true. Whatever, who cares, I’m just putting up a smokescreen.
I used the time waiting for the plane, and the time on the plane, to steadily think things through─opening the notebook, I used a whole spread to draw a map first.
A map.
A map of that town.
A map of the town from which I was temporarily un-banished.
I had only vague memories to rely on for certain areas, but having drawn one a little over six months ago, I didn’t have all that much difficulty.
A map it was, but the scale and relative positions didn’t need to be correct. It was simply an approximation, a tool for visualizing a situation.
Visualization.
Basically my own kind of mental map.
So more like an illustration than a map.
It’s much easier to picture things when you start drawing. At least it is for me.
Kita-Shirahebi Shrine, whose location I knew, secondhand; MS 701, which I believe Nadeko Sengoku attended while she was human; Naoetsu High, where Senjogahara and Araragi go; the Kanbaru residence; the Araragi residence─maybe I didn’t need to draw in Tsuganoki Second Middle, Araragi’s little sisters’ school, since it was a little farther away? No, better include it, just to be on the safe side. I crammed the blank spread with info that might come in handy, info that might not.
I also drew recognizable caricatures of the involved parties whose faces I knew, like Senjogahara and Araragi. Those two, in particular, had names that looked scary if I wrote them out.
In cartoon form, they became cute kids.
Naturally it wasn’t just those two. I fluidly drew all the middle schoolers I had duped back then whose faces I could still bring to mind.
When the spread was full, I turned to a fresh one for a somewhat more specific map. If the previous pages were an overview, this was a detail. The scale was still completely screwy, but if I needed precise distances, I could just use the mapping app on my smart phone.
It might come across as a strange activity to whoever’s sitting next to you on a plane, but that didn’t bother me. This was my own internal visualization aid, and if they peeked, they still wouldn’t get it; for anything I really couldn’t have anyone seeing, I use codes.
Thanks to the cute illustrations, people might even get the mistaken impression that I’m a manga artist.
Speaking of, back in the day, I think in college, I showed one of these visualization aids to Gaen-senpai, who said, “Looks like a walkthrough for a dating sim.” It brought me down, and I gave it up for a while─but no other method took, and I went back to it soon enough.
My drawings and notations almost completely filled the notebook, and it was at that point that we landed.
The snow was piled high, a real winter wonderland─but all I felt was cold. Confirming that I wasn’t moved, that I lacked any such sensibility, I called Senjogahara.
“I’m here.”
“Thanks. I appreciate it.”
“Yup.”
That was all we said to each other.
All we said.
012
Check in to the hotel, take a hot shower, drink a little saké, go to bed, and in the morning any desire to do this job will have completely evaporated─that’s what I expected, but that’s not how it went. Apparently my engine was already revving, independent of my own will, or of Senjogahara’s or anyone else’s for that matter. Once it gets going, not even I can stop it.
That’s a lie.
I know I can stop anytime I choose, which allows me to tackle work with a certain level of motivation. Although I wanted to meet Toé Gaen’s legacy at some point during the job if I could, well, that might be impossible this time around.
Maybe not impossible, but best let it go.
I had to work behind the scenes, so I should avoid unnecessary interactions─and contacts. I’d wait patiently for the day when Suruga Kanbaru left the confines of that town.
It was January second.
Hence most stores wouldn’t be open─is an outdated notion. The shopping district where my hotel was located was in the middle of its New Year sale.
I wanted to take advantage of this to procure a number of items.
Honestly, mingling with the crowds of customers clamoring for a lucky-dip was a pain in the ass (I don’t mind crowds per se. I like places with lots of people, I just hate becoming part of the crowd myself), but reminding myself that it was all part of the job made it bearable. Swindling is no walk in the park; the crooked path to making money is longer than the straight and narrow one. The requisite qualities, in other words, are patience and endurance.
When you get right down to it, giving it my all just to hoodwink a single middle school girl was nuts, but I would think of it as an investment. I wasn’t sure what kind, or towards what, but I can stand just about anything if I think of it as an investment.
A little after ten I hung the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the knob of my hotel room door and sallied forth into town.
I always slick my hair back, but that day I didn’t. Not because it was a hassle, though, I had a reason not to.
While I shopped, I mulled things over.
Fundamentally, I prefer to work alone no matter what the job, but that doesn’t mean I don’t enlist the help of other people. You might say that’s the same thing, but it’s completely different. My preferred business model, in short, is to accept helping hands but never lend a hand.
Especially with a big (if you ignore the fact that, all told, I was conning a single middle school girl) job like this, I couldn’t help but think that it might be a good idea to enlist some help.
I had finished reaching out, the previous day, to a necessary minimum of people who served as sources and informants, but I wanted to rope in a local or two if possible. Having to keep my identity secret meant I couldn’t operate openly.
Enlisting their help is quite a modest way to put it for a swindler, because it’s more like using them─but I try to stay away from mock-evil manners of speech. I’m not some kind of slave driver, and I intended to pay them a generous stipend of around 10,000 yen each.
Locals…
Naturally, the first person that came to mind was Suruga Kanbaru, but I’d already decided to let that go this time around. In which case, who would be good?
I cast my mind over the likenesses I had drawn in my notebook the day before.
And I thought, What about the Fire Sisters? Koyomi Araragi’s little sisters, Karen and Tsukihi. I didn’t know what Tsukihi looked like, but…all the middle school girls in town wanted to be like them. When I was there laying the groundwork for my last con, I was on guard─yet somehow they slipped through the cordon.
As with Kanbaru, though for a different reason, I’d been thinking the day before that I absolutely needed to avoid encountering the pair (particularly Karen, the elder sister), but I quickly changed my tune.
Forming a plan didn’t mean that I had to follow it─I simply enjoy making them. Who knows, I might even head straight to Kanbaru’s house when I was done shopping.
My personality aside, the fact of the matter was that above and beyond my desire for a thrill, things were bound to proceed much more quickly if I enlisted their aid. They had been my enemies last time and I had only been fearful of them, but in taking on a middle school girl, nothing would be more heartening than getting the sisters on my side.
I decided to sleep on it.
If I could just make sure they wouldn’t tell Ararag
i, it might not be such a bad idea─but at this point it was no more than a pipe dream.
My preparations complete, I finally headed to the town─but not until I did something else first: change. Not just because I needed to keep warm. I had to disguise myself if I was going to set foot in that town, which is why I hadn’t slicked back my hair. In fact, my usual “funeral suit,” as Senjogahara called it, was close to a disguise.
Hawaiian-shirt me is not the real me, of course, but please don’t think that the black suit is actually a part of me or something─or rather do, because that notion could be turned to my advantage in certain cases.
