by Nisioisin
Clad in a brightly colored suit I had bought in the shopping district, I put on a necktie, like a normal office worker so to speak, and then, finally, got on the train and headed to that town.
A peaceful town, said to be under the sway of a serpent god at the moment.
013
Although I had told Senjogahara to expect it to take at least a month, I really prefer not to drag my feet.
Patience is important, of course, but I like to deal promptly with anything that can be dealt with promptly. I prize alacrity. So I decided to go straight to the heart of the matter.
And where was the heart of this particular matter?
On the one hand, there was Kita-Shirahebi Shrine─marching in there right off the bat, however, wouldn’t just be reckless, it would be moronic. It wouldn’t be fearless, just scary.
The matter had another heart, so I would go there first. It’s odd to be speaking of multiple hearts, but never mind that, the other one in question was Nadeko Sengoku’s home.
The logic being that if I could begin by getting a handle on the personality of the mark, the rest would fall into place─thus I left the station and made a beeline for the Sengoku place.
By which I mean I started walking in what I assumed to be its general direction, since I didn’t have the address, and called Senjogahara.
“What is it? Any new developments?”
“I’ve completed my preparations and am now commencing operations… Sounds pretty loud where you are. Where’re you spending the holiday, anyway?”
I should’ve just butted out. The work was mine to do, and I didn’t want her butting in, so it didn’t matter where she was or what she was doing.
“Araragi’s house,” she answered. When she really didn’t have to. “They invited us, you see. My dad’s here too, like our families are getting to know each other…”
“Isn’t that cute.”
“Go easy on me. I’m quite aware how ridiculous it is for us to be carrying on like nothing’s wrong,” Senjogahara pleaded, in a sinking voice that was very unusual for her.
Well, that did explain the noise and her whispering. In that case, she could have just not taken the call, but with her and her sweetheart’s lives on the line, I guess she had no choice.
The thing is, while I found them ridiculous, I didn’t think they were wrong to be carrying on like that. Just because you’re dying in seventy-four, no, seventy-three days, whatever, in the near future, you can’t simply neglect your interpersonal obligations.
As long as you’re trying to save yourselves, anyway.
“I need Nadeko Sengoku’s address. By which I mean her legal place of residence, where she was living when she was human. I could find it out myself, but I want to know now,” I cut to the chase, not giving a damn about their complex feelings or delicate situations. “Email it to me, will you?”
“I know Miss Sengoku’s…Nadeko Sengoku’s address, sure, but…”
That “Miss” didn’t escape me─I had no idea what that slip of the tongue might mean, but I filed it away in my mind. I wasn’t sure if it would prove to be useful info, but I didn’t need to know yet.
“I don’t have your email,” Senjogahara stated.
“I’m telling you now. Do you have something to write with?”
“No, but I’ll remember it.”
Smart little girl.
It pissed me off, so I gave the address quickly and indistinctly. I don’t know what I’d have done if she’d gotten it wrong, but she repeated it back to me without any hassle.
She really is smart, I thought, genuinely impressed this time.
When such a smart girl ends up in a bad predicament, nothing to say but life ain’t fair─or wait. Maybe it just balances the equation when someone who’s talented faces hardship.
People who aren’t talented basically facing hardship too pokes a hole in that theory, but I’m just going to let that one go.
It was just a thought, after all, and I don’t have a comeback if you start splitting hairs.
“Okay, I’ll email her address right away… But what are you gonna do once you have it?”
“Send her a holiday card.”
Making jokes in serious circumstances isn’t just bluster, it’s a kind of conversation skill, but this one actually landed.
I could tell that Senjogahara had crouched down on the other end of the line─probably she couldn’t laugh out loud because her family or her sweetheart were on the other side of the door.
The stone-faced girl of two years ago.
She’d become someone who laughed easily─though in the end I was to blame for exacerbating the stone-faced attitude that had been brought on by her mysterious ailment.
“I’m kidding, of course,” I clarified unnecessarily, which Senjogahara also seemed to find funny. She couldn’t get a hold of herself, so there was nothing to do but forge ahead. “I’m going to find out more about Nadeko Sengoku. I assume that, having given up her humanity and become a god, she’s currently being treated as a missing person, a runaway. So I’m going to get the story from her parents, then get permission to search her room. Maybe I’ll find something.”
“W-Wait a sec,” Senjogahara tried to stop me though she still couldn’t stop laughing. “Um… Kaiki. Naturally I’ll leave your methods up to you, but don’t get too rough─”
“I don’t get rough. You should know me better than that. If you’re going to leave my methods up to me, then leave them up to me. And don’t forget, Senjogahara. Don’t ever forget that your life was so shamefully dear to you that you turned to your most bitter enemy rather than lose it.”
Sure, if it had only been a question of her own life, I doubt she would have come to me. But I enjoy saying stuff like that when I know the truth damn well. And the moment I enjoy it, I lose sight of what was so enjoyable about it.
“I know. I haven’t forgotten. But let me ask you anyway… Please don’t do anything too rough.”
“I just told you I wouldn’t.”
Suddenly fed up, I jabbed the off button. I like phones because you can do that. Well, it wasn’t just because I was fed up; if I kept Senjogahara away for too long, Araragi or one of his family members might notice.
And as I discovered later, both of his parents are cops… I really dodged a bullet there.
And then there was Senjogahara’s dad.
Running into him was absolutely out of the question─even more out of the question than running into Koyomi Araragi.
Senjogahara’s email arrived as I was cautioning myself. Man, high school girls have thumbs like lightning. She probably deleted it, too, before it even arrived in my inbox.
The subject line read, “Don’t do anything rough.” Persistent. Really persistent. She was making me sick. Now that she’d made me sick, I felt like honoring her request.
Frankly, I’d been planning to get a little rough at the Sengoku place, but I didn’t want to anymore. Nicely done, Senjogahara.
I checked the address (Even allowing for the speed of her typing, the email arrived too soon for her to have looked it up, so she must’ve had it memorized. That gave me some insight not only into her prodigious memory, but also into how earnestly she had fought by her sweetheart’s side these past few months. Not that I cared) and quickened my pace.
It occurred to me that I needed to add the house’s location to my notebook when I got back to the hotel─at which point I realized that I didn’t even know what Nadeko Sengoku looked like.
No need to panic, I could ask Senjogahara to send me a picture message at a later date─tonight, even. She probably had a pic of Nadeko Sengoku. Or I could just ask to borrow one from her parents when I got to their house.
The streets were oddly empty, which made me uneasy until I remembered that it was still the New Year’s holiday. How quickly we forget. What the hell was I doing during the holidays, anyway? My job─or maybe I was just trying to convince myself of that.
014
N
adeko Sengoku’s parents were very average adults. What I mean by “very average adults” is that they were those law-abiding citizens I’m always going on about, no more, no less.
In other words, I felt neither positive nor negative about them─like with almost everyone I meet.
They were people, that’s all.
Yet these average adults and law-abiding citizens weren’t celebrating New Year’s. Which was only natural since their daughter, while not dead, was missing, and had been for months. They were basically in mourning.
My joke about sending a greeting card was not only unfunny (even if Senjogahara had laughed) but also inappropriate.
But as someone who, hearing that word, only starts thinking about “appropriating” and what the prefix “in” would mean in that case, I’ll send anyone a greeting card anytime I damn well please.
The atmosphere was so gloomy that my usual funeral suit (not my term) would have fit right in.
Anyway, I marched straight into the house of mourning. That makes it sound like I took the sort of “rough” approach Senjogahara worried I might, but in fact I was quite gentle.
It was by pressing the button on the intercom and announcing myself as the father of one of their daughter’s (i.e. Nadeko Sengoku’s) classmates, which is to say by lying, that I gained entry to the home.
“Maybe she just ran away, of course, but my daughter has been missing for three days now as well. I’m pretty sure she said something about your daughter right before she disappeared. It’s been tormenting me, so here I am, thoughtlessly barging in. Do you think you might be willing to talk to me about your daughter?”
And so on.
I’m one hell of a performer─or rather, any wariness her parents might have maintained towards their unknown visitor melted away the second I uttered their daughter’s name, so even if I’d been a performer and liar unfit for anything above the level of an elementary school talent show, the outcome might have been the same.
If I may digress for a moment, nothing is more of an imposition, nor more painful, for people caught up in a situation like that than the busybody who comes bearing misinformation, or disinformation.
I understand that sentiment. I do, but that’s as far as it goes.
So, as I sat in the living room listening to their story, I thought to myself, You two are “very average adults”─not to mention, “very average parents.”
I’m not disparaging them, to be clear.
That was just my impression.
I meet a lot of people in my line of work. Among them have been a great many parents whose daughters have gone missing, whose daughters have died, whose daughters’ whereabouts are known but who haven’t been heard from in ages, and as far as I could tell the couple seemed, well, pretty normal.
I suppose that was to be expected.
No point in holding out for anything else.
Because while they might have been worried that she’d been in some accident, or even that she was dead, there was no way they suspected that their daughter had become a god.
It was inexcusable to let them tell their story without telling mine, so I began by describing how adorable, how sweet, and how close with Nadeko Sengoku my daughter had been.
As I said before, my visit was a serious imposition, but such blathering really hit home with Nadeko Sengoku’s parents.
The things I never knew about my own girl, sobbed the mother. I might have been moved to tears by her weeping, if only my story were true.
I’d started talking off the cuff with no preparation or background info, and who knows, maybe I had uttered some truths, inadvertently. Given the possibility, I didn’t feel guilty.
Not that I would have felt guilty without the possibility.
The fact that they believed my cock-and-bull story made it clear that, like so many other parents, the very average Sengokus didn’t know a thing, not one damn thing, about their daughter.
While I seem to recall them talking about how she was shy, quiet, but prone to laughter, I had no interest in such parental cooing. What I wanted to hear about was her dark side, but they didn’t seem to know, or want to know, about any of that.
Her father told me that she’d never had a rebellious phase and always listened to her parents, but a daughter who didn’t go through any against her male parent? It should have set off every alarm bell in his brain. I almost stood up and demanded to know how he could have been so deaf.
Even Senjogahara, with her severe daddy issues, went through a distant phase with her father when she was in middle school.
Well, well, well.
But it was over and done with now, so no use crying over spilt milk. While I may have stumbled across the Sengoku family’s educational philosophy or whatever, it wouldn’t have any bearing at all on my life thereafter, so without commenting on it, I simply said, “Oh really? Yes, our little girl was the same.” I was just going with the flow of the conversation, and few can match Deishu Kaiki when it comes to that.
My cover story made it difficult to ask for a photo of their daughter, so I gave up on that idea, deciding to have Senjogahara send me one later on as I had originally envisioned. Instead I asked, “Would it be all right for me to see your daughter’s bedroom?”
I didn’t come right out with it like that, of course. I started with a little I think my daughter may have lent something or other to Miss Nadeko, and I think it might provide some clue to finding the two of them, does anything come to mind? It was only after dancing around the issue for a half-hour or so that I arrived at the goal. Naturally I didn’t neglect an initial I know this is terribly impolite, but. I don’t think Mr. and Mrs. Sengoku thought I was being impolite in the slightest, however.
Nadeko Sengoku’s parents showed me to her (second-floor) room, which was what you might call tidy. Yet it was a little too clean, artificially so, to call it ordered. Her parents must have continued to clean the room after its occupant went missing. When I noticed this, I asked them, and indeed they were preserving it in the state it had been in before their daughter disappeared.
Well, Nadeko Sengoku wasn’t dead (as far as they were concerned) but only missing, so as parents it was the right thing to do. It wasn’t like they were counting the years of a child who’d passed away.
Kid-friendly manga lined up on the bookshelf, cute stuffed animals─the overall impression was very much that of a middle school girl’s room.
But to me it somehow seemed affected.
Affected, if this is how it looked with her parents cleaning it─honestly, I might even say creepy.
It was as if a cute, childlike sensibility was being forced on the room willy-nilly, which, combined with her father’s remark that Nadeko Sengoku had never had a rebellious phase, gave me plenty to think about.
I couldn’t very well snort that it didn’t matter.
This─did matter.
It might be the key.
The darkness, in Nadeko Sengoku’s heart.
With that in mind, I began scouring her room─it was still bright outside, but the interior was dim because the curtains were drawn. The first thing I did upon entering, therefore, was open them.
Of course, Mr. and Mrs. Sengoku hadn’t gone back down to the living room after showing me to their daughter’s room, so I had to conduct my search under their watchful gaze and couldn’t ransack the place.
I was sweeping a square room in circles, so to speak, or just scratching the surface─and then, on the lowest shelf of the bookshelf, I happened on the spine of something that appeared to be a photo album. A photo album. Excellent, what a windfall. After securing her parents’ permission, I opened it.
The pages were filled with portraits of Nadeko Sengoku. So this is Nadeko Sengoku, eh? A face to put to the name. At long last, my mark had a face.
My first impression of her─though these were only photos─matched my impression of the room.
Childlike, cute, creepy.
Somehow artificial. Like she’d be
en compelled to be pretty─with something awkward about her smile. As if she were only smiling because a camera lens was pointed at her, and she had no choice.
It was more abject than shy.
She had her bangs down, to avoid meeting anyone’s gaze─or worse, like she was cowering.
What was she so afraid of?
What?
Taking them with me was definitely off the table, so I burned the image into my brain as best I could, to be analyzed in due course.
“She’s alone in all these pictures, isn’t she? I guess she didn’t take any with my daughter,” I observed, casually so it wouldn’t sound like an excuse, before returning the album to the shelf. I was just filling the time in a sense with those words, but after I spoke them I realized that I hadn’t come across a single photo of the whole family.
