by Nisioisin
“Uh… Y-Yeah, it is…”
“I see,” I said, wondering what to do with it. My honest feeling was that it would fetch a hefty price, and I didn’t think Sengoku or Araragi could blame me if I just pocketed it…
But the thing had come from Gaen-senpai.
Better to let sleeping gods lie.
Or─a snake in the grass is worth leaving in the goddamn bush.
“Here,” I pushed the talisman on Araragi, acting for all the world like I was doing him a favor. Then I wiped my slimy hand on his shirt. “This time, don’t mistake who to use it on.”
“I’m not gonna,” Araragi declared. “I’m not using this thing.”
The same determination that started the whole mess─this guy never learned his lesson, not like it was for me to say.
Shrugging my shoulders, I walked past him, striding brazenly down the center of the path.
When I was about to pass under the torii.
“H-Hey, wait a sec, Kaiki! Where do think you’re going!”
“Nowhere, to do nothing… I’m not even supposed to be in this town. If she finds out I was here, Senjogahara will kill me.”
It wasn’t that I wanted to cover for her.
I was just using her as a clever excuse to make my exit.
“I’ve done my job. And made good money.” I walked off without looking back. “Get that kid home safe, Araragi.”
I made it sound cool, but basically I was just sticking him with the extremely dicey job of accompanying a missing girl on her return home.
Well, I couldn’t deny a prominent role to a guy who’d showed up conveniently at the eleventh hour.
“But be sure the girl never finds out it was you who brought her home.”
“Wha…”
“If she thinks you’re the one who saved her, you’ll be right back where you started. After all my hard work exorcising the spirit that possessed her…”
Though that was just happenstance.
“The Slug Tofu will leave of its own accord after three days, no lingering issues. If it absolutely won’t leave, throw some salt on her. And then never interact with that girl again for the rest of your life. Got it? Become nothing but a memory to her.”
“You really think I could be that irresponsible? It’s my fault that this happened to Sengoku, so it’s my responsibility to─”
“Do you really not get it?”
Ridiculous.
Why was I stuck doing all this preachy crap─I’m even less suited to it than Gaen-senpai or Oshino.
But it had to be said.
I had to say it.
“You cannot do a damn thing for that girl. With you around, that girl is just going to go to shit. Sometimes love makes people stronger, and sometimes it makes them go to shit─thanks to you, Senjogahara has gotten a little stronger. But with you around, Nadeko Sengoku will just go to shit.”
“…”
I wonder what Araragi’s expression was at that moment.
How did it feel, getting an earful from a guy like me? I imagined that, yeah, he might kill himself over it. Although I’d managed to conceal the fact that Senjogahara had instigated the whole thing, there was no hiding anymore that I’d rectified Araragi’s blunder. He probably even felt embarrassed.
Well, when was youth ever not embarrassing?
But I’d give him a little follow-up, on the house.
“Senjogahara went to shit because of me. And you made her stronger. This time around I happened to be the right man for the job, or maybe I was paying back that debt.”
“Kaiki─”
But Araragi didn’t finish his sentence. That was the extent of his protest.
I doubt he was convinced, but he had the good sense to leave well enough alone.
Then, as if in place, he asked, “You think that if I’m not around, Sengoku can be happy?”
“I wonder. She seemed happy until just now, but…being happy isn’t the point of life. Even if you can’t be happy, you can, say, become what you aspire to be,” I answered off-hand. “But either way,” I continued off-hand, “life’s got its bright spots, don’cha think?”
“…”
“See you around.”
The more I said that we’d never meet again or that I’d never set foot in this town again, the more I seemed to get drawn back here. I decided to be contrary and tried that instead, then passed under the torii and down the steps.
My entire body was groaning with pain, but of course I didn’t let on.
039
I don’t know anything about any epilogue to this story, nor do I have a clue how things shook out. Why should I? Nothing to do with me.
I left Sengoku and Araragi behind and descended the mountain, then called Senjogahara. I told her straight out (with a few embellishments) that the job had gone off without a hitch, but that Araragi had found out about it.
The first part aside, she was pissed about the second part. It wasn’t a charming kind of pissed like “blowing her top,” she was so agitated that she went into hysterics.
I felt bad, but refreshed at the same time, like it served her right, so it was really very emotionally complicated for me.
But then again, this was the last time I would hear her voice, a parting auditory glimpse, so perhaps I felt more refreshed than anything.
“Well, I did the minimum to cover it up, now the rest is up to you. Old soldiers simply fade away, and the children inherit the Earth.”
“You screwed up royally, so spare me the meaningless posturing…”
I don’t know if there’s such a thing as hysteria fatigue, but having thoroughly exhausted herself through her wild ravings, “Thank you. You saved us,” Senjogahara finally said for the record. She’d become a lot less difficult even just over the last month. “So I guess this is it.”
“Guess so. Now we’re done with each other. The end.”
“Bye-bye.”
“Okay then.”
Neither of us spoke with any real feeling. There wasn’t even the awkwardness you feel when you pass an old acquaintance on the street. There was absolutely nothing between us.
Well, I say “us,” but maybe it wasn’t as true for Senjogahara as it was for me, because she wasn’t done.
“Hey, Kaiki. Can I ask you one thing?”
Well, well, no good at goodbyes. Still a child after all.
“No.”
“Back then, two years ago, do you really think I was in love with you?”
“…”
How the fuck should I know? I thought, and considered hanging up, but as always, my mouth had other ideas.
“I did, yeah.”
“I see,” came her rejoinder, “someone got duped. By me.”
“Right… What of it?”
“Nothing… That’s it. Just watch out for wicked women from now on.”
“I will. And you─don’t forget to sign your letters.”
I hung up, feeling like I’d gotten the last laugh. I was shocked at my own pettiness.
There was nothing to it. Figuring out that Hitagi Senjogahara was the one who’d put the letter in my hotel room was nothing to write home about─it would have been one thing if I’d realized immediately, but it had taken ages.
When I summoned her to the shopping district, it gave her an idea where I was staying. All that was left was for her to call and tell the concierge in an adorable, childish voice, “I have something for a guest of yours, a Mister Kaiki,” like it was the most natural thing in the world─there were any number of hotels in the area, including the one where Hanekawa was staying, and no harm done if I wasn’t there. I would never find out, at any rate.
And the show she put on of deducing how the letter had been slipped into the room must have been intended to eliminate her from the list of possible suspects.
No wonder she was pissed when I told her I’d torn up the letter; she’d written it.
So why did she give me the contradictory order to “withdraw,” when she
had commissioned me for the job?
Because she knew me all too well.
Hitagi Senjogahara knew perfectly well that if someone told me to withdraw, I’d become more stubborn about finishing the job─in fact, if Ononoki had taken the opposite approach, if Gaen-senpai’s warning had been “not to withdraw,” I might have then and there.
Which is why Senjogahara contacted me to do something, and the opposite as well.
A stupid, childish ploy.
Not that I hadn’t gone along for the ride even as I’d known.
I turned off my cell phone, then immediately smashed it─okay, the phone itself was pretty pricey, so it was just the SIM card that I smashed.
And thus the cord tying me to Senjogahara was cut. She could probably find out my new number if she tried, of course, she’d done it before, but from here on out there’d be no reason for her to contact me. None at all.
I deleted Senjogahara’s number, and only hers, from the empty cell phone, then headed to the station. I had to retrieve the suitcase I’d left in a coin locker there.
That was evidence─not quite Sengoku’s closet, but it had to be properly disposed of.
“Be that as it may…”
As I trudged along the snowy February street, I wondered─forget Senjogahara, how much of this was actually premeditated by Gaen-senpai?
Because Senjogahara wasn’t the only one who knew me well enough to know that if I were told to withdraw, I would do the opposite. Was the three million yen actually just an attempt to fund my endeavor?
Had I been dancing to Gaen-senpai’s tune all along? Well, nothing to be gained by pondering such things. Dancing to her tune was a small price to pay to be free of my ties to her.
But had she really disowned me?
She might appear before me the very next day, as if nothing had happened… But I’d cross that bridge when I came to it. If she brought an offer of money to be made, I wouldn’t refuse to play my old role as her junior.
Nevertheless, I thought.
Gaen-senpai’s unsentimental and practical attitude was one thing─and Kagenui’s lack of involvement was only to be expected, but where the hell was Oshino in all this?
He was every inch the vagabond.
A rootless vagabond like me, though even more dissolute, which made getting a grasp on his whereabouts harder than grasping a cloud─and yet.
That chump who loved to look cool in front of kids─did he really skip out when so many of his former charges had their backs against the wall? Did he really leave them hanging like that?
With Araragi and Senjogahara and the former Kissshot and Hanekawa and─a bunch of other people in such dire straits, wouldn’t he come riding in on his white horse, like never before?
I’d gotten dragged into the mess because he hadn’t shown up─but by all rights, saving Sengoku, saving Araragi and the others, should have been Mèmè Oshino’s job, not mine.
Where was he now, and what the hell was he doing?
It bugged me.
Well, it didn’t, but looking into it might prove profitable─maybe I should search for my fellow vagabond. It had been a long time since we’d had a drink together, and it was an appealing prospect.
Just as I came to that decision, I saw stars.
I toppled forward onto the snowy road, clueless as to why. I was quivering like jelly. Did my body finally reach its physical limit after being crushed by the snakes? But the snow before my eyes was dyed crimson, and I gathered that I’d been struck hard on the back of the head.
I could hear ragged breathing coming from behind me. “Huff, huff, huff, huff─”
Forcing myself to turn my bloodstained head, I beheld a lone middle-school-age kid standing there holding an iron pipe. The pipe was also stained with blood, so apparently that’s what I’d been struck with. It was a terribly long pipe, and the centrifugal force must have been something.
“M-Miss Ogi was right. You really came back, you con man…” muttered the middle schooler, staring at me with eyes devoid of even a glimmer of sanity. “Th-Thanks to you, thanks to you, thanks to you─”
“…”
At first I didn’t recognize the kid, but as I gazed at that face and those bloodshot eyes, it came to me. I couldn’t recall a name, but… Right, it was one of the many middle schoolers I’d hoodwinked last time I was in town. One of the faces I’d drawn in my notebook on the plane ride from Okinawa.
And behind the kid there loomed a snake.
Not strictly behind, more like─around. A giant snake, coiled around, enwrapping, the kid’s body.
It wasn’t some vague phantom, but clearly visible.
What the hell?
Did the kid get counter-cursed or something?
Was this kid─the one who’d started everything by putting that “charm” on Sengoku?
And by the way… After solving the mystery of the letter, I’d lumped it in as Senjogahara’s doing─but the identity of my “tail” was, strictly speaking, still unknown.
If it wasn’t Senjogahara, then I assumed it was Gaen-senpai’s watchdog… Yet if everything was proceeding according to plan for her, why would she put me under surveillance?
So had this kid been the one tailing me?
No, I turned it over in my blood-soaked head and judged that it must’ve been someone else. This kid didn’t possess the requisite “sanity” to tail someone─
Wait, had I heard a name a second ago?
Ogi?
Who─is that?
The name rang a bell, like I’d heard it somewhere before, but that was as far as I got.
“Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”
The crazed middle schooler shrieked with rage and brandished the iron pipe at my prone figure. And with the next hatred-, spite-, and curse-filled blow, I slipped away into unconsciousness.
They say that even in hell, money talks. As someone with no savings to speak of, I thanked my lucky stars that I’d picked up some change there before the end.
Afterword
I think this marks something like my fiftieth novel, and it strikes me that the number of “liars” appearing in those books is proportionally very high. The real question is, how many “honest people” have I actually written about? I imagine this imbalance reflects the author’s firm, utterly unshakable worldview that “all tales are lies!” And if the package is a “lie,” won’t everyone inside it inevitably be a “liar” as well? But that begs the question of the world outside the tale, the reality we all inhabit. It’s not exactly overflowing with “veracity,” is it? Even if people don’t mean to “lie,” aren’t aware of “lying,” they still “lie” “unwillingly” all too often. And conversely, sometimes people refuse to accept the “truth” as “true,” interpreting it instead as a “lie” and ending up believing in its “falsehood”… Even though someone relates something “true,” the listener takes it as “false” and so the “truth” spreads as a “lie,” coming to exist as such. In that case, doesn’t the “truth” become directly equivalent to a “lie,” without any need to turn it inside out or upside down? Here I am spilling all this ink, but actually, maybe it’s just that the author is a liar so all his characters are too, end of story. Then again, would a book featuring just honest people even be interesting?
And so this has been a book featuring just liars. During the writing process, I myself got thoroughly mixed up about what was true and what was false, what was honest and what was not. In any event, this is the final volume of the Monogatari Series Second Season. We had narrators switching places, innovatively for me, and as an author I was filled with trepidation when different viewpoints cast the same people and events in an entirely different light: Hey, buddy, this is totally different from what you wrote before! It’s surprises like these that keep me writing novels. At any rate, this book completes the publication of every installment of the Monogatari Se
ries announced thus far. The schedule was insane, but I was able to pull it off thanks to assistance from many quarters. I’ll never make such incautious promises in the future again, beware. Oops, I swear. There we go, a novel written one hundred percent in bad taste, this was KOIMONOGATARI “Chapter Romance: Hitagi End.”
Senjogahara once again graces the cover of this book, which as it turns out marks a triumphant return five years in the making. Crazy, right? VOFAN has been kind enough to depict Senjogahara amid the snow for us.* I’ve caused all kinds of trouble schedule-wise for the editors at Kodansha BOX, but this is the last time, so please find it in your hearts to forgive me. And I want to offer my deepest gratitude to all the readers who have accompanied me on the fly-by-night journey through this Second Season.
