Bakemonogatari Part 2

by Nisioisin

  “No, we don’t have such rules.”

  It was just coincidence.

  Or rather, though Kanbaru wore hers short, it was probably because she was imitating Senjogahara that they had similar hairstyles. I wasn’t aware of any reason behind Senjogahara’s, but as for Hanekawa, well, as a symbol of seriousness? That had to be it more or less.

  “So it’s what you’re into, after all,” asserted Oshino. “Hmph. In that case, I’ll cut little Shinobu’s hair, too, for your next visit. She just lets it grow out, and it’s about time she had a haircut. In exchange, do you think you could bring a girl with a one-length haircut next time? I might be wasting my breath, but I’m putting the request out there.”

  “…I saw Shinobu on our way up. What’s she doing there?”

  “Oh, she’s sulking because I ate one more than I should of her snack-time Mister Donuts. She’s been like that since yesterday.”

  “……”

  What kind of a vampire was she?

  And what kind of a dude was he?

  “I tearfully handed over the Pon de Ring, so she’s one narrow-minded little girl. I think I need to teach her the phrase, ‘quality over quantity.’”

  “I don’t care… I couldn’t care any less. Also, Oshino, one correction. She’s not my classmate. Take a close look, her scarf isn’t the same color as Senjogahara’s or Hanekawa’s, right? She’s a year younger than me, and her name is Suruga Kanbaru. Kanbaru as in ‘god’ and ‘plains.’ And Suruga as in…umm.”

  Oops.

  I knew how to write it, but it was hard to explain…

  The barely literate Koyomi Araragi was showing his colors.

  “Suruga as in ‘Suruga-toi,’” Kanbaru chimed in helpfully.

  Thank goodness…but wait, what exactly was that?

  I’d never heard the term before. Was it toi in the sense of “question”? Like some famous quiz? A riddle like with the Sphinx?

  “Ah, ‘Suruga-toi.’ Of course, of course.” Oshino nodded in clear comprehension.

  Ugh, if he hadn’t known, I would’ve gotten an explanation without having to speak up… I clicked my tongue, but I hated having to wonder, so I asked Kanbaru, “What’s ‘Suruga-toi’?”

  “It’s a famous method of torture from the Edo period. They’d hogtie your hands and legs behind you, hang you from the ceiling, put a heavy rock on your back, and spin you around.”

  “Don’t use a torture method to explain your name!”

  “It’s something that I’d love to undergo sometime in my life.”

  “………!”

  So she was a sapphist, a BL fan, a sub, a bottom, a pedo, and a masochist?!

  How could all of that apply to any one person…

  The star of our school didn’t need to spread conflicting rumors about herself. She already had a personality disorder.

  I was at a loss for words.

  “Anyway, I’m Suruga Kanbaru.”

  The exchange seemed to have relaxed her, and finally letting go of my belt, Suruga came out of half-hiding─and in her usual proud, confident, and unhesitating way, stated her name, her right hand in front of her chest.

  “I’m Araragi’s junior. Nice to meet you.”

  “Nice to meet you, missy. I’m Mèmè Oshino.”

  While Suruga was smiling─

  Oshino was smirking.

  Written out, “smile” and “smirk” look similar, a difference of only two letters, but seeing their expressions up close, I received very dissimilar impressions that were pretty much diametrically opposed. It proved to a painful degree that looking happy wasn’t enough. Yes, Oshino’s was lighthearted too, but so much so that it felt unpleasant. The man was just sculpted to seem fake.

  “…Hmph. If you’re his junior, that makes you missy tsundere’s junior as well.”

  As he said this, Oshino’s eyes were unfocused and distant as if he were looking at Kanbaru’s back─and me and Senjogahara both being third-years and Kanbaru therefore being Senjogahara’s junior as well didn’t seem to be his entire point.

  But maybe I was reading too much into it.

  “Oshino─anyway, I should start by giving this to you. It’s from the very same missy tsundere, Senjogahara.”

  “Hm? An envelope? Oh, money. Money, money. Perfect, I was just starting to feel squeezed. This should last me until the rainy season. Once it starts, I won’t die of thirst, but I thought I’d be keeping a stiff upper lip in the meantime.”

  “What a thing to say to sensitive adolescents.”

  It was amid such dire straits that they’d fought over their Mister Donuts… No wonder Shinobu was sulking. Vampire or not, she did come from a noble bloodline. Cohabitating in these ruins with a filthy older guy was like plunging to the lowest depths… Since I was partly to blame, I didn’t know what to think…

  Oshino checked the contents of the envelope.

  “Yep, exactly a hundred thousand yen. This clears out any balance between me and missy tsundere. You know, she’s made a good impression on me, giving this to you instead of coming to hand it to me herself. She seems versed in the way of the world.”

  “Huh? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? It feels like giving it to you in person would be a show of good faith, or good grace─”

  “It’s all the same whether you make gestures like that or not. But I don’t intend on having that argument with you, Araragi, it’d be a pointless one at best. So─what’s up with this missy?” Oshino asked casually, jabbing his chin in Kanbaru’s direction as he crammed the envelope (those fresh bills, all for naught) into the pocket of his Hawaiian shirt. “I’m sure you didn’t bring her here just so you could introduce a cute junior to me. Or did you actually do it just to show her off? If that’s the case, I underestimated the kind of man you are, Araragi… Ha hah, but that couldn’t possibly be it. Which means─hm, could it be that bandage? Ah…”

  “Mister Oshino. I’m─” Kanbaru began to say something.

  He slowly waved his hand as if to cut her off. “Let’s start from the beginning. It doesn’t seem like a very happy story. Stories about arms never are, in my experience. Especially if it’s your left hand.”

  007

  Mixed among the crushed soda cans, candy wrappers, and empty instant noodle cups I found while cleaning up Suruga Kanbaru’s room was a single item that gave me pause, a long and thin paulownia box. I could feel its age from the color of the thing, and though it was covered in scratches, probably due to how carelessly Kanbaru treated it, the box seemed thick and sturdy. I assumed that it held some sort of curio─maybe a vase. Its presence, or that it might contain some such object, didn’t seem odd given how impressive the Japanese home I stood in was.

  But.

  The box was empty.

  That of course wasn’t enough for me to classify it as trash, so I placed it on top of some cardboard boxes for the time being, but around when we got down to business, Kanbaru made a show of reaching out, grabbing the box, and placing it between the two of us. Then she asked me what I thought had been inside the box. A vase or something, I replied candidly.

  “So even you can be wrong sometimes… This might be rude of me, but I’m relieved. Saved. I feel like you’ve given me a glimpse of your humanity.”

  “…And what was inside it?”

  “A mummy,” she replied straightaway. “A mummified left hand─was in it.”

  “………”

  A mummified left hand, inside a paulownia box.

  According to Kanbaru, she used it for the first time─in elementary school. Her mother had given it to her eight years ago when Kanbaru was still in third grade.

  It was apparently the last time she ever saw her mother.

  A few days after Kanbaru was given the box, both of her parents died in a traffic accident─the timing was so perfect it was as if her mother had known what was going to happen. Kanbaru said it happened while she was in math class at her elementary school. They’d died instantly in a multiple car pil
e-up on some far-off highway. Their car caught fire, and the remains were left in an awful state.

  Kanbaru was taken in by her grandparents on her father’s side.

  Taken in─to the Japanese home where we sat.

  She said she’d lived with her parents in an apartment until then, just the three of them─because her mother and father had eloped. Their wedding had brought them no blessings or congratulations. Her father came from a traditional and storied family, while her mother’s world was far removed from any of that…or so Kanbaru told me. I had to wonder if those kinds of things still happened in this day and age, but she said they do all the time.

  “My mom suffered because of that. My dad─rebelled against such customs, but it was no use. His family pretty much cut ties with him. In fact, I hadn’t met my grandparents until the day of my parents’ funeral. I didn’t even know their names─and they didn’t know mine, either. That was the first thing they asked me, what my name was.”

  “Huh…”

  Flooded on top and in blazes on the bottom.

  You don’t need to worry about them, at all.

  Those kinds of things─happened.

  But despite whatever strife had intervened with her mother, Kanbaru was their son’s only daughter─their grandchild. Taking her in was the natural thing to do, and so Kanbaru left the town where she’d lived her entire life, of course transferring schools in the process.

  She wasn’t able to fit in.

  “The way I spoke was different. I might talk like this now, but when I was still with my parents, we were all the way out on the tip of Kyushu, probably to get as far away as possible from this home. They talk in a thick accent there, and well…I wouldn’t call it bullying, but I was made fun of, and I didn’t have any friends.”

  “Um…so it wasn’t the same elementary school as Senjogahara’s?”

  “Right. I met her in middle school.”

  “Okay.”

  It made sense, address-wise.

  She probably wasn’t with Hanekawa back then, either.

  “When I think back to it, I was throwing everything off balance in my new environment, and I wasn’t completely blameless. It’s obvious to me now, but my parents’ death had hit me hard, and I’d closed off my heart. You can’t expect people to treat you kindly when you’ve closed off your heart. But, and I can only say this because so much time has passed─back then, I was still deeply mired in my parents’ death. Not that I was able to sit back and reminisce about them. I couldn’t even drown myself in my memories of them. That was because my grandfather and grandmother threw away every last one of my father and mother’s possessions. It was like they wanted to raise me as someone who had nothing to do with my parents.”

  But just so you know, Kanbaru said.

  “My grandmother and grandfather are both people of character─I do respect them, and I’m truly grateful that they’ve looked after me all this time. It’s just that their relationship with my parents is beyond me.”

  It made sense.

  Too much time had elapsed for it to be mere past strife.

  And that was why the only mementos she had left of her parents were whatever memories she retained, along with, yes, that paulownia box her mother had given her.

  It may have been sealed tight.

  But she hadn’t been told not to open it.

  So she did.

  The mummified left hand.

  But back in those days─the mummified hand only went down to its wrist. There was also a letter from her mother inside the box. Well, it wasn’t so much a letter, given what was written on it─but a simple user’s manual for the left hand.

  It stated that it was a tool for making wishes come true.

  It would make any wish come true.

  It would make three and only three wishes come true.

  It was such an item.

  She’d gone up a school year to become a fourth grader and was either nine or ten years old─whichever she was, whether you believed that kind of fantastic story was a tossup at that age. Just barely yes, or just barely no, one or the other. It’s probably an age group where the split between kids who believe in Santa Claus or not is about fifty-fifty. Or maybe that’s just an illusion that people of my generation and above hold… At least, I don’t think I believed in Santa Claus when I was in fourth grade, but maybe some of the special gadgets in cartoons were credible to me.

  Kanbaru─was straddling that line.

  In other words, she half-believed and half-doubted it would work, and just as she might try a charm printed in a girls’ magazine, with a casual attitude really, she made a wish upon the mummified hand.

  It didn’t matter what the first one was.

  It was like one of those charms.

  She was just trying it out.

  “Though I did know what my second wish would be if the first one worked,” Kanbaru said.

  Of course she did.

  I knew already─it had to be a wish about her parents, right?

  Something about their being alive.

  I want to be able to run faster.

  Such was the wish the fourth grader Suruga Kanbaru made─to the mummified thing. She was apparently a notoriously slow runner back then…and that, just as much as her accent, contributed to her being teased. From a high schooler’s perspective, it seemed as ridiculous of a reason to make fun of someone as an accent, but being a slow runner is, in any case, a serious cause of distress for a grade school kid. It just so happened that field day was coming up soon at her school─and she’d made the wish thinking that everyone would look at her in a new way if she could just win the foot race.

  “I was fatally unathletic at the time. I’m not talking about having slow reflexes or slow anything, but actually tripping over myself just walking around.”

  “Huh… But now.”

  Our basketball ace.

  A star.

  “…Wait, so does that mean─”

  “If only it did,” Kanbaru said. But instead. “I had a dream that night. A dream of children being attacked─by a monster wearing a raincoat. A nightmare─where they were tucked into bed and the monster’s left hand attacked them mercilessly.”

  “……”

  “I’m sure someone with your intuition has already figured out how this story ends. When I woke up the next day and went to school─four students were absent. And all four of them were supposed to run in the same race as me at field day.”

  The Monkey’s Paw.

  The Monkey’s Paw grants its owner’s wishes, the story goes.

  But not in the way its owner intends, the story goes─

  “I was terrified. I went to the library in a panic to find out what the mummified thing really was─and I came across Jacobs’ ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ in no time. My shoulders trembled with fear… If I’d made my second wish first, what would have happened, I wondered. As it was, those classmates of mine could easily have died… Fortunately, it wasn’t that serious, but it could have turned out that way.”

  Kanbaru returned the thing to its box, sealed it even tighter than before, and stuffed it in the depths of her closet. There would be no second or third wish, of course not─she wanted to pretend none of it ever happened. She wanted to forget it all.

  But.

  She couldn’t.

  No matter how much she tried to forget about it, she found that she couldn’t. Because there was still time until field day─and during practice the next day, they decided to place Kanbaru in another group.

  There were five others this time.

  She would be racing against─five other people.

  “What do you think I did?”

  “……”

  “What do you think I should have done?”

  Whatever I thought, if she sat and did nothing─well, the consequences were as clear as day. The same thing would happen…and repeat itself over and over again. Normally, the only way out of the situation would be to make another wish upon the paw─
to ask it to cancel the first wish. But Kanbaru was afraid to. Now that she’d learned about the paw, she was afraid. It granted wishes, but not in the way its owner intended─and she had no idea how the revocation might come true.

  Which is why Kanbaru ran.

  She ran, and ran, and ran.

  She was slow─