Bakemonogatari Part 1

by Nisioisin

  It suddenly felt like I had accomplished something truly great.

  ………

  But she had to know what she was doing.

  “Anything, really,” she assured. “Any one wish you have, I’ll grant. Whether that’s world domination, eternal life, or to defeat the Saiyans on their way to this Earth.”

  “Are you telling me that you’re more powerful than Shenlong?!”

  “Of course I am.”

  She said yes?!

  “But don’t lump me in with a traitor who becomes your enemy in the end after being useless when it matters the most… Really, though, I’d prefer to be asked to grant wishes that are more personal. Those are easier, after all.”

  “I’d imagine so…”

  “But it looks like you’re having trouble coming up with something after being put on the spot like this, Araragi? In that case, we could always go with, well, you know. The standard wish in this kind of situation. Where for your one wish you ask for a hundred wishes or something.”

  “…Huh? Wait, is that allowed here?”

  That was one of the most standard taboos in this kind of situation. I’d have to be shameless to even attempt that one.

  And she said it herself.

  That’d be like pledging her obedience to me.

  “Please, whatever you want. I’ll do my best to make it happen. There must be lots of things that appeal to you, like me ending all my sentences with ‘-mew’ for a week, or me going to school with no underwear on for a week, or me coming to wake you up every morning in nothing but an apron for a week, or me helping you use enemas to go on a diet for a week.”

  “Is that the kind of pervert you think I am?! That’s just rude!”

  “Well…um, I’m sorry, but I don’t think I could bring myself to do any of those for the rest of my life…”

  “No! No, no, no! I’m not mad at you because you thought I was less of a freak than I am, it’s the opposite!”

  “Is that so?” Senjogahara said primly.

  She was clearly toying with me…

  “And wait, Senjogahara. Are you saying you’d actually go along with any of those if it was for a week?”

  “I’m prepared to, yes.”

  “………”

  Well, you don’t need to be, I thought.

  “For your reference, my personal recommendation would be the apron for a week. Not only am I a morning person, I’m already getting up early every day, so I’m even willing to make breakfast for you while I’m at it. Still in nothing but an apron, of course. Isn’t watching a girl do that from the back one of the great male fantasies?”

  “Hey, don’t talk about ‘male fantasies’ like that! They’re all way cooler! Plus, if you did that at my home when people were around it would tear my family apart faster than you could say gale-force winds!”

  “You make it sound like it wouldn’t be a problem if your family isn’t around. All right then, would you like to stay at my home for a week? I assume the end result would be the same, though.”

  “Listen, Senjogahara,” I said, this time in a stern voice. “Even if we somehow came to an agreement like that, I don’t think it’d be possible for us to keep being friends afterwards.”

  “Oh. Now that you mention it, you’re right. Yes, of course. In that case, nothing erotic.”

  Of course not.

  And wait, so Senjogahara saw ending all of her sentences with “-mew” as an erotic request… She had some pretty out-there interests despite her cool demeanor.

  “I know you would never ask me for something erotic, anyway,” she said.

  “Oh. You really trust me, don’t you?”

  “You’re a virgin, after all.”

  “………”

  I guess I had told her that.

  Just last week, in fact.

  “It’s nice and easy being with a virgin. They never ask for much.”

  “Um… Wait a second, Senjogahara. You’ve been saying stuff about virgins since the other time, but it’s not like you have any experience yourself, do you? So it’s hard to appreciate anything you say regarding the topic─”

  “What are you talking about? I do have experience.”

  “You do?”

  “I do it all over the place,” Senjogahara let slip casually.

  All she cared about was contradicting every single thing I said, it seemed…

  And “all over the place”? Really?

  “Uhh, I don’t know how I should respond to that, but even if, hypothetically, that were somehow true, what could you possibly gain out of telling me that fact, Senjogahara?”

  “…Hrm,” she murmured.

  Not without blushing.

  I was the one doing the blushing, though, not her.

  This conversation was reaching a lot of limits.

  “All right, fine… Allow me to make a correction,” Senjogahara finally said. “I don’t have any experience. I’m a virgin.”

  “…Okay.”

  She was confessing to me, but not in the way I’d imagined at all.

  Though she did force me to say the same thing the other day, so technically speaking, we were even now.

  “In other words!” Senjogahara then thrust her index finger toward me and began yelling in a voice that might have carried throughout the park, “The only kind of girl who would ever talk to a lame, virgin loser like you is a crazy spinster like me!”

  “…!”

  So… So she was even prepared to degrade herself if it meant more verbal abuse to hurl at me…

  I didn’t know which I wanted to do more, take my hat off to her or wave a white flag at her.

  I was prepared to surrender unconditionally.

  Of course, there was no need for me to dig too deep into this subject after learning about Senjogahara’s fixation on chastity in a traumatizing manner the week before. With her, it wasn’t a personality issue but something of a condition.

  “We’ve gotten off track,” I said.

  Senjogahara began speaking to me in a composed voice again. “Really, isn’t there something, Araragi? Something that’s bothering you on a simple level, maybe.”

  “Something that’s bothering me, huh?”

  “I’m not very good with words so this is hard for me to say well, but I really do want to help you.”

  I wasn’t so sure about the “not very good with words” part.

  If anything, she was too good with them, and that was her problem─but still, Hitagi Senjogahara.

  She wasn’t a bad person─at the root.

  So even if it hadn’t been banned…

  I’d have a tough time tossing any kind of immodest request her way.

  “For example,” she offered, “maybe you want me to teach you how to overcome being a shut-in.”

  “How could I possibly be a shut-in? In what world would a shut-in own a mountain bike?”

  “You never know, there might be one. I won’t let you discriminate against shut-ins like that, Araragi. They probably take the tires off then pedal away inside their room or something.”

  “That’d be an exercise bike.”

  What a healthy shut-in that would be.

  But yeah, maybe they did exist.

  “Either way, it’s hard to come up with something that’s bothering me on the spot.”

  “Yes, I can see that. You don’t have any bed head today, after all.”

  “Are you saying that the only problems I have to deal with are things like having messy hair?!”

  “Where are you getting all of that from? I never knew you had such a strong persecution complex. You read between the lines too much, Araragi, you know that?”

  “What else could you have meant by it?”

  Sheesh.

  She was like a rose whose petals were made out of thorns, too.

  “I should be able to help you with other problems, like if there’s a girl in your class who’s nice to everyone except for you.”

  “Next subject!”


  It felt like the conversation would go on like this forever unless I forced myself to come up with something.

  Agh…

  Seriously.

  “Something that’s bothering me, you say… Well, if I had to come up with something, it might not exactly qualify as bothering me, but─”

  “Oh, so you do have something.”

  “Sure, of course I do.”

  “What could it be? Tell me.”

  “You really go straight for it, don’t you?”

  “Of course. This is the moment of truth when I learn whether or not I can pay you back, Araragi. Or is this something that’s awkward to talk about?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Then let me hear it. Just talking about it will make you feel better─or so they say.”

  ……

  I don’t know, it wasn’t convincing coming from someone who used to be as secretive as her.

  “Umm… I got in a fight with my siblings.”

  “…I’m a little doubtful I can help you with that.”

  So quick to give up.

  She hadn’t even heard the details, either…

  “But go ahead,” she said, “you might as well tell me the whole story.”

  “I might as well?”

  “Okay, tell me the whole story, for the time being.”

  “Was that rephrasing even worth it?”

  “Time’s a-wasting, then.”

  “…Well, uh, sure.”

  I’d just told myself the words were off-limits, but…

  I had to use them, given where the conversation had taken us.

  “Today’s Mother’s Day, right?” I asked.

  “Huh? Oh, I suppose it is, now that you mention it,” Senjogahara replied normally.

  I guess I was being overly sensitive after all.

  Which meant all that was left─was my own problem.

  “So, which of your siblings did you fight with? You have two little sisters, right?”

  “Right, I guess you knew. If I had to say just one, it’d be the older of the two─but I basically fought with both of them. They’re inseparable wherever they are or whatever they’re up to, the Five W’s.”

  “They are Tsuganoki Second Middle School’s famed Fire Sisters, after all.”

  “You know them by their alias?”

  Something about that bothered me.

  Not as much as the fact that my sisters had an alias, though.

  “Both of them are tight with our mother, too─and she treats the two of them like her favorite little pets. So─”

  “I see,” Senjogahara cut me off as if she now understood the situation. She all but told me that I didn’t need to finish my thought. “So you, the oldest son of the family, feel like there’s no place for you at home today on Mother’s Day, being the failure that you are.”

  “…That’s right.”

  While Senjogahara probably considered the “failure” remark to be on a continuum with her standard arsenal of verbal abuse, it was unfortunately the unexaggerated, stark truth. I had no choice but to agree.

  It was a stretch to say there was no place for me at home.

  But I wouldn’t have said there’s no place like home, either.

  “And that’s why you’ve toured your way up here. Hmph. I don’t understand, though. Why would that cause you to get in a fight with your sisters?”

  “I tried to sneak out of the house early this morning, but my sisters caught me as I was trying to get on my mountain bike. Then we had an argument.”

  “An argument?”

  “They wanted me to spend Mother’s Day together with everyone─but it feels like, you know, I can’t do that kind of thing.”

  “You know, you say. I can’t, you say,” Senjogahara repeated meaningfully.

  Maybe she was trying to tell me something.

  Like, what a nice problem to have.

  Senjogahara lived alone with her father─so it would be, from her perspective.

  “A lot of us girls start to hate our fathers around middle school─are boys the same way with their mothers?”

  “Eh… It’s not that I don’t like her, or that I hate her, it just feels awkward around her, and well, when I’m around my sisters, I more or less feel the same way, and─”

  ─You know, Koyomi, that’s why.

  ─That’s why you’ll never─

  “…But you see, Senjogahara, that’s not the problem here. Not having fought with my sisters, not Mother’s Day, it’s not the specifics that are bothering me─this stuff tends to happen on any kind of special day. It’s just…”

  “It’s just what?”

  “What I’m trying to say is that regardless of the circumstances, I’m not able to bring myself to celebrate Mother’s Day, and I’m getting honestly upset at something that my sister who’s four years younger than me said, and, I don’t know, I’m just so annoyed at how petty of a person I am that I can’t take it.”

  “Huh─what a complicated problem to have,” Senjogahara said. “You’ve gone all the way around and turned it into a meta-problem. Like which came first, the chicken or the chick.”

  “The chick, of course.”

  “Is that so.”

  “It’s not a complicated problem, it’s a paltry one, that’s all. Woe is me, I’m a petty person. But still, I really don’t want to go home when I think about how I’m going to have to apologize to my little sister. I almost want to live here in this park for the rest of my life.”

  “You don’t want to go home, huh?”

  Senjogahara sighed.

  “Unfortunately, fixing your pettiness is beyond my abilities…”

  “…Can’t you at least try?”

  “Clearly, fixing your pettiness is beyond my abilities…”

  “…”

  Even if it was clear, it only further depressed me to hear her put it in such a succinct and crestfallen manner. Of course, this wasn’t serious enough to get depressed about, but precisely the degree to which it wasn’t serious made me feel uncomfortably small.

  “I feel like I’m such a lame person. If I had to have worries, I wish they could at least be about world peace or how to bring happiness to all of humanity. But instead, my worries are this small-minded thing. That’s─what I can’t stand.”

  “Small-minded─”

  “Maybe ‘pathetic’ would be a better word. The way it’d feel if every time you got a scratch-off lottery ticket, all you ever won was another free ticket.”

  “You shouldn’t degrade what makes you so charming, Araragi.”

  “Charming?! My charm is the ability to win free lottery tickets?!”

  “I’m joking. And when I think of how pathetic you are, that isn’t how I would describe it.”

  “I’d never win anything, no matter how many tickets I bought?”

  “Are you kidding me? That’d be impressive in its own way. When I think of how pathetic you are, Araragi…”

  Senjogahara made sure to wait a few moments in order to give extra weight to what she was about to say.

  “It’s the kind of pathetic that would win the jackpot and tell all his friends about it, only to realize later that it’s a nominal sum.”

  I slowly chewed on and digested the words.

  “God, that’s pathetic!” I screamed.

  That was as pathetic as you could get…and she’d come up with that on the spot. A frightening woman, as always─more than ever, really.

  “Putting aside the stuff with your mother for now, the fighting with your sister part does seem petty. I would have thought you were the kind of brother who doted on his little sisters.”

  “All we ever do is fight,” I said.

  And today─today was especially bad.

  Because it wasn’t a weekday.

  “So instead of finding them cute, they make you cringe?”

  “There’s nothing cringe-worthy about my sisters!”