by Nisioisin
That was it.
I still don’t know how much of her memory she lost as Hanekawa, nor what she retains. I would have to ask her some time, but that time wasn’t now. She needed some space to put her mind back in order.
As always, Senjogahara arrived at school moments before classes started as if she’d calculated it so as not to waste a single moment.
“Welcome home.”
“Thanks.”
“When’s our next date?” she asked abruptly.
With the same flat and expressionless face as always.
“You plan it out, Araragi.”
“……”
“I’ll skin you if you take me anywhere lame.”
“…Roger that.”
In fact, I wanted to.
I’d show Senjogahara my treasure this time.
And crab, too─we had to go eat some eventually.
After classes, we prepared for the culture festival─the last one of my high school life. It was getting so close I could taste it, and today was the last day of preparations. Even Senjogahara didn’t skip today and helped us strive toward our goal. It sounded like everyone stayed at school until some ridiculously late hour the day before, but now that Hanekawa, the class president, was back, the work proceeded at a completely different level of efficiency, and all of our classmates were free to go just before school officially closed for the day.
From there, I decided to give the abandoned cram school another visit and took along with me Senjogahara, Hanekawa, and also Kanbaru, who’d been waiting for us. I was the only one with a bike, so I pushed it and we all walked together.
Oshino wasn’t there.
Yet again.
That’s strange, Senjogahara said. That man acts like he sees it all coming, and he isn’t around for two of your visits in a row. It made me realize that if anything was strange, it was that Senjogahara had come with me to meet Oshino, even if I had invited her. Maybe she already sensed this would happen. Maybe she’d figured it out by the time I explained it to her.
The four of us split up and searched every nook and cranny of the cram school, but Oshino was nowhere to be found. When we looked closely, very closely, however, it seemed that a few things were missing from inside the building─and they were all Oshino’s belongings.
It was clear now.
Mèmè Oshino was gone.
Without leaving behind a single note─he’d left our town.
Now it made sense─when I’d biked to the cram school with Hanekawa the day before, it hadn’t been to find Shinobu that he’d been outside. He’d been in the middle of packing up. He must have been undoing that spiritual boundary he’d set around the place.
On that occasion.
I hadn’t been waited for.
The ruined shrine on top of the mountain─Oshino’s interest in this town must have reached its endpoint when that case was settled. It was one of his biggest goals─that’s how he described it.
His collecting and researching would some day come to an end─
He would leave this town some day─
And that turned out to be now.
I’m not going to disappear all of a sudden one day without even saying goodbye─I’m an adult─I do know my manners─
Why didn’t I notice?
He was already saying goodbye with those words. How could you understand them any other way? He was a man who never said goodbye, who couldn’t deal with parting ways, an awkward, tactless man, and it was the most earnest show of affection he could manage─
Honestly.
I really was dull.
I should have been able to figure that out.
There’s no time, he’d told me.
So that was about Shinobu.
He looked the other way when Shinobu left, too─he knew, and he let her get away. He probably hadn’t actively encouraged her, but he must have seen it as a fine opportunity. The Hindering Cat joined the fray at a good moment─which is to say, a bad one─and so he just retroactively added her to the story. In other words, he saw Shinobu’s disappearance as a test for me─or rather, as a sort of parting gift.
He became sure of something or another when I ran off to find Shinobu─and after he let the Hindering Cat escape, he must have gathered his things and left. He was sure─that I’d manage to do something about both Shinobu and Hanekawa on my own.
That Hawaiian-shirted bastard.
Trying to act so suave.
He wasn’t making me think he was cool.
A day had already passed, so Oshino must have already wandered into another town where he was busy with his collecting and researching─who knew, maybe he was saving someone from an attacking aberration as he happened to pass by.
Yes.
He was probably saving someone.
“Whatta…” I said.
“Yeah,” Senjogahara said too.
“Totally,” Hanekawa added.
“No mistake,” Kanbaru agreed.
And then, all four of us in unison.
“Chump.”
Mèmè Oshino─
A frivolous, cynical, vulgar, mean, arrogant, superficial, malicious, insincere, dramatic, jesting, capricious, selfish, lying, dishonest─and endlessly good and kind person.
And so, we each returned to our homes. Kanbaru left first, then Hanekawa split off, and then I walked Senjogahara home. There, for the first time, which is to say at last, Senjogahara treated me to her cooking. As far as my thoughts on the taste and her skills, well, let’s say it was a smart move for her to leave it up to my imagination for so long.
I will probably encounter more aberrations in my life.
I can’t pretend they never happened, and I can’t forget them.
But─that’s fine.
I know.
That there’s darkness in the world, and that things live in the darkness.
For example, in my own shadow.
A blond kid, who seems very cozy there.
It was getting late by the time I got home, so I ate dinner, took a bath, and went straight to sleep. My two sisters would surely wake me up the next morning, just like they always do.
Tomorrow was finally the culture festival.
Our class was putting on: a haunted house.
Afterword
While there’s no telling how many people have found themselves concerned about how to draw the line between their hobbies and their work, I believe the problem is such a difficult one because we start from the assumption that hobbies and work have the same absolute value. Hobbies. And work. I will admit, they are both major issues in one’s life. When I think about it closely, though, it seems somehow unnatural that we treat the two as mutually exclusive. Or rather, some deep-rooted ethical notion that hobbies and work should never be one and the same seems to exist prior to the premise. It’s said that you shouldn’t make your hobby your work, but we can’t survive without working. Meanwhile, life feels empty without hobbies. In that case, we in fact ought to encourage people to make their hobby their work, or their work their hobby, from an efficiency standpoint. So then why is it said that you shouldn’t make your hobby your work? Probably thanks to a contradiction such as follows: seeing work, which we perform in order to live, in terms of enjoyment is inappropriate, while hobbies, which we have in order to live better, are meant to be enjoyed. But it’s not as if making your hobby your work means that it stops being a hobby, and it’s also not as if something ceases to count as work because you’re doing it as a hobby. Your hobby is not your work, and your work is not your hobby. It is your hobby, and it is also your work. There may be nothing cooler than someone who can stand tall as a living example of this idea.
So, at the risk of being misunderstood, I’d like to say that BAKEMONOGATARI was written entirely as a hobby. There isn’t a speck of anything work-related about it. It started as a novel I wrote as a diversion to fill a hole in my schedule, and I honestly wonder whether I should really be releasing it like this. Because I wrote it as nothing more than
a hobby, I’m terribly ashamed that the author’s favorite characters could be ranked far too easily, but I had so much fun writing scenes of any of the characters talking that, for the first time in a while, I was reminded of the days when I was just starting to write novels. As before, VOFAN was kind enough to adorn these pages with his work. I am of course reluctant to part ways with it, given that it was a hobby, but this brings an end to the five stories in these volumes. This has been BAKEMONOGATARI, consisting of “Hitagi Crab,” “Mayoi Snail,” “Suruga Monkey,” “Nadeko Snake,” and “Tsubasa Cat.”
Thank you very much for humoring my hobby.
NISIOISIN
