The Surprise of Haruhi Suzumiya

by Nagaru Tanigawa

  Asahina was still wiggling around in adoration. “She even glommed on to Nagato. She must be good at making friends!”

  Seemingly coming back to her senses, or possibly having noticed the conspicuously silent Koizumi as he gazed at the table, she returned to the kettle and began filling the lieutenant brigade chief’s cup. I looked at Nagato, trying to imagine what technique Yasumi could’ve employed to foster instant trust.

  Nagato seemed to have guessed my thoughts correctly; she slowly emerged from her sea of words.

  “I lent her a book,” she murmured in a too-controlled voice. Then, evidently feeling that further detail was necessary, added, “She asked me to.”

  This seemed to satisfy her. She looked back down.

  “The book had a name like some kind of satellite, or maybe a Greek myth,” said Haruhi casually. I choked down my anxiousness like a piece of dry ice. But Nagato did not respond to Haruhi, so I had to maintain my poker face.

  Thankfully, Haruhi seemed not to care much about the matter. She made no further references to Nagato’s library, instead clicking the browser closed and turning off the computer. It was a clear indication that the day’s club activities would soon be over.

  “Having a new member join us bodes well for the new school year. The SOS Brigade must not neglect the education of the next generation. We have to show such spirit that even if the entire school were destroyed, the SOS Brigade would remain. And we are the very foundation of that spirit—or rather, we must become it!”

  Still standing, I sipped my tea. “If you say so, I guess that’s how it’ll be.”

  Yasumi’s face floated up in my mind as I delivered my halfhearted reply. I owed her a large debt of gratitude for keeping quiet about my special Asahina folder, but it still bothered me. I glanced at Nagato and saw that, as usual, she hadn’t looked up from the hardback she was reading. As she served tea to Koizumi, Asahina’s affect was the same as before. But there was just no way the new brigade member Haruhi had picked was a regular person. It might not be obvious, but there had to be something about her.

  The phone call I’d gotten in the bath, the strange unease that had plagued me for the past few days—these things made everything feel fuzzy. Even if you chalked that up to the unresolved problem of Sasaki, Kuyoh, the nameless time traveler, and Kyoko Tachibana, then why was this feeling of tension in my chest directed so specifically at Yasumi? And why did it feel almost optimistic, of all things?

  Yasumi wasn’t obviously an enemy or an ally. That would’ve been too easy. The feeling I got from her was nothing like the way I felt about Asahina and Nagato, or about Kuyoh and Kyoko Tachibana. If anything, she seemed more like—

  I glanced at Haruhi, who hummed merrily away as she packed up to head home.

  She wasn’t an alien, time traveler, or esper. The feeling I got from Yasumi Watahashi was like what I felt from Haruhi and Sasaki.

  But I had no idea why.

  The uncertainty was like the moment after having mistaken chikuwabu for chikuwa and having popped a piece in my mouth, and I held on to this bright unease all the way home, until I opened the door to my room and was stunned.

  “Welcome home, Kyon!”

  The fact that my sister beamed at me like a friendly cat while Shamisen glared at me like an irritated human as the two of them rolled around on my bed was not particularly surprising—it was pretty much normal, really.

  What froze me in my tracks with my mouth hanging open was the fact that in addition to them, there was a face I’d seen not long before; the person sat opposite my sister, but immediately jumped to their feet like a pencil rocket.

  “Hi, Kyon! Sorry to bother you at home!” she cried out in a clear, high voice, then bowed deeply. She had very good manners.

  “Wha…”

  I couldn’t begin to comprehend what was happening.

  Yasumi Watahashi was in my room. There was no way I could convince myself that this was a hallucination. It was impossible.

  She’d left the clubroom because of some kind of urgent business, so what was it, and why was she here?

  No, wait. Let’s be rational. Given all the absurd events I’d been wrapped up in up to this point, I should have been used to this kind of thing, however unwillingly. Compared with Haruhi’s disappearance or the many time jumps I’d done, having a new brigade member waiting for me in my room was a perfectly ordinary occurrence. It was like a mystery novel where the culprit’s motives went unexplained until the end. All right. I was calm. I’d try to get an explanation from the people at hand.

  Yasumi clasped her hands in front of her chest, looking at me with eyes aglitter. “I really wanted to come yesterday, but things took longer than I expected. I shouldn’t have hesitated.”

  I did not understand what she was saying. Expected? Hesitated? What the hell? Whatever. I’d figure that stuff out later. I grabbed my smiling, carefree sister by the collar. “Did you bring her in?”

  “But, ’cause—” She squirmed ticklishly. “She said she was your friend!”

  There was such a thing as being too nice. It was one thing when they were people you recognized, but I was going to have to teach her not to just trust the word of complete strangers. It was my duty as her older brother.

  But Yasumi came to her rescue before I could draft a proper lecture.

  “When I met her at the front door I knew right away that she was your little sister. Heehee, she’s such a good girl! I wish I had a sister like her. I just want to pick her up and take a nap with her. Also, that kitty! What a wonderful calico. He seems super smart—I’m really impressed.” After rattling all this off at a quick tempo, Yasumi seemed slightly gloomy. “But I can’t have any pets. It’s too bad… still! I love playing with other people’s pets when I visit their homes!”

  Feeling physically overwhelmed by her voice, I flinched slightly away. “I thought… I thought you said you had to leave early, that you had something to do. Don’t tell me…”

  “Yes. I wanted to come over at least once—you know, to your place. Heh,” said Yasumi casually, without a trace of anything suspicious in her voice or manner. Her trademark barrette moved slightly as she bowed.

  “Hey, hey.” My sister tugged at Yasumi’s sleeve. “So, um, I was just saying, I really want that barrette. You can’t buy ’em anymore, right? Can I have it?”

  “Sorry.” Yasumi bent down so she was at my sister’s level and looked straight into her big, round eyes. “This is a treasure I’ve had since I was little. So I can’t give it to you now. But I might come around to it eventually. We’re both little boats floating on the river of the world. So I might wind up floating back here, sometime. Or maybe even just this barrette. Eventually, someday.”

  I got the feeling that the smiley-faced hair ornament didn’t just keep her wild hair in order, it served as proof of her identity—but such speculation was trivial. What was far more important was that as I was pondering such things, Yasumi had walked over to my bed, peered under it, and pulled Shamisen out from under it by his ear. “This cat is great! Super great, really.”

  After offering said comment, she leapt over to my sister and hugged her, then resumed her still posture right in front of me, speaking her intentions in a clear tone.

  “I’m going home.”

  I see, was all I could manage in reply, which felt pathetic. I should’ve had better vocabulary installed, but frustratingly, I just couldn’t put what I wanted to say into words.

  Yasumi looked up at me penetratingly, but then her expression suddenly turned almost nostalgic.

  “I always dreamed that when I went to a new school, there’d be some interesting club, and some kind of coincidence would suck me into it, and I’d wind up joining. That I’d keep quiet and they’d approach me. Isn’t that how it is? The narrators of every good story always have something like that happen. And the club is full of fascinating older students, and I’d wind up getting close to one of them—that’s the kind of protagonist I wanted to be
.”

  I felt as if I had heard someone say something like this before. But before I could search my memory for the reference, Yasumi lowered her head quickly, then bent her body as if it was spring-loaded.

  “Just kidding! Actually I just wanted to see your room. Sorry for intruding! But I’m totally satisfied now. I won’t come again.”

  The smile that Yasumi directed at me made me understand why Asahina had found herself so helplessly charmed by the girl; it was like that of a baby animal looking up at its caretaker with total trust, enveloped in some kind of soft light. Surely no pet shop customer could ever walk away empty-handed after being gazed at in such a fashion.

  “Now, may we meet again! Kyon, please don’t hate me!” No sooner had she spoken than Yasumi patted my both my sister’s and Shamisen’s head affectionately, then dashed away with all the energy of spring’s first storm. There wasn’t even enough time to tell her to wait up. Before I knew it, the brigade’s newest member had disappeared from my house.

  My sister forcibly picked up the yawning Shamisen. “Who was she?”

  No one wanted the answer to that question more than I did.

  “Ah—” Suddenly I remembered something I’d forgotten to ask. I was positive that Yasumi was the one who’d called while I was in the middle of taking a bath.

  But why me? She’d only given me her name. Had she already been confident that she would be the only one to pass Haruhi’s gauntlet of tests? It was as though she was precognitive, but according to Koizumi there was no reason to think that. Which meant she was just a regular student who just happened to come to North High, and just happened to get tangled up with the SOS Brigade—but that was just too many perfect coincidences.

  —Nothing in this world is coincidence. Everything is predetermined. Humans merely refer to predetermined events that they don’t understand as “coincidence.”

  Someone had told me this—or wait, maybe it had been in a novel someone had lent me.

  I mulled it over vaguely as I took Shamisen away from my sister and brought his nose up to mine. As usual, he turned away, looking annoyed.

  “What do you think of Yasumi?” I was well aware that it was no more than me talking to myself, but somehow it felt as if I was pouring out my soul to someone.

  “Her name’s Yasumi? Is she friends with Haru-nyan and Tsuru-nyan?” asked my sister with eyes even rounder than the calico cat, whose face showed his patience was at an end, so I put the irritated Shamisen down. He ran out the room, and fortunately my sister chased after him, so I was finally left in peace.

  No matter how much I thought about it, I couldn’t put the pieces together. It felt as if I’d been told to solve the “four fours” puzzle up through infinity without using the log operator.

  She was Yasumi Watahashi, a freshman at North High and the first new member to be admitted by Haruhi into the SOS Brigade.

  But who was she?

  β—10

  Thursday.

  I had so much to think about that I had no idea where to start.

  If you were going to count up the number of things I could actually do, you would only get as far as the index finger on your right hand. In the end, all I could do was go to school like usual, and absentmindedly attend class, like usual.

  Somehow, Haruhi seemed to be in the same state as I was. Even before classes started, her attention was elsewhere, her mind seemingly back in Nagato’s room.

  “Hey, Kyon.” No sooner had first period ended and the short break begun than Haruhi poked me in the middle of my back with her mechanical pencil. “About Yuki—do you think maybe it would be good to force her to go to the hospital?”

  Her expression was very serious, like that of a small dog who’d lived with a family for a long time but had just been denied a walk.

  “It’s just a spring cold, right? That’s going too far for something like that.”

  It hurt me to shut her down like that, but I was well aware that her condition wasn’t something that antibiotics or dietary adjustments were going to improve.

  “But still. I’m just worried,” said Haruhi, clicking the end of her pencil. It was probably an unconscious tic. I gazed at the gradually extending lead at its tip and replied.

  “Have you told Koizumi? If it comes down to it, you can probably forcibly get her admitted.” I took a deep breath and prepared myself for what I was about to say. “But Nagato herself said she was fine. Has she ever been wrong about anything in the past?”

  “That’s… true, but still…” The clouds of doubt did not clear from Haruhi’s face; it was like a dawn so misty that Venus couldn’t be seen. “It really bothers me. It’s not just Yuki either, it’s like… I don’t know how to say it, but it’s like there’s something strange going on on a bigger scale, or something.”

  Something like a mysterious space-borne illness spreading throughout the Earth, like something out of an old SF movie? I asked. I remembered there being a lot of movies like that on TV when I was a kid.

  “Nothing so crazy as that. That kind of old-fashioned worldview doesn’t work in the modern world. Nowadays scenarios like Mars attacking or some biological weapon threatening humanity only make people think you’re so dissatisfied with your life that you’ve got a death wish and enjoy fantasizing about catastrophes. But people like that don’t even have the courage to commit suicide, so they just enjoy imagining all of humanity dying. They’re naive! Naive!”

  Haruhi’s comment would surely have made the masters of science fiction grimace. She sniffed.

  “I shouldn’t have bothered asking you. I knew you’d just make some tasteless joke; I must be going senile or something. Listen, Kyon: just forget it. No, I order you to forget it. My ideas are my own, and it was obviously a mistake to share them with anybody. I guess I have to acknowledge that much.”

  I see. Well, I was fully aware that I lacked the ability to construct a creative fake story, so having that pointed out by Haruhi now didn’t exactly pain me. Calling someone an idiot when they already know they’re an idiot will only earn you a derisive laugh. And idiot described me in that moment.

  After that conversation, Haruhi remained preoccupied, and she continued to space out until afternoon classes were over, her body seeming like a cast-off skin, her mind having flown off somewhere far away, as unresponsive as a Buddhist priest in meditation, until at the final chime she came suddenly awake, as though it were her alarm clock.

  She hurriedly put her bag over her shoulder. “I’m going to Yuki’s with Mikuru. You don’t have to come. Just stay in the clubroom.”

  I pointed out that without Nagato or Asahina in the room, there wasn’t any reason to be there.

  Haruhi’s eyes angled slightly up at me. “New. Club. Members!”

  Her mouth made her look just like an irritated waterfowl.

  “They might come, so I need you to follow up with them. Plus, Koizumi aside, you’re totally useless when it comes to taking care of Yuki.” Haruhi seemed to hesitate for a moment, then seemed to decide to plunge ahead regardless. “My guess is you’d even make her worse. You’re like a god of pestilence, Kyon. Plus it’s cowardly for a guy to bust into a girl’s room, especially when she’s sick. So you and Koizumi don’t need to come. Just watch over the room. It’s your job as a brigade member.”

  Thus I was given a direct order by the Brigade Chief to watch over the room. Was there anything else I could do?

  I tried to think about it. The person I needed to face down next was Kuyoh. She and her boss were the cause of Nagato’s illness, and if we didn’t do something about the problem, the situation wasn’t going to change.

  The other thing to keep in mind was Fujiwara. So far all I’d heard from him was obfuscating cynicism, but I couldn’t afford to doubt that the self-proclaimed time traveler and Kuyoh had some kind of connection, or possibly even an alliance. From what I could tell, they were just using Kyoko Tachibana. She couldn’t really go toe-to-toe with our Koizumi either. Kyoko Tachibana didn�
��t really have what it took to deal with aliens and time travelers. I’d gotten that sense ever since she’d run out of resolve at the end of Asahina’s kidnapping ordeal. I felt bad for her, but she was no match for Koizumi. She was a minor character at best. But our roles are assigned to us without concern for our feelings. Disrespect was forbidden, but let’s just say Kyoko Tachibana wasn’t overly impressed with whoever it was that handed out those roles.

  “… so it’s gotta be Sasaki,” I murmured to myself, quietly.

  “Did you say something?” Haruhi’s sharp ears caught my muttering.

  I decided her apparent irritation was due to her worry over Nagato, so I lightly raised both hands. “Like you said, I’ll stay in the room today. If any freshmen show up, I’ll do what I can for them, so don’t worry about that. I figure it’ll probably be more inviting without you around, anyway.”

  Haruhi sniffed. “Well, thanks. Call me if anything happens. I’ll call you too. If I feel like it. Bye!”

  Then Haruhi, whose motto was “do everything swiftly,” nearly flew out of the room, like a piece of cat fur swept up by a broom.

  She really was deeply worried about Nagato, in her own way. And so was I.

  But the method and objective of our worry were very different. We were both doing our very best by Nagato—Haruhi in her way, and me in mine. Neither of us was right. The correct solution didn’t exist.

  But both of us were trying to find some kind of answer. And at the moment, one of us was closer to the heart of the matter—and that was me.

  I’d wanted to start running to Nagato a long time ago. But at the moment I left that duty to Haruhi. So what was it that I would do?

  I would wait. It would come to me eventually. And not in the distant future either. Kuyoh’s attack, Asakura’s revival, Kimidori’s interruption…