The Surprise of Haruhi Suzumiya

by Nagaru Tanigawa

  This was a good time for the decisive battle to happen. No—honestly, it was overdue. I knew all too well that more long-winded talk at the café wouldn’t improve anything. Not even when our opponent was an alien or a time traveler. When I thought about it, I realized we’d been wasting our time. But now we could finally settle everything.

  “By the way, Kyon,” said Sasaki, her tone full of concern for me. “Fujiwara’s serious this time. There’s not going to be a curtain call after this is over. He means to finish things. He tried to keep it from me again, as usual, but misdirection doesn’t work on me. I’m pretty good at seeing through people, if I do say so myself.”

  She was. I’d never met anyone, man or woman, young or old, who could get the drop on Sasaki. Maybe Tsuruya, who so rapidly embodied her own sincerity. She had the swiftness to act before someone read her intentions.

  “Still, Kyon, whether they’re going to try to eliminate me or use me is an unknown factor. At the moment, I’m an uncertain element. The one certain thing is you, Kyon. You and your decisions are the key to everything.” Sasaki’s trademark chuckle came over the phone. “But you don’t have to worry about it too much. I can be certain that neither you nor I can affect the world as it is. What will change is the future. This is probably a very important moment for Fujiwara and Asahina, but we here in the present don’t have anything to worry about.”

  I didn’t know what Asahina the Elder’s intentions were. But I didn’t want to have to see this Asahina cry.

  “I think the future can be anything, Kyon.” Sasaki spoke like a sparrow perched on a power line, talking about the weather. “From their perspective, we’re people from the past. But to us, they’re nothing more than people from a future adjacent to our present. So the most important thing for us is the fact that this world is the present. That’s our biggest advantage against them. You’ve got to remember that, Kyon. I’m sure you’ll figure something out. After all—”

  Sasaki let slip a little chuckle.

  “—You’re the sole ordinary person Suzumiya chose.”

  I didn’t feel like anything close to the chosen one. Sasaki sounded full of confidence, but her words only baffled me. I wanted to ask what all this nonsense about “choosing” or “being chosen” meant. I wanted to scream it. I knew that Nagato, Koizumi, and Asahina all saw me as special, and I’d done my best to be ready. I’d prepared myself for the worst last Christmas Eve. Even now it had sunk into my mind like fresh-made tofu. But while it pained me to do so, I couldn’t help acknowledging that my current predicament was the result of Haruhi’s subconscious—and still, Sasaki, you had to choose me too?

  Haruhi was entirely unaware of this, but Sasaki wasn’t. She was entirely aware that she was a godlike being. So if she understood, she should tell me, I said.

  Tell me, why me?

  “Heh. Heehee, Kyon. Your thickheadedness has always given me fits, but I’m shocked you’d take it this far.” She wasn’t mocking me; she was genuinely taken aback. “Let’s speak hypothetically. It could be anything, but let’s say you’ve bought a lottery ticket.”

  I never had before, but sure.

  “The winning lottery number is drawn at random, then presented. The odds that your number matches the winning one are significantly worse than one in many tens of thousands.”

  Which meant you shouldn’t count on it bringing in all the money you need to buy your dreams, I said.

  “Speaking probabilistically, no. Only the house makes money with gambling, and nearly all gamblers end up with a loss. But someone has to win. The odds of your purchased ticket matching the selected number are not zero. Do you understand? In this case, Suzumiya and I are the house, and you’re someone holding a ticket.”

  Sasaki stopped talking for a moment, and I got the feeling that on the other end of the phone, she was taking a deep breath.

  “And surprisingly, the numbers Suzumiya and I chose at random are the same, save for the last two digits. And your ticket matches too. Except you don’t yet know what the last two digits you’re holding are. No, indeed—they’re being hidden from you. You can’t see them yet.”

  What the hell kind of lottery was this, anyway?

  “The digits are always changing. For now. But don’t worry. I’m sure they’ll settle soon. But the only reason you’ll know what those digits are is because they’ll be fixed. And to fix them, you have to observe them. If you just leave it unaltered in the back of your desk, the redemption date will pass, and the ticket will be no more than an ordinary scrap of paper. And then it won’t even be a question of who you’ll choose. It will all have been for naught.”

  Even I wasn’t that stupid, I said. There was a lot of money on the line, after all.

  “That’s right, Kyon. That’s why. You’ve got to fix the last digits. Will they be mine, or Suzumiya’s? You’re the only one who can decide. Not Fujiwara or Kuyoh. This is something they can’t do. It’s not possible for anyone in this world, nor anyone from the future, nor any extraterrestrial life form. That’s why they’re so fixated on you. Everything depends on you.”

  “…”

  “Heehee. That’s a very annoyed silence I’m hearing. You’re so honest, Kyon.”

  If she knew that much, why wouldn’t she switch places with me, and take on the task I’d been left?

  “I don’t want it either. But I… huh, how to put it? Ah, yes—I trust you; that’s what I wanted to to say. The path you’re on is the correct one. And that, Kyon, is something you’ve long-since realized, isn’t it?”

  Sasaki’s tone was pleasant, as though she was just making small talk, and it had the effect of calming me down. She wasn’t trying to lecture me. She wasn’t trying to influence or instruct me either. My so-called close friend from middle school, whom Kunikida had labeled a “strange girl,” had simply called to convey to me her true thoughts.

  “All right, Sasaki. I get it,” I said, gripping the receiver tightly. “Leave it to me. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  After a moment of silence, Sasaki chuckled. “Right. I’ll look forward to it. My trust in you is deeper than the crushing depth of a newly launched submarine. Go ahead and push the down-trim as much as you want. I don’t mind a bit. See you, old friend.”

  I remember hanging up the phone at exactly the same time as her, with no lag whatsoever.

  CHAPTER 8

  α—11

  It was already Friday.

  I felt as though the past week had been unrelentingly busy. With Haruhi’s brigade entrance examinations, and the establishment of Yasumi as the club’s sole new member, it somehow felt as if I’d lived two weeks’ worth of life. But after coincidentally running into that time-traveler guy, Kyoko Tachibana, that Heavenly Canopy Dominion terminal named Kuyoh Suoh, and to top it all off, Sasaki, no wonder I was feeling restless.

  But it was strange. Given our storybook encounter, it seemed odd that I hadn’t heard from them again at all. Normally you’d think the usual scurrying around would ensue, but there’d been no contact at all, which baffled me.

  Perhaps unbeknownst to me, they were struggling with Nagato, Koizumi, or Asahina. It wouldn’t be strange if the three of them had decided to cooperate in the service of preserving Haruhi’s peaceful life, but why wouldn’t they mention it to me? After all this, was I still an unconcerned party? Although I supposed if I got involved, not only would I not be of much use, I could easily be taken hostage.

  Such thoughts occupied me as I arrived at the entrance to North High, and mechanically proceeded to the shoe lockers, opening mine.

  “Bwuh?”

  On top of my school slippers lay an object I hadn’t seen in some time.

  It was a colorful envelope printed with some licensed character or another. It was addressed to me. And on the back was written the sender’s unmistakable name.

  Yasumi Watahashi.

  I read.

  A flood of memories washed over me. How many times had something like this happened to me? First
with Asakura—and her goal had been my murder. Next had been Asahina, but the adult version of Asahina, who’d given me an important hint, then disappeared. After that it was Asahina the Elder again, and in the course of following her incomprehensible directions, I’d encountered another time traveler, who’d hurled some bitter invective at me before things were over.

  Given my experiences, I was well aware that an analog message waiting for me in my shoe locker was not a ticket to paradise.

  And yet it felt as if circumstances were different this time. After all, it was from our brigade’s new freshman member, who was a harmless-seeming, cheerfully active girl, whose height and build made it hard to believe she was even an innocent freshman. Given her house call yesterday, she was quite assertive.

  “Did she…”

  Was my dream of so many years about to come true? Was this truly a love letter? Had the spring of my youth finally arrived?

  —I fell in love with you the moment we met, and I knew that I had to get into the SOS Brigade no matter what.—

  “What am I, stupid?” I murmured to myself, unable to think of a single reason why such a cheerful, energetic freshman would make a pass at me.

  Plus, every time I got a message like this, it was always the beginning of some crazy, unprecedented development. Two faces came to mind. So which would it be this time? Encroaching danger, or that perfect smile?

  “All right—”

  There was no telling who might spot me if I just kept standing stupidly in front of my shoe locker. If Haruhi or Taniguchi saw me, explaining the letter would be annoying.

  I quickly hid myself away in a bathroom, and opened the envelope. A playing card–like slip of paper was contained therein, on which the following had been hurriedly scribbled:

  “I’ll meet you in the clubroom at 6 PM. Please come, okay?”

  It was hard to know how to react. If I had to sum up my feelings in a single word, that word would be “suspicious.”

  I couldn’t help recalling the incident with Asakura almost nostalgically. But my danger sense wasn’t tingling at all, and no alarms were going off. My senses had not been particularly sharpened by the morning hike, but from what I could tell this was closer to the invitation I’d received from Asahina the Elder. I didn’t fundamentally trust my own instincts, but maybe it wouldn’t kill me to heed my intuition once in a while.

  That said, there wasn’t any danger in being careful.

  It was just before homeroom started.

  “By the way, Haruhi.”

  “What?”

  “Say you’ve got a problem that you’re not sure how to approach.”

  “Is this about study?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Looks like you’ve kindled a bit of inclination toward academics. As brigade chief, I’m pleased that one of my members is upping their motivation. I assume you’ve given whatever your problem is a certain amount of thought on your own, yes?”

  “Of course.”

  “If it’s something you can solve by looking up, you should look it up.”

  “It’s not a question of content.”

  “Huh? So what is it, then, math? In that case, you’ve gotta know how to solve the problem. What’s the formula?”

  “No, it’s not math. And incidentally, I don’t care about how to solve it; I just want to know the answer.”

  “You’re not some grade schooler copying over the answers to your summer homework, and anyway, that’s no way to learn something.”

  “Who cares? I thought as long as you could understand the thinking of the test-maker, that was good enough.”

  “Oh, so it’s modern lit. You should’ve just said so. So the question’s something like ‘What was the writer thinking when they wrote this sentence,’ right?”

  “I guess that’s closest, yeah.”

  “What a stupid question. This is true for novels and essays too, but when it comes to the question of what’s written in a sentence, how would the test-maker know what the original writer was thinking? Even if you get the ‘right’ answer, that’s just because whoever’s grading the test happens to agree with you. So here’s how I think problems like that should go: What was I thinking when I read this sentence? That’d be a lot easier for me to accept.”

  “I don’t really need to go that far. In this case, the person who wrote it and the person asking the question are the same.”

  “Oh, that’s easy, then.”

  “By all means, tell me.”

  “All you have to do,” said Haruhi, leaning in and getting right up in my face, her overwhelming smile making me think of some kind of radiation, “is just ask whoever wrote it!”

  And so come lunchtime, I left my bento box with Taniguchi and Kunikida and took action.

  It was just as Haruhi said. If I didn’t understand, going and asking someone who did understand was a lot better than flailing around in ignorance. Especially when that someone was the only person who knew her own intentions. All I had to do was ask her, and everything would be cleared up. I’d have to get her to talk, but so long as I didn’t get into a scuffle with her, I expected it wouldn’t be too much trouble. I mean, she was just a nice little freshman.

  So it was that I wandered around the building that contained the freshman classrooms, in search of Yasumi.

  It might’ve been bad manners to ignore the note’s order to come at six o’clock, but I would just have to make her understand that I was too curious to help myself. And so long as there was even the remote possibility of my getting knifed again, I had every intention of flushing as much of my intuition down the toilet as I wanted to.

  Thus resolved, despite my high spirits, I stopped dead in my tracks.

  “Wait, which class was she in, again?”

  She’d written it on her answer sheet for the brigade entrance examination, but I couldn’t remember it. My attention had been focused on her name and her strange answers at the time.

  “Guess I shouldn’t have come during lunch.”

  The halls that I had become so accustomed to the previous year were now filled with new students, and felt like another world. Even though the color of my school slippers was the only thing that was different, I couldn’t help feeling nervous when I peered into the classroom of a different year. On top of that, the freshmen didn’t seem to particularly enjoy an unfamiliar junior looking into each of their rooms as though they were some rare animal species.

  As soon as I found Yasumi, I was going to call her over and take her someplace without any other people. That would probably seem a little suspicious, but I figured it would be all right since we were both in the same club. Still—

  “… Where is she?”

  The girl in question was nowhere to be found. I was hoping that her small frame would make her easy to pick out, but if anything it seemed to make her harder to spot. Wondering if she bought her lunch at school, I headed over to the cafeteria, but no dice. With all the wandering around I was reaching the limits of my own hunger. I’d made a good show of proving my endurance by wandering all over the school, but it had been wasted effort, and I cast my gaze upward. I was in the courtyard, and my eye just happened to land on the window of the literature club’s room.

  Surely not.

  I headed straight for the room. I found it hard to believe anyone would go all the way over there just to eat their lunch, but there was always the possibility. Honestly, I should’ve brought my own lunch with me.

  I opened the door that Haruhi and I would doubtless open again after school, and there was Nagato. And only Nagato. Taking in this all-too-ordinary sight, I waved briefly to her before considering turning around and getting my lunch—but I soon thought better of it.

  Right here in front of me was the best person in the world for answering questions I couldn’t answer myself.

  “…”

  Sitting in her usual corner with a book on her lap, Nagato didn’t so much as twitch an eyebrow at my intrusion, which told m
e definitively that things were as they ever were, here in this room. If I hadn’t known she was an extraterrestrial life-form, the peaceful mood set by the girl silently reading her book here would’ve struck me as completely normal.

  But I knew things weren’t normal, and forgetting about the contents of my lunch box momentarily, I spoke to Nagato.

  “Nagato.”

  “What?”

  First things first. “What is she?”

  “She is nothing.”

  Good old Nagato, she’d known instantly who my question referred to. But that said—

  “That’s going too far. Isn’t the girl known as Yasumi Watahashi just a normal student?”

  “No student with such a name exists in this school.”

  That answer made me take a step back—not physically, but mentally. About half a step.

  She didn’t exist? Which meant… My brain started multitasking.

  Oh right.

  “So it’s an alias. Someone’s posing as a North High student and sneaking in just for after-school activities.”

  “That recognition computes.”

  Good grief. So Yasumi Watahashi’s background was going to make her hard to deal with. I supposed I’d always known as much. She was obviously weird, after all. Her convenient appearance was an obvious plot twist from a silly novel.

  So, who was controlling her? If I had to take a guess, it’d be—

  An alien? I asked.

  “No.”

  Time traveler?

  “No.”

  Not an esper. She didn’t seem like the type.

  “Indeed. She is not. Nor is she from another world.”

  It wasn’t like Nagato to offer information unasked for. Before I could get hung up on that, my ignorance-born curiosity got the better of me, and I opened my mouth.

  “So Yasumi’s just a strange girl with a slightly odd approach, then? And she’s just posing as a North High student?”

  Nagato looked up from the printed page, and returned my gaze for the first time. I couldn’t help feeling sucked into her eyes, which were like toffee sprinkled with gold.