The Surprise of Haruhi Suzumiya

by Nagaru Tanigawa

  Koizumi notwithstanding, I was deeply relieved to see Nagato standing there, her usual expressionless self.

  The pair removed their shoes in the entryway, and Shamisen came over and rubbed his face on both of them. This seemed less as though he was trying to be a good host and greet his guests, and more like feline instinct, reacting to the scent of people to whom he was connected. He seemed especially eager to rub against Nagato’s ankles, purring loudly as he did so, perhaps because of the something-or-other life form that had been sealed within him.

  Meanwhile, my sister greeted our guests.

  “Yuki! Koizumi! Welcome!” She followed them around with a smile like a blast furnace, and I had to send her to the kitchen so I could bring them to my room.

  Somewhere along the line Nagato had picked Shamisen up, so I wound up temporarily housing two people and one cat in my room. Well, it wasn’t as if it mattered if the cat overheard our conversation.

  “So, where shall I begin?” Koizumi sat cross-legged on my bed. “But first, I’d like to hear your side of the story. You and Suzumiya both disappeared right in front of us. I knew instantly where Suzumiya had gone, but…”

  What conclusion was he leaping to now? I asked.

  “She was in her house. Both α and β returned there like normal. Just like that. She might have remembered feeling faintly uneasy, but that’s not a problem.”

  Nagato sat on the floor and silently put Shamisen in her lap, and began to rub his belly. Shamisen purred loudly. He seemed to have taken quite a shine to her.

  When it came to what had happened in that crazy, mixed-up closed space, there was something I wanted to know more than anything else.

  “Nagato.”

  “…” Nagato ceased her gentle massaging of Shamisen and looked at me.

  “Has your fever gone down?”

  Nagato only nodded as she poked at Shamisen’s paw-pads.

  “Did you manage to complete any, uh… high-level communication or whatever, with the Heavenly Canopy Dominion?”

  “That has been temporarily aborted.” Shamisen rolled over on his back, and Nagato stroked his throat. “Both the Data Overmind and the Heavenly Canopy Dominion determined that each had received the minimum necessary amount of information. My ability to relay information has been recognized as insufficiently accurate for the task. Thus I have been relieved of that duty, and given new orders—to passively observe and report on Haruhi Suzumiya and Kuyoh Suoh.”

  So Nagato’s restoration was because the Heavenly Canopy Dominion had temporarily ceased interfering with her. I was just happy she was back to normal, I said.

  “Not necessarily,” said Nagato without any trace of disappointment. “We have moved on to phase two of a plan to achieve mutual understanding. I was merely judged insufficient for the task of conducting communication for phase one. I have not been informed which individual will be succeeding me, but they will undoubtedly perform better than I did.”

  They should’ve just let Kimidori handle it from the beginning.

  “Wait a second.” Did that mean Kuyoh was still in this world? I asked.

  Nagato tugged on Shamisen’s whiskers. “She had not disappeared. She is currently attending Koyoen Academy, where she will remain as a student. Her primary goal is to achieve autonomy, which will take some time.”

  “And Fujiwara?” I addressed this question to Koizumi.

  “I doubt we’ll see him again. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that he’ll never be able to travel back to our present again. It seems that his future time line was severed. Just as that which prevents Asahina and her comrades from traveling further back than four years ago, Suzumiya created a new time fault—or so Asahina the Elder explained to me.”

  So she’d had time to explain things, then? I asked.

  “Immediately after you and Suzumiya disappeared, the started to disintegrate. It was a rather familiar scene, for me. After that, the closed space completely collapsed. Not only Suzumiya’s, but Sasaki’s too. The world returned to a peaceful state. In that moment, it was just the adult Asahina and myself—and Kyoko Tachibana, I suppose. Fujiwara and Kuyoh Suoh were nowhere to be seen.”

  And neither was Yasumi Watahashi, I guessed.

  “Did you talk with Asahina the Elder at all?”

  “A bit. She seemed very sad about what happened with Fujiwara, but that’s just a guess based on how she looked. But she did say that his actions were half-impulsive, and that he had probably been used to protect the time line he was attached to. There isn’t enough information to understand all the details, so that’s about all I can say.”

  I wondered what had changed from when Fujiwara planned to kill Haruhi and install Sasaki as the new god. Was that somehow a problem for Asahina the Elder’s future?

  “Still,” said Koizumi, gazing at Shamisen’s twitching tail, “Asahina did let slip that even if the space-time continuum were completely overwritten from this time plane onto her own future, it would all end up converging anyway. And she sounded sincere.”

  Huh. And then?

  “She gave me a sad smile and left the room. I followed right after her, but she was gone. I assume she returned to the future.”

  I wondered how much of this I should believe. Both of Koizumi’s statements, and Asahina the Elder’s words. “What about Kyoko Tachibana?”

  “Once the two worlds were fused, she was stunned. She stayed there for a while, holding her head and moaning, but eventually calmed down and just slumped there. She seemed deeply disappointed.”

  I’ll bet she was, I said.

  “She returned home, totally depressed. I suppose her burden was quite heavy.” Koizumi then took out his cell phone. “But before we parted ways, I exchanged numbers and addresses with her.”

  After all that confusion, he was always so clever. Koizumi the ladies’ man.

  “She sent me a text right away. In it…”

  Apparently for a variety of reasons, Kyoko Tachibana had decided to withdraw from all of this. She saw all too keenly that she couldn’t keep up with these aliens and time travelers. Though apparently she was still holding on to the hope that she would be able find something she could do.

  Koizumi snapped his phone shut. “Don’t worry. If she appears again we’ll take the necessary measures.”

  He didn’t have to sound so happy about it.

  “Based on her postscript, she plans to be reclusive for a while. Her comrades have all gone underground, and she’s simply going to try to remain Sasaki’s friend. I wonder how that will go.”

  I was quite confident that Sasaki would not be sweet-talked by Kyoko Tachibana any time soon.

  As Koizumi and I talked, it seemed as though Nagato had become Shamisen’s personal masseuse, and was focused entirely on petting his fur. Perhaps she had no interest in our conversation, or perhaps the entity that had been transferred into Shamisen was simply more interesting.

  “Kyon! Yuki!” My sister opened the door and bounced her way into the room. “Yuki! Let’s play! C’mon, with Shami too! We’ve got all sorts of kitty toys downstairs, so let’s play!”

  “…”

  Nagato took Shamisen and quietly stood, allowing herself to be pulled out of the room by my excited sister. Perhaps she’d read the situation, or perhaps playing with a cat and a girl was more interesting than hearing a recap of events she’d already experienced.

  In any case, thanks to her Koizumi and I could now speak one-on-one, so I was grateful to her.

  “So I know that that was Sasaki’s closed space back there. Hers was extremely stable, after all. But why did Haruhi’s closed space also appear?” I got confused just thinking about the swirling jumble of dark and light back there.

  “There’s no room for doubt there. Suzumiya intentionally made that happen, such that I could be allowed in, and such that a could be created.”

  That was weird. At the time, Haruhi had been outside the school, and she hadn’t been conscious
of what was happening with us, I pointed out.

  “What if I told you that she was fully aware?” Koizumi smiled like a nasty cram school teacher, looking at me as if I was giving myself fits trying to answer a question even though the solution was right in front of me. “Have you forgotten that there was someone else besides us in that space? She just suddenly appeared, and she wasn’t an alien, time traveler, or esper. Despite us never really understanding her true nature, at some point she stabilized her position there, and summoned both you and me to the clubroom. Yes—our α versions.”

  Yasumi Watahashi, huh?

  What was she? I asked.

  Koizumi answered immediately. “Her true form is Haruhi Suzumiya. She is an alternate self created by Suzumiya.”

  By this point I had sort of gotten that feeling, but I wanted to hear the details. When had Koizumi figured that out? I asked.

  “It was explained to us from the very beginning. Quite simply, actually. Can I borrow a notebook and pen?”

  I handed them over as asked, and looked on as in a graceful hand he first wrote the words “Yasumizu Watahashi” on the paper.

  “It’s a very simple anagram. It can be solved without any hints at all, so none were given to us. Reading this as it is should make the solution quite obvious.”

  I told him to cut the chatter and get on with it.

  “The reading of the kanji for ‘Yasumizu’ as ‘Yasumi’ was misdirection. This should be pronounced as ‘Yasumizu.’ If we write it out phonetically in the alphabet, it turns out like so—”

  —ya-su-mi-zu wa-ta-ha-shi

  “Then, if we rearrange the letters—”

  —wa-ta-shi-ha su-zu-mi-ya

  Watashi ha, Suzumiya.

  I am Suzumiya.

  Koizumi dropped the pencil on the notebook as though having proved his point.

  “Suzumiya unconsciously used her abilities. As a precaution, you see. That’s why the world was split. One was the world as it originally was. The other was a world that didn’t exist. Despite being unaware of it, she sensed the danger, and protected the world. If she hadn’t split reality, our enemies would’ve been able to do with you as they pleased. Essentially, she saved both you and Nagato.”

  So this was what it felt like to be at a loss for words.

  “As for when it began, I can only speculate. The last day of spring vacation and the first day of the semester both seem likely. At that point Suzumiya guessed what was going to happen. Subconsciously, of course. This was some kind of miracle. I suppose you could call it an unconscious prediction.”

  So far as I could remember, the world had been continuous until, still in the bath, I put the phone receiver my sister brought me to my ear.

  And then the world split—into one where Sasaki spoke to me, and one where Yasumi did.

  “Suzumiya was aware that a future awaited in which both you and Nagato were in danger. So that’s where she made her move. That’s what I’m calling the α route, where her other self appeared. Not only does she not know about her own power, she may not even want to know, to say nothing of whether the knowledge is accessible to her in the first place.”

  Koizumi’s face looked somehow terrified.

  “Yasumi Watahashi was Suzumiya’s unconscious instantiation. I say ‘unconscious’ because she represents actions taken literally outside the realm of her own awareness. Furthermore, even if Yasumi Watahashi did not disappear but instead was reintegrated into Suzumiya, Suzumiya herself has no knowledge of that. She is no more than a dream that disappears upon awakening. And who knows, she may well have been an actual dream. We may have been in an illusory world created by Suzumiya. It’s possible that we came perilously close to non-being becoming reality.”

  Don’t make me remember that again. Could Haruhi do anything?

  “It’s a mind-boggling thought. I’ve always taken a skeptical approach to the Haruhi-as-god theory, but I may have to revise my opinion.”

  I doubted she particularly wanted his worship, though.

  “When I said that Suzumiya was gradually losing her power, that may well have been a wrong guess. She is evolving. The possibility has emerged that she will be able to consciously control the manifestation of her emotional power. The deliberate actions of the speak of that possibility. Although she does still remain unaware. That’s precisely why it’s so awe-inspiring. If you sit down at a keyboard and randomly mash on the keys, the odds of you writing a sentence with meaning are so faint they’re near zero. But if you press them consciously, it’s trivial, is it not? She can do this without even being aware of it. She can completely ignore probabilities. She’s transcended godhood.”

  So there’s nothing more we can do, then, I said.

  “It’s just a guess. Psychoanalysis of Suzumiya is beyond my abilities—all the more so if she’s undergone some kind of apotheosis. Go read up on your mythology. The will and words of the gods are always mysterious and capricious. Sometimes even unreasonable. But it’s not the case that they have no affection for humanity. If there’s one thing we can learn from the strangely human faults they sometimes show, it’s that myths were written by humans. So what would be a god, to a god?”

  I had no idea either, I said, but it didn’t much matter either way.

  I asked about the relationship between Asahina the Elder and Fujiwara—or more to the point, about the time travelers’ theory of time.

  “We know from personal experience that it’s possible to split the time line. So long as it overwrote space-time, neither you nor I could notice it. Just like that last somewhere that we repeated how many tens of thousands of times. The fact that we have memories of two separate routes is paradoxical proof.”

  And?

  “The bifurcation that we experienced was thanks to Suzumiya’s manual alteration of space-time. However, we don’t know how that affected Asahina and Fujiwara’s future. They could have been from the same future, or individuals from different realities, or one of them could have been lying, or the possibility even exists that both of them were presenting false testimony. There’s no way to know for sure.”

  It didn’t seem like “classified information” was the only reason why time travelers didn’t talk about their true feelings, I said.

  “Indeed. This is only my intuition, but I feel that be it thanks to either natural phenomena or deliberate action, the future is split into many different paths. But the diverging routes to those destinations are limited, and they will eventually reconverge to a single path. And we’ve become conscious of one such divergence, then reconvergence—that is my guess. If I were to draw a diagram—”

  Koizumi picked the pencil back up, and started doodling lines in my notebook.

  “As I just mentioned, the path we were originally supposed to take was the β route. But then Suzumiya forcibly intervened and created the α route, which is what led us to where we are now. Who’s to say what would’ve happened without the α version of you and me, along with Yasumi Watahashi.”

  “On the other hand, if Asahina and Fujiwara’s futures are separate, then we can postulate it would look something like this, diverging thanks to some event, then converging again.”

  “There is also the possibility that there are futures that do not converge, remaining fragmented and unchanging. Asahina may have come back in order to prevent her own world from tapering off—to guide the flow of time such that it leads to her future.”

  Good grief. I couldn’t keep up with this. I wondered if Nagato could offer an alternate explanation… and as I was thinking about it, something totally different occurred to me.

  “This is changing the subject, but you and Mori… and Arakawa too, come to think of it—what’s your relationship? I just assumed that Mori was your boss.”

  Koizumi peered at me, an intrigued look on his face. “Now, why would you have thought something like that? Do you have any problem with the Agency?”

  “Mori always calls you by your name, but I was wondering what
she calls you when we’re not around.”

  He seemed momentarily taken aback, but Koizumi soon recovered his amused smile. “We’re all colleagues with the same goal. As such, we don’t have the kind of hierarchy that exists in a corporation. There are no superiors—everyone is the same. There’s no hierarchy among comrades. Mori is simply Mori. And she’s free to call me whatever she wishes.”

  Huh.

  Well, I’d leave it at that for now, I decided. I didn’t particularly want to know, and it was rude to pry.

  “Ah, there is one other thing. This is a trivial matter, but I thought I would let you know. It’s about the flower that Yasumi brought to decorate the room. I sent a photo of it to be analyzed, and it turns out that it’s a completely new variety—we could even assign fresh Latin taxonomy to it. She kept her promise—she was told to bring something interesting to the brigade, and she faithfully did exactly that. Despite being Haruhi’s alter ego, she might just be a little more charming than the original… though I suppose that’s a bit rude to say. In any case, I hope we can meet her again somehow.”

  Koizumi stood with a slightly bashful smile, and thus did my weekend meeting conclude.

  Incidentally, when I escorted him back downstairs, I should add that we encountered Nagato and my sister ignoring Shamisen in favor of a game of animal shogi. According to what I heard later, my sister had beaten her alien opponent several games in a row. I wonder about that.

  I still think about it sometimes.

  —What if.

  What if I had chosen Sasaki? What if I had switched sides from Haruhi to Sasaki, and joined up with that fake SOS Brigade? What if I had traded Koizumi for Kyoko Tachibana, gotten Kuyoh Suoh in exchange for Nagato, and discarded Asahina in favor of Fujiwara, finally siding with Sasaki?

  I might have been killed. Probably by none other than Ryoko Asakura. Third time’s the charm. Kimidori probably wouldn’t have stopped her. And there was no telling what Nagato would do in response. It was probably overestimating my own importance to imagine that Nagato would’ve really rebelled against the Overmind.