by Nisioisin
“A-ha. Meaning?”
“Well, this is a pretty boring, realistic interpretation, but I bet somebody, I don’t know who but somebody, started worshipping some stone that had landed in the flowerbed as if it were a god─I mean, a shrine doesn’t just appear out of thin air. A person’s got to build it.”
“A vampire, on the other hand, might be able to manifest one.” Oshino turned his eyes to the little blond girl in the corner.
True, there were exceptions.
“But that shrine was obviously a human creation,” I objected. “It seemed that way to me, anyway. Though I’m not a hundred-percent certain…”
“Hm.”
“So in this case the somebody is plural, in other words an unspecified number of students started a little religion, or a faith group kind of a thing, and took that stone as their object of worship… Something like that?”
I wasn’t expressing myself well, and it was hard to put into words what the relevant questions were in this case, but the idea that a bizarre faith had sprung up at my school was definitely unsettling.
Or flat-out frightening.
“People have freedom of religion, ya know. It’s guaranteed by law,” Oshino reminded me.
“Right, no question about that─in this case, though, it’s clear from Hanekawa’s testimony that two short years ago this now-deified stone was nothing but a lump of rock─doesn’t that kind of give you the creeps?”
Unlike Naoetsu High, which had only been around for eighteen years, not long enough to develop a “school ghost story,” this venerated stone had just been a rock sitting by the roadside up until a couple of years ago, and that was difficult for me to accept.
I think that’s what it was.
“An aberration doesn’t have to have a history or pedigree, though,” answered Oshino, “since new aberrations are being born, being produced, all the time.”
“When something creeps you out, it’s because some kind of malign influence might be involved. That’s my hunch, and I believe that’s what Hanekawa’s worried about. In other words, someone’s knocked together this sham religion, fabricated this object of worship, and is taking a bunch of students for a ride─”
“For a ride? To rip them off for some cheap candy?”
“Well, I dunno.”
“If someone was going to take them for a ride, you’d think they’d do a proper job of it─I haven’t seen it for myself, Araragi, but as far as I can tell from your crude drawing, the construction of the shrine is itself quite crude. About as crude as the drawing.”
“Oshino. I’m well aware of how bad I am at drawing, but it hurts my feelings to hear someone else say it, okay?” Don’t make it sound like my crude drawing has made a crude shrine even cruder.
“Anyone who’s trying to take them for a ride would build a more impressive shrine, don’t you think? In order to fool people, work on the design─or so says a friend of mine.”
“Like you have any friends.”
“You’re right. Maybe not a friend.”
I was trying to get back at him by hurting his feelings, but not only did I fail, Oshino even smiled in apparent delight.
What the hell went on in his mind? It was a mystery.
“Not to mention, in that guy’s case, it might’ve been just another lie,” mused the expert. “Putting that aside, Araragi, how does it strike you?”
“Well, sure, I guess it makes perfect sense. If you were trying to take them for a ride, you wouldn’t use such a childish shrine. If you can’t build one yourself, you might outsource the construction. So then, is it a genuine religion? It’s part of their creed that they have to build the shrine themselves, no matter how broke-ass it is? I know we have freedom of faith in this country, but all the same, founding a new religion at your school is kind of…”
And why would anyone want to worship a rock that was just sitting there like that? It would be one thing if it were some kind of precious stone… Then again, maybe it was some kind of insane power stone, and Hanekawa and I just couldn’t pick up on it?
“You’d sense something from a power stone, wouldn’t you, in your present condition─hmm. Okay, listen, Araragi. This is the message I want you to relay to missy class president. Knowing her, it’ll tell her everything she needs to know.”
Forget about the “school ghost story” angle for the moment, the ever-smirking Oshino advised─for some reason with an even jollier expression than usual.
“Now try taking a look at the Naoetsu High curriculum. The lot of the student is to study, after all.”
005
The next morning.
In homeroom, when I told the overly sagacious Tsubasa Hanekawa what the all-seeing expert Mèmè Oshino had said, she paused a moment then went, “Ah,” as though it indeed told her everything she needed to know.
What the hell was up with the both of them? It was scary.
Since the village idiot over here naturally didn’t understand any of it, I did my best to avoid voicing such rude sentiments and simply asked, “What’s it all mean?”
“Hm? Oh, no, just that I was jumping at shadows this time around─man, I really let you and Mister Oshino see an embarrassing side of myself. Not just a swing and a miss, a full-on strikeout.”
“That still doesn’t tell me anything… An embarrassing side of yourself? Did I miss something? Come on, what do you mean?”
“Nothing, really. This might sound like bullshit, but I had my doubts all along. If people were going to worship something, they’d do a better job of it─still, it was the very defectiveness of that half-assed object of worship and half-assed shrine that gave you the creeps and unsettled Mister Oshino, and that’s what was worrying me. I’m glad it was a false alarm.”
“Hanekawa, hang in there, I know you can find a way to explain it that even I can understand.”
“Hang in there?” Our class president’s face twisted into a wry smile. Apparently my wording had tickled her. “Listen, once all the evidence is neatly lined up, everything turns out to be totally fine. Up until now, you and I had both been focusing on the rock itself, right?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah…but what’s there…apart from the rock?”
“The shrine. Focus on the shrine.”
“The shrine?”
“Yes, the shrine. If we’d focused our attention on it instead, we never would’ve had to bother Mister Oshino.”
Bother my ass, all he did was sit in an abandoned building and listen to me talk…
“Focus our attention on the shrine… Where does that get us? That raggedy-ass─”
“Okay, um, I’ll put this as plainly as I can. I’m pretty sure the rock wasn’t put in a shrine in order to be worshipped─it was chosen as a thing to put in the shrine.”
“How’s that different?”
“It’s totally different. A shrine is only ever the container and not the object of worship─so at least, we can discount the possibility that there’s some bizarre religion at the heart of all this.”
“Still sounds the same to me. If there’s no religion involved, doesn’t that mean somebody was trying to pass off some sham religion─”
“No, that was our false assumption,” Hanekawa said. “Since that shrine wasn’t originally built to be a shrine.”
“…?”
“About the Naoetsu High curriculum─I don’t have to look at it again to understand because I’d checked it out before I took our exams.”
So she’d done that, after all.
Gives me the willies.
“Look, when we were first-years, we had to pick an art elective─I took fine art, but they also offered calligraphy and technical arts, didn’t they? Mister Oshino was specifically nudging me to consider the curriculum for the technical arts class.”
“Technical arts?”
“Yup. You know, woodworking and stuff. And the curriculum for that class includes a freestyle shed construction project─something along those lines, anyway.”
“…”
“I didn’t actually take it so I can’t say for sure, but I can only assume that the shrine in question was a shed built for that class.”
“…”
“And judging from the workmanship, I’d say it was a reject─this is just a theory, mind you, but I think this is more or less how it went: Some student tried to build a shed for technical arts but botched it. Having built the thing in class, the student was instructed to take it home. It would just get thrown out once he or she got it home, though, so off this student went to the garbage area to surreptitiously get rid of it. And passed by the flowerbed on the way.”
True enough.
There was a garbage area near the flowerbed.
A piece of junk that large wouldn’t fit in the classroom trashcan, so the logical course of action was to take it outside and put it straight into the garbage.
“As our hypothetical student passed by, he or she laid eyes on the rock in question─or maybe tripped over it, like I almost did. Either way, finding this appropriately sized rock, the student figured that even a botched job might look surprisingly good with a rock in it…”
It wasn’t that the rock looked like a stone statue─because it was inside a shrine.
It was that some scraps of wood looked like a shrine─because there was a rock in it.
Like the simulacrum phenomenon─or, not quite.
But a reject.
A botched job, ceased to be a botched job.
“So it was the opposite─the reverse,” I managed to get out, in a trembling voice.
“Yup. Of course, it isn’t any less crude, but at least it went from being a botched job bound for the dump to looking like a shrine─a shed, so the student just took off and left it there. Thus a stone statue worthy of worship was born.”
“What about the altar…and the offerings of candy?”
“I assume the altar got there in more or less the same way. I don’t know if it was for class or a club or what, but some other student must have ‘botched’ a project and figured it’d look like an altar if it were left in front of the shrine… As for the candy, I imagine either the gardener or some students passing by the flowerbed had some with them and left it there for no particular reason.”
“…You mean they just kind of leave an offering because it seems like the thing to do, and not out of anything as overblown as faith?”
“An offering, or maybe they just left whatever candy they hadn’t eaten during the day before going home… It was always a possibility, but if the stone isn’t religious in origin, then that’s the most likely scenario.”
Right…
Cheap candy─not even loose change─has a strong “I chucked what was left over” vibe…
“I don’t know who’s in charge of the flowerbed,” I said, “but wouldn’t that person dispose of a shrine that suddenly showed up one day?”
“Nah, most people don’t destroy something that looks like a shrine without a second thought. Why invite divine retribution.”
“Fair enough…”
And after a while, they start to take its existence for “granted,” I suppose.
They don’t ask where it came from.
They take for granted─the “gratitude” they feel for its grace.
“…”
“Phew, I feel so much better!”
Hanekawa stretched happily.
For someone like her, “not understanding something” must be a source of stress, because she smiled as if she really did feel much better.
“I see… Something still doesn’t sit right with me, or rather, I’ve got some feelings about that conclusion─”
“Forget about it. It’s all thanks to you, Araragi.”
“Huh? It is?”
“I mean, wouldn’t you say Mister Oshino was only able to figure it out because you told him the shrine ‘rings a bell’? Even he couldn’t if he didn’t base his judgment on the proper material─and how could he predict what the curriculum of a ‘closed space’ like a school might contain? It’s not because it was modeled on something that you recognized it, it’s because you’d made something like it yourself for class. The art elective you took was technical arts, wasn’t it?”
“Well, yeah…that would be it.”
I hadn’t seen it at a temple or by the side of the road.
I’d seen it─in the school woodshop.
When Oshino demanded that I draw a picture of it, probably it was just to learn the shrine’s shape─but witnessing my reaction when I recalled as I drew, he hit upon the truth. That was how it had gone.
That was how, but…
“Okay, case closed─wait, Araragi, where are you going? Class is about to start. Hey, c’mon, don’t run in the halls─”
006
The epilogue, or maybe, the punch line of this story.
Paying no heed to Hanekawa’s injunction, I ran down the hallway and out of the building towards the quad, to the flowerbed, and once there I picked up the shrine housing the rock that resembled a stone statue and smashed it on the ground.
“Huff, huff, huff, huff…”
I mean.
There was no point in smashing it at this point─but I couldn’t help myself, I completely dismantled the shrine, reducing it to its constituent scraps of wood.
Even if I hadn’t, the second it no longer surrounded the rock, it was nothing more than that─in any case, I carried the scraps over to the garbage area.
The completion of a trip begun two years earlier.
“…”
Yes.
Needless to say, I was the one who had built the shrine for woodworking two years earlier and left it in the flowerbed, more or less just as Hanekawa surmised, instead of bringing it home.
The reason it rang a bell wasn’t that I’d made something like it myself for class─I’d made it myself.
I’d completely forgotten about it.
Even if I couldn’t remember things from two years back like Hanekawa could, this was pushing it. I’d said all kinds of horrible things about it, called it a crude, childish, raggedy-ass shrine, but it had been my own handiwork all along.
Now I understood Oshino’s detestable little smile.
He must’ve been holding in a massive burst of laughter─Hanekawa might have shown us an embarrassing side, but it was nothing compared to me.
Happily, Hanekawa (who probably assumed that no one could forget, so completely, something that happened only two short years ago) didn’t seem to have caught on yet…but I was so ashamed that I didn’t feel like I’d ever be able to look her in the eye again.
That said, my attendance record was dangerously poor and she had ordered me to turn over a new leaf, so if school was about to start, I had no choice but to return to the classroom.
As I trudged away from the garbage area, I caught sight of the stone that up until recently had been ensconced in a shrine. Yup, now it just looked like a regular old rock.
Nothing but a rock.
Immobile.
The offerings of candy were still there, but that alone wasn’t enough to make it look like a stone statue or an object of worship─if someone cleaned up the cheap candy, no one would ever leave another offering there again.
It made me feel a little guilty about having destroyed the shrine in the throes of my humiliation. Having built it myself, though, I knew better than anyone that absolutely no divine retribution would be forthcoming…
Yet I still felt a little bad for that rock. Thanks to my sheer laziness and shame at the thought of taking my failed creation home, it had been on a real rollercoaster ride, now worshipped as a god, now reduced to a regular old rock.
Apologizing to a rock is kind of weird, but… I entered the flowerbed and lifted the stone off the ground.
Is it worshipped because it’s an aberration, or did it become an aberration because it was worshipped, Oshino had asked.
Undeniably, this rock had “gone” so far as to receive offerings, even i
f they were only cheap candy. Realizing how my unprincipled behavior might have turned it into an aberration made me feel even worse.
A stone we took for granted.
Became a statue whose grace we took to heart.
It could have turned into a graceless aberration─its origins no longer relevant.
Graceless or not, it would have come to be taken for granted.
