by Nisioisin
“I never asked you to take me to the storage.”
Messy.
Didn’t even begin to describe the room’s interior─to put it simply, it wasn’t just cluttered horizontally, but cluttered vertically. No, like I said, it was more than messy─it was chock full. The total chaos in the room wasn’t just a question of area, we’re taking about volume here…
“Storage? How rude. There are some things that even Araragi-senpai shouldn’t say.” Kanbaru grinned smugly. “Though that doesn’t happen to be one of them.”
“So you don’t mind having your room described that way…”
Well, to be honest, I did hold back in calling it the storage─my actual inclination was to call it a trash compactor.
I was starting to wonder if a place like the Kanbaru residence might actually have a trash compactor in it.
Or maybe it was more like a junkyard─piles of scrap metal towering menacingly overhead…
The room somehow seemed to be maintaining this precarious, not to say miraculous, state of balance, but if I impatiently stamped my foot, there might just be a teensy-weensy little avalanche out into the hall─where I therefore continued to stand aghast, not moving a muscle.
“…”
Suruga Kanbaru.
My strange bond with the former ace of the Naoetsu High basketball team, a second-year, had begun at the end of May─she’d been cronies with Senjogahara back in middle school, which also helped bring us closer together.
Our relationship isn’t actually so simple that such a simple explanation could explain it, though─if I can expand on the subject a little without derailing the story, she also got involved with an aberration, same as me, or more than me─and the vestiges of that remain in her left arm.
Wrapped up in a bandage.
Hidden under a bandage.
That said, if you forget about all that stuff, or even if you don’t, at this point Suruga Kanbaru had become my darling junior. Though for someone with no redeeming qualities, a total washout like myself, to refer to a superstar athlete (even a retired one) as “darling” might be overstepping my bounds…
The superlative athlete part aside, however, she was also an undeniably debauched and undisciplined woman.
For example, as we’re seeing, Suruga Kanbaru “didn’t pick up after herself”─the unvarnished truth is that she was a “slob.”
A chaoslob.
The first time I was shown into her room, I looked to the heavens for strength and promised that I’d find a time to come back and do a thorough cleanup. It hadn’t been all that long ago, but now that I’d found that time and actually come to clean up, the room was in such a state that I couldn’t even see the ceiling, let alone the heavens.
I’m no slouch when it comes to cleaning and organizing, in fact I can’t relax unless things are nice and orderly, but to be honest, in this case I didn’t even know where to begin.
I was frankly at a loss as to how to restore order to this storage of a room─the garbage bags I’d brought from home seemed laughably insufficient.
Ten 45-gallon bags.
What could I possibly accomplish with them? They’d be no use at all. What I needed wasn’t garbage bags but cardboard boxes. Though if it was cardboard boxes I wanted, this storage seemed a likely enough place to find some…
“Keheheh. So, how will Araragi-senpai go about cleaning up this room? Show me what you’ve got.”
“Get off your high horse.”
“High? Not at all. More like subterranean.”
“Terrifying. A voice from underground telling me to ‘show me what you’ve got’… Sounds like the series is heading into a whole new stage. Listen, you knew I was coming to clean up, so you crammed your room full of all the trash from every other room in the house just to fuck with me, didn’t you?”
One way to take care of the housekeeping, I guess.
Consolidate all the boxes and useless crap in one room, then clean all the other rooms one at a time. Seems kind of inefficient, like it’d end up requiring twice as much effort, but it would lower the difficulty level of the actual cleaning.
“What a thing to say, Araragi-senpai. Now you’re just showering me with accusations. Though I’m overjoyed to be showered with anything by you, be it praise.”
“I’d feel so stupid praising such a girl…”
“This is the only room I’ve got. I’m not the kind of spoiled rich kid who’s always been allowed multiple rooms. This is my one and only room.”
“Yeah? Well, thank god for small favors.”
“Yup. Just as Araragi-senpai is my one and only senpai.”
“That’s a lot of pressure!”
What about Senjogahara!
How can you call someone you only met a couple of months ago your only senpai in the world? I haven’t done anything to deserve that from you, and I probably never will.
“Wait a minute, though…I mean, it doesn’t make sense. With your room like this, where the hell do you sleep?”
“Here in my room, where else?” Kanbaru cocked her head, puzzled. “The only places I would lay my head are this room, Senjogahara-senpai’s lap, and your outstretched arm, Araragi-senpai.”
“I don’t know about Senjogahara’s lap, but my arm’s no pillow, and this room seems like a no-go too… You can’t even get inside, can you?”
“An amateur like yourself might think so,” Kanbaru casually insulted her honored senpai─I’d love to learn to be so insensitive, even if it’s from my junior.
Well, if she wanted to call me an amateur, I’d ask her to spell it out for me. I’m certainly not an expert─in anything.
“Okay then, let’s hear it. How do you manage to sleep in this room?”
The renowned polymath and genius Leonardo da Vinci is said to have slept standing up─shocking if true, but did Kanbaru do something along those lines? She was something of a genius when it came to sports, at least…and yet, it seemed impossible for anyone, even a genius, to so much as stand up in that room, let alone sleep…
“Heheheh. Now I’ve seen everything, Araragi-senpai. I never expected to live long enough to see the day when I could be the one to teach you something.”
“You’re only seventeen, plus we haven’t even known each other for a hundred days…”
She was already seeing the day, more like.
“Now quit putting on airs and tell me already. How do you sleep? If the punch line is that you sleep in the hall, I’m gonna kick your ass.”
“I wish that was the punch line. Boy, I’d love to get my ass kicked by you. I’d love to get a hall-slam instead of a wall-slam from you.”
“What’s a hall-slam?”
I mean, I get slamming your hand against a wall, like in a rom-com…
Geez.
We’d been talking all this time, and I still hadn’t set foot inside Kanbaru’s room.
We’re going to run out of tape before the intro’s even over.
“Are we talking about breakfast at Denny’s or something? A fluffy, buttermilk hall with two eggs, sausage and bacon on the side?”
“Hm. Well, anything’s possible, I guess there could be a hallway you’d want to slather with maple syrup, but… Let’s see, you were asking how I sleep, right? Okay, Araragi-senpai. Please, look. See that opening over there?”
Kanbaru pointed into her room.
Sure enough, there was an opening, or a cave dug out of the sheer cliff face…a kind of air pocket, I guess you might say, created by the precarious balance of the piled boxes.
“Sure, but what about it? You can’t possibly be telling me that you sleep in that crevice like a mole or something.”
“Oh, but I can. If I get a running start in the hallway and do a Fosbury flop, I can get myself in there.”
Kanbaru puffed out her chest like she was proud. Arching her back like she was doing a Fosbury flop… But leaping backwards into a place like that rather than a mattress or a sandbox could cause the kind of grievous inju
ry that would require immediate medical attention…
No need to bend over backwards just to sleep in your room.
If it’s that much of a pain in the ass, sleep in the hall.
“No, no, Araragi-senpai. The speed with which you come to conclusions is one of your many virtues, but it does sometimes invite lapses in judgment.”
“I don’t need any friendly advice from you, Kanbaru. My only lapse in judgment was agreeing to clean up this room. Well? So it’s comfy, your little cave?”
“It’s comfy.”
“Even if you don’t hurt yourself, it doesn’t seem like a pleasant place to sleep. Seems like your body’d be stiff as all hell by the time you woke up. You may not know this, Kanbaru, but sleeping is a biological necessity whose general purpose is to rest the mind and body.”
“I know that. Sure, it may not be the most cushiony place to sleep, but it fits me perfectly, like a sleeping bag, so it’s surprisingly comfy.”
“Really…”
“It can’t compare with Senjogahara-senpai’s lap, of course, but it’s certainly comfier than your arm.”
“Hold on just a second there! First let me state unambiguously that I’ve never once offered you my arm as a pillow, before retorting that being told a mountain of garbage is more comfortable than my arm is beyond dismaying!”
“Boy, you’re rolling up your sleeves to yell at me? No need to get so up in arms over an arm pillow.”
“Wipe that smile off your face and quit talking nonsense!”
To begin with, I hadn’t rolled up my sleeves.
I was wearing short sleeves. It was July, the middle of summer. There was nothing to roll up in the first place.
“Well, I may have slightly overstated the case.”
“You’ve never not overstated the case. Everything you say is an exaggeration. So? What case specifically did you overstate?”
“It’s true that a mountain of garbage is more comfortable than your arm, but…”
“…”
She wasn’t retracting that part.
She also admitted it was a mountain of garbage…
“But that comfort is a double-edged sword. Since that cave fits my body so perfectly, there isn’t room for someone else to share it with me,” Kanbaru said achingly.
Aching in both senses.
“If only you could sleep beside me in my cave, Araragi-senpai, it would outstrip Senjogahara-senpai’s lap─the perfect bed, perfected at last!”
“Take it down a notch!”
“I should have pointed this out sooner, but as you said earlier sleeping is a biological necessity undertaken to rest the mind and body, and in terms of physical needs, ‘sleeping’─”
“Dirty jokes prohibited!”
The banter had run its course.
Having bided my time, I girded my loins, so to speak, and finally turned my hand to cleaning Suruga Kanbaru’s room.
003
Upon reflection, I had in fact done some light organization the first time I visited Kanbaru’s room─if I hadn’t, there wouldn’t even have been anywhere to step.
That time, it felt like it’d be dangerous to go barefoot in there─like a minefield. Whether it’s rooms or thought processes, I know I’m more of a neat freak than most boys, but any human being confronted by that room would’ve been moved to do something about it.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that I underestimated the situation and assumed today’s task wouldn’t be so hard, having completed the preliminary preparations a couple of months ago.
If Kanbaru was neither fucking with me nor testing my mettle, then a certain lassitude born of the expectation that “Araragi-senpai will clean it up for me” was probably to blame for the fact that her room had ended up in this ignominious state in barely over a month.
And so as her senpai, as a senpai who should provide guidance to his juniors, the ethical and moral choice may have been to turn right back around and go home without lifting a finger to clean her room. But that’s life for you, we all make mistakes.
It’s a lot harder to stop doing something than it is to start.
I didn’t want to disappoint Kanbaru, but more importantly, I couldn’t let her go on living in a little cavern inside a mountain of trash. Also, her room’s initial overwhelming state simply stimulated my desire to clean up, just as it had the month before last.
While I had recoiled in horror, if I turned tail, Koyomi Araragi’s name would be mud.
The cleanup took hours─it’s no exaggeration that I started around noon, and night had fallen by the time I was finished. Ultimately, though, I did manage to clear out some breathing room.
“Frankly, I think some well-placed explosives might’ve been quicker…”
“Hahaha,” Kanbaru laughed cheerfully. “Hold off on the explosives, please. The house is made of wood, the whole thing’d be blown to bits.”
What’s so goddamn funny?
Just FYI, she didn’t help out with the cleanup one bit─only the bare minimum, telling me what was trash and what wasn’t from the sidelines.
Anyone observing us during those hours would’ve been convinced that she was the senpai─and that a junior had come over to help her move.
Compelled to do so under great duress.
“I’m pretty sure your grandparents would happily give me permission to carry out a bombing raid to get this mess cleaned up.”
“You just don’t get it. You have no idea how precious those books are.”
“They’re the first to go.”
First or not, it was a holiday so there was no trash pickup. All I could do was tie up all the unwanted crap with string or whatever and leave it in the courtyard─nothing to do but pray that it didn’t rain before trash day.
I wonder if I should help take out their trash as well…though maybe that was over the line, don’t want to get too involved in another family’s affairs.
“Anyway…good work, Kanbaru,” I said.
To be honest, I was the only one who’d done any work at all, be it good or bad, but I couldn’t come up with anything else. “We did it!” didn’t seem quite right either…
And if I’m being generous, I can see how watching someone else clean up for that long might constitute work in its own way.
Me, I hate it when someone else cleans my room…but with Kanbaru, who knows. Maybe she loved every minute of it.
I really don’t get this girl’s character at all.
Seriously, what’s her deal?
“Okay, I’m headed home. It’s already completely dark out─no need to overstay my welcome.”
“Hold it right there, Araragi-senpai, young man.”
“I’m sorry, but that’s just not the kind of thing you say to your senpai.”
She speaks in such a robust and cheerful manner that it’s hard to tell, but apart from calling me her dear senior, she doesn’t have time for actual polite speech.
“Do you really think I’d let an esteemed senpai just clean my room and go home, especially when that senpai is you, finest of them all?”
“‘Let’? Exactly what are you planning to do to me?!”
“Why be so alarmed…”
What do you take me for, Kanbaru said, pouting.
Why be pouting?
She’d given me plenty of reason to be alarmed.
“I just wanted to serve you some tea. Uh-uh, tea won’t cut it. A little supper, Araragi-senpai.”
“Supper? Oh, you mean dinner? No, I’m fine. I’m pretty sure they’ve got dinner waiting for me at home.”
“I can’t allow that. You’re not permitted to be fine.”
“Wha? I can’t be fine without someone’s permission? My junior’s?”
“Understand that until you’ve eaten my grandmother’s home-cooked supper, you won’t be leaving this mansion.”
“Is that a threat?”
And what the hell, her grandmother’s home cooking?
A little supper, she says, but she’
s not even going to make it herself…though any way you slice it, Kanbaru doesn’t seem like the type to be any good at cooking.
Her grandmother made the lunch she gave me that other time, too.
While cooking and cleaning may both come under the heading of housework, they are not, of course, directly linked. Still, someone skilled at cooking would, at the very least, be unable to remain impassive in the face of a room in such a disastrous state.
