by Nisioisin
But Kanbaru also had an aberration lingering in her body, so if she could bathe without incident then there was nothing to worry about─except she’s a raging masochist, and she might enjoy the pain from her body melting a little bit.
“…”
What a caveat: except she’s a raging masochist.
One hell of an aberration.
Truly abnormal and irrational.
Able to be doubted again.
“Sure, if you want to get out, I won’t stop you. And if you want to come out of the changing room naked, I won’t stop you either.”
“Do stop me.”
“But first, Araragi-senpai, I want you to look at the surface of the water you’re in.”
“?”
I didn’t know what she was up to, but I reflexively did as Kanbaru said─not that I had to do much, since most of my body was immersed and the water was already taking up most of my field of vision.
“I looked. It’s a little late to be asking this, but…what’s up with the water?”
“It’s not the water.”
“Huh? What is it, then? I guess for baths you call it oyu instead of water, but─”
“No, no, that’s not what I meant. Look, I already told you, it’s not the water that I want you to look at.”
It’s the surface of the water, she reminded me.
The surface?
005
This little tidbit shocked me when I first heard it─but apparently the concept of “oyu” doesn’t exist in English. Or rather, there isn’t a separate word for it─the distinction between “oyu” and water is expressed as “hot water” and “cold water,” and they’re basically treated as the same thing.
It’s inconceivable to me as someone raised in Japan not to have a distinct word for “oyu,” but from a foreign perspective maybe the ambiguity of our word for water─“mizu”─is itself troubling. We make a distinction between “oyu” and “mizu,” but at the same time “oyu” is “mizu”─and while “mizu” refers to H2O, it can also refer to liquids in general.
No, forget about troubling, when you really think about it, that’s downright disturbing.
Anyway─Mademoiselle Hitagi Senjogahara, who shared that disturbing truth with me, also told me to Drop dead.
“Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.”
“…”
Eek.
She’s terrifying whether it’s sound-only or the full sensory experience… She starts out cranked to the max, so it doesn’t make much of a difference anyway.
I very nearly dropped my cell phone but somehow hung on and said, “I-I can’t die yet. We’ve only just fallen for each other. We’ve only just started going out. I want to go on so many more dates with you. It would be too painful to let go of life at this point.”
“Well now. That’s a very nice thing to say. Fine, you don’t have to die yet.”
“…”
You’re too soft, Miss Senjogahara.
Tell me to drop dead at least a couple more times.
Actually, she could quit being so open about her murderous desires if she was just going to back off at the drop of a hat─but whatever.
“In any case,” I returned to the topic at hand, “I ended up going over to Kanbaru’s today to clean up.”
Ultimately I got out of the bath and partook of Kanbaru’s reward, namely the supper party that she held for me. By the time we were done eating it was quite late, and they were about to lay out a bed for me, but on that, at least, I held firm─and somehow made it home before the clock struck midnight.
I got a lecture from my little sisters for staying out so late.
Usually when they lecture me it unfolds into a bloody civil war, but luckily for them I was too tired this time.
The bath had done a fair job of washing away the fatigue of cleaning Kanbaru’s room, but I was worn out from the tension of the supper that followed.
So ignoring my little sisters, I headed to my room─intending to fall asleep right away.
When I went to plug in my cell phone, however, I saw that I’d gotten an email and not noticed. An email from Senjogahara.
I could ignore my sisters, but not an email from her. Because she’s scary─partly, but we’ve been going out since the month before last, so even if she weren’t, I wouldn’t just ignore her.
Given the time, I figured it was a good-night message, but judging from the subject line “I hear you were in Kanbaru’s room,” it had more to do with surveillance.
There was nothing in the body.
Even the way she used email was scary…
Maybe it was a good-night-forever message.
And so I ended up calling Senjogahara and giving a detailed report of the day’s activities─faithfully and accurately.
It’d be terrifying if I got caught in a lie, and there was a dreadfully open line of communication through the mental hotline that connected the newly reborn Valhalla Duo, so any lie would most definitely be detected. In that sense maybe they should’ve been called the Valhalie-Duotector.
I was thoroughly whipped.
No, forget about whipped, I was downtrodden. They were walking all over me─Kanbaru treated me as a headrest, and Senjogahara treated me as a doormat. I didn’t have one iota of dignity left.
I oughta left my dignity in a safe-deposit box.
I wanted to ask Hanekawa to save me, but if Senjogahara was monitoring me, Hanekawa was supervising me; if she wasn’t already riding to the rescue, then she had no intention of saving me this time, whether I asked her to or not.
While I hadn’t told Senjogahara that I was going to Kanbaru’s house to clean (hence Kanbaru’s report to her), I had duly informed Hanekawa in advance─yikes…
Seriously, what the hell has happened to my life?
Zero free will.
I have to wonder, my decision to buckle down and study so that I could go to the same college as Senjogahara─was it really my own?
“Going to clean your junior’s room for her… Well, aren’t you the helpful one, Araragi─taking a bath though, that’s over the line. I think you really ought to drop dead.”
“Don’t think that.”
“It’s better than thinking ‘I’m going to kill you,’ isn’t it?”
“…”
Sure, but.
“So, Araragi. What did you make of Kanbaru’s story?”
“Hm?”
“The story─not the water, look at the surface, that one.”
“Oh, right…” I nodded.
My intention was to tell her what had happened faithfully and accurately, so I included the story as well, but not said anything about what I made of it.
“Yeah, I mean, it’s definitely a weird story. Or maybe not weird? I guess I should call it a romantic story─since Kanbaru’s father saw the face of his future wife on the surface.”
That was the story.
From the time he was little, Kanbaru’s father had seen the figure of an unfamiliar woman when he bathed in that cypress tub─not always, mind you, only occasionally, but either way, the woman with whom he’d elope one day was reflected for him there on the surface.
He didn’t pay it much mind since it was clearly some sort of illusion, and at some point he stopped seeing it. What, if anything, the illusion meant kept on tugging at some corner of his mind, however─so he had quite a shock the first time he laid eyes on Kanbaru’s mother, on Toé Gaen, in other words.
Almost as if.
They’d been destined to meet.
“Sounds like the kind of charm girls would be into,” I said. “Wasn’t there one like that, where you’d fill the sink with water, and it would reflect the face of your future husband or something?”
The story was about Kanbaru’s dad, so instead of a girl I ended up picturing a man in the prime of life, but the story took place when he was a kid, plus, they got married quite young, so it didn’t feel that off.
Romantic.
You could ca
ll it that, sure.
From the smattering of knowledge I’d acquired as a high school student just dipping his toes into the world of exam prep, a liquid surface could function as a sort of screen… But in that case, seeing his “soul mate,” or even just “the face of someone he’d meet in the future,” was pretty crazy.
This wasn’t like the sandbox.
Water is, of course, even more protean than sand─and while the cypress tub may have been an antique, there was of course nothing funny going on with the bottom of it.
“Hm,” said Senjogahara. “So when you looked at the surface of the water like Kanbaru asked, who did you see reflected there? Me? Or me? Or was it me?”
“Ugh!”
“Hanekawa? Kanbaru? Li’l Hachikuji?”
“You’re scaring me!”
I was quaking with fear.
“I didn’t see anyone… The only thing I saw was a normal reflection of my own face.”
“Wha? Are you trying to tell me that your soul mate is your precious self?”
“Oh shut up. What do you mean, my precious self?”
She always maintained such a level tone, why was this the only time she managed to sound properly surprised?
“There was a story like that, wasn’t there? A myth where a guy was so enamored of his own reflection that he drowned himself… What was it again?”
“You know perfectly well. You’re just trying to get me to say that I’m a narcissist.”
“Here’s another story. Once there was a dog that was carrying some meat in his mouth. When he saw his own reflection in the river, he wanted the meat that was ‘in’ the water too. So he started barking, and when he did the meat in his mouth fell into the river and was washed away… That kind of foolishness is what they call Araragism.”
“That’s not a word! Don’t try to make me the gold standard for foolishness. Anyway, the water just looked like regular water to me. And the surface seemed totally normal too.”
“Hmmm. So even though you’re a vampire, surfaces reflect your image.”
“No, I’m not a vampire anymore… I just have some lingering after-effects. My reflection appears in regular old mirrors too.”
“That reminds me, don’t they say vampires can’t cross rivers and can’t swim and stuff like that? Are you able to swim, Araragi?”
“Hm? Well, I haven’t tried, but…I wonder. I probably can, right?”
What about Shinobu, though?
While she was a little girl, her vampiric level seemed higher than mine… I got the sense that she was at the mercy of her identity.
“Well, whether or not an aberration was involved, it’s still a pretty strange story,” I said. “It’d be one thing if it were her mother, but her father…”
Not like I know all about her mother, but the simple fact that she’d bequeathed the “monkey” to Kanbaru suggested she had some connection to all that.
Especially considering how Kanbaru’s seemingly sound grandparents despised her even before she stole their only son from them.
“It seems more like a curse than a charm,” commented Senjogahara. “Sending your image to your soul mate.”
“You make it sound so scary. What are you trying to make Kanbaru’s mother out to be?”
“Juuust─” Senjogahara said in a playful tone. No, her tone was totally flat, only the stretched-out vowel was playful. “Kidding, hellooo.”
“…Right, of course you are.”
“I’d already heard that story from Kanbaru, though.”
“Huh?”
Just gonna drop that into the conversation, eh?
How about a “the fact is” at the beginning there or something?
“What. It’s not like I told you I hadn’t heard it. Me and Kanbaru go way back, of course I know about stuff like that. Seeing as you only just met her, if you knew something about her that I didn’t, that’s what would be shocking.”
“…”
As far as I could tell from this defense, she’d heard the story back in middle school, not after the recent rebirth of the Valhalla Duo.
“I didn’t mean any harm. I just wanted to savor how ridiculous you were, proudly relating to me this story you’d heard from Kanbaru.”
“That’s the cruelest thing I’ve ever heard…”
So damn cruel, even when she didn’t mean any harm? What kind of a person was she?
“Well, the truth is that I’d heard it but totally forgotten about it. I remembered partway through. Like, oh yeah, that rings a bell─then again, back when I was the one getting invited to Kanbaru’s house and being allowed to use the bath and stuff, I was a good kid, so I never said anything uncouth.”
“Huh?”
Um, uncouth?
What’s she talking about?
“Of course, unlike you I did share the tub with Kanbaru. Heheh, jealous, aren’t you?”
“That’s not what I want to ask about…”
Senjogahara and Kanbaru in the bath together?
Not jealous at all, more like scared.
Don’t wanna go anywhere near that.
“…What do you mean, you didn’t say anything uncouth?”
“I’m telling you I had a good personality at the time. In other words, I wasn’t a low-down, twisted, unpleasant woman like I am now.”
I gasped. A little too self-aware, aren’t we…
Heedless of my reaction, Senjogahara went on. “I’m saying that I didn’t boorishly offer my analysis of a love story that was romantic, and not a tale of an aberration─”
006
The epilogue, or maybe, the punch line of this story.
We don’t need to fall back on the Greek myth of Narcissus to say that people love themselves─in a biological sense in addition to self-love or self-infatuation.
They do so out of an instinctual hereditary drive to pass on their genes to future generations.
People hold themselves in high esteem, they idealize themselves.
Senjogahara was the one who said this.
“Huh? What? So, are you trying to tell me Kanbaru’s father thought his own reflection in the bathwater was his ‘soul mate’? I mean, come on, that…can’t be.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s idiotic.”
“Exactly, it’s an idiotic story. And pointing that out is like calling Kanbaru’s father an idiot, so I didn’t tell Kanbaru. I wouldn’t say something that harsh even now, so of course I wouldn’t when I was in middle school.”
“…That’s on the level of the fable you told about the dog. He’d realize. How could anyone in the world not recognize his or her own face?”
“No one in the world knows it that intimately. The face you see in the mirror is flipped left to right. In photographs and videos, the colors and sense of depth are completely different. We ourselves are actually the ones who’re least familiar with the us that people see.”
“That’s not what we’re talking about here…”
“For example, Araragi, people from other families all look alike, right? But the members of those families don’t think so. You and your sisters look disturbingly alike, but I bet you don’t think you look all that similar.”
“Disturbingly? Thanks for that…though I guess I see what you mean. But aren’t you just saying that it’s easier to tell people apart if you’re used to seeing them, than if you’re not? Like how a counterfeit might fool a layman, but an expert would be able to tell the difference─”
“Yeah. Well, no, but it’ll do.”
“No? Whatever, anyone looking at a face reflected in the water would at least be able to tell if it’s their own.”
“Not really. In a mirror, maybe─but…”
“…”
“A watery surface is moving, sparkling, it’s blurry─it’s not the same as looking in a mirror. You’ve heard of the uncanny valley, right? How with CG or robots or whatever, the more humanlike you make them look, the less human they seem─the dissimilarity actually become
s more distinct, and they start to seem creepier. I think you’ll agree that my metaphor is more accurate.”
