Nekomonogatari (White)
Page 2
Going to school.
In any case, I would always have to return to that house in the end, and nothing could depress me more─and yes.
The act I’m describing is strictly “returning” to that house and not “going home.”
Tytyl and Mytyl realize in the end that the bluebird of happiness was at home all along, but where should someone with no home go to seek it out?
Perhaps she’s seeking the wrong thing?
Should she be seeking not a bluebird but─say, a white cat?
Anyway, if you’ll allow me to say something a little negative─even if the bluebird of happiness is at your own home, that doesn’t mean a beast of unhappiness isn’t lurking there, too.
As I walked pondering such thoughts─why, if it wasn’t a little girl with pigtails appearing in my way.
“My goodness. If it isn’t Miss Hanekawa.”
The little girl─Mayoi Hachikuji─turned around and approached me with a charming trot. Every move she made was just too adorable. I wondered how aware she was that her cuteness drove Araragi mad.
“It seems that classes are resuming today, Miss Hanekawa.”
“Yup. That’s right.”
“Applying yourself to your studies really is extraordinarily taxing. I may only be an elementary schooler, but I, too, spend my days overcoming one trial after tribulation. You could even call the crushing amount of coursework I faced during summer break its own kind of military history.”
“Huh…” Noting that the girl’s tongue never seemed to suffer any slips except when she was speaking to Araragi, I engaged her. “So what are you doing now, Mayoi?”
“Searching for Mister Araragi,” she said.
My goodness.
Now it was my turn to use the line.
I could understand Araragi wandering around in search of Mayoi, but the opposite was truly rare.
No, had something similar happened before? I wanted to say that Shinobu had gone missing then─could something like it have happened again?
“Oh, no,” Mayoi denied, picking up on my groundless concern from my expression. “It isn’t as if anything serious has happened. It’s only that I forgot a little something at Mister Araragi’s home, and I was hoping to have him return it to me.”
“You forgot something?”
“Just look.”
Mayoi presented me with her back.
I couldn’t find anything to look at there other than a cute little back, but when I gave it some more thought, the fact that there was nothing there was the strange part. What was charming about Mayoi was the big backpack she wore no matter where or when.
That backpack was absent.
What was up?
“Um, hold on. Mayoi, did you just say that you forgot something at Araragi’s house?”
“That’s right. He hauled me there yesterday,” Mayoi complained, her back still facing me. “And I carelessly forgot my backpack then.”
“Hauled?”
“Forcibly hauled.”
“You’re making it sound even more criminal…”
I decided not to pursue the matter any further. If I asked again, she might say she was assaulted. Whatever the case, Mayoi seemed to have forgotten her backpack at Araragi’s home.
What a bold thing to forget.
“In that case, why don’t you just go to Araragi’s?”
Her coordinates were all wrong.
Why was she here?
“I of course began by visiting the gentleman’s home. But he seemed to have already left, and his bike was nowhere to be found.”
“Hm? Does Araragi leave for school this early, though?” While I do, wanting to get out of the house as soon as possible, even if Araragi wanted to, his sisters wouldn’t let him go so easily. You could say he’s in a constant mild state of house arrest, so if he left home early, he must have had something very important to do before heading to school… “Or he must have finished having something very important to do and hasn’t come home since last night.”
It wasn’t that he left early.
Maybe he hadn’t come home yet.
“Ah, the thought never occurred to me. I should have known I could count on you for an impressive feat of inference. Yes, that is a possibility. Perhaps an intractable case came up after I somehow managed to flee from Mister Araragi’s home.”
“Yeah.” I decided to ignore the fraught, already plenty intractable somehow managed to flee. Pursuing it any further felt like it might shine a light on a lot of regrettable facts.
“But whatever the case, it seems unlikely that Mister Araragi would have gone straight to school at this hour, which is why I’m here, bravely searching for him at random.”
“Looking for people isn’t your strong suit, Mayoi, is it?” What sort of haphazard approach was she taking? Did she really expect to find him that way? It wasn’t just a shot in the dark, she didn’t know which way she was aiming.
“Well, well, but it’s exactly what led me to you, Miss Hanekawa. My tracking abilities are nothing to sneeze at.”
“How forward-looking…”
“Be that as it may, I don’t know whether or not you could count yourself fortunate for having met me today.”
“Hm? Why? People in my circle say that anyone who meets you is guaranteed to have something good happen that day. You’re spoken of as a lucky item.”
“Please stop making up strange legends about me…”
My source, of course, was Araragi.
No one can outdo him when it comes to spreading false rumors.
He has what it takes to be a pretty good teller of ghost stories.
“Okay, if I see Araragi at school, I’ll tell him you were looking for him.”
“Thank you very much,” Mayoi said, politely bowing down her little head, before going back the way she came in her still-charming trot.
Obviously, Mayoi doesn’t have long conversations with me the way she does with Araragi. I envy him for being able to talk on the same eye level with cute little girls like Mayoi, and yes, I suppose I envy Mayoi for being able to chat on and on with Araragi.
Araragi seems to find it completely natural.
To me, it’s far more of a miracle than anything I do.
I’m jealous.
“Well, then! Let us meet again soon, Miss Hanekawa!”
Mayoi was kind enough to turn around once more and wave her hand from a distance.
I waved back.
“Yep! See you later!”
“What’s about to happen with me and Mister Araragi is an episode for the next volume!”
“Don’t be so crass with your foreshadowing.”
That wasn’t even foreshadowing, it was just an ad for a program.
Following in Araragi’s footsteps, I at least managed to get one quip in at the end.
004
Meet an aberration and you’ll be drawn by aberrations─they say.
Apparently.
Whether they mean drawn in, drawn together, drawn out, or even drawn and quartered, the possibilities seem closely related if you really think about it, making it all a chaotic mess─but according to Mister Oshino, people who have “encountered” an aberration, even once, are more likely to meet one again for the rest of their lives.
He said there was no rhyme or reason to it, but I think you can assign one. A realistic reason, nothing mysterious or inexplicable.
It could of course just be my tricky, bad habit of ascribing a reason to everything.
Basically, though, it’s a matter of memory and cognition.
Everyone has experienced learning a new word or phrase and suddenly running into it everywhere.
For example, when I learned about “jellied meats,” I was inundated with them whether I was reading a newspaper or novel or watching television or a film.
It’s not just words. The same phenomenon occurs with music and names, too.
If you know it, you know it.
You know it more the more you know i
t.
Knowledge equals cognition, memory.
It’s just what you know.
In other words, a circuit for recognizing “it” has formed in your head, and from out of the torrent of information flowing into you each day, you’re able to scoop up what you used to ignore.
Aberrations are everywhere.
Aberrations are only there.
It’s merely a question of whether or not you notice them.
That’s why the first time is so important.
Your very first is your most important one.
For Araragi, it was a demon.
For Miss Senjogahara, it was a crab.
For Mayoi, it was a snail.
For Sengoku, it was a snake.
For Miss Kanbaru, it was a monkey.
For Karen, it was a bee.
And for me─it was a cat.
Now, if you’re wondering why I’ve started to talk about this all of a sudden, it’s because there was one in front of me at that moment.
One what?
An─aberration.
“Ack…”
Normally, in encountering an aberration, people must think: Ghosts aren’t supposed to exist in this world, yokai aren’t supposed to exist in this world, what I’m looking at can’t be an aberration.
They must.
But at that moment, I was thinking nothing but the absolute opposite.
I was wishing with all my heart that “it” was an aberration in front of me.
After all─a tiger?
It was a tiger.
A tiger, prowling right in front of me.
Yellow and black stripes.
The very picture of a tiger.
It happened soon after I saw Mayoi off─I turned the corner and there was the tiger. No, even phrasing it that way imparts no sense of reality, no taste of an actual occurrence.
Since it doesn’t, it had to be unreal.
It had to be an aberration.
Actually, it was going to be an issue if it wasn’t an aberration, whatever the facts of the matter─I stood less than fifteen feet from it. I could almost reach out and touch its stripes. If the tiger were real and not an aberration, say one that had escaped from a zoo, my life was surely over.
I was so close that I couldn’t even run.
I’d be eaten.
Humbly accepted into its stomach.
I’d be passing the baton along in the race of life.
By the way, they say that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, but any excessive aberration is indistinguishable from reality, too.
Its uniquely feral scent, its even majestic presence, it was all so intense that lacking in reality, it yet seemed like realness itself; but I was okay, the dearly beloved television anchor hadn’t said a word about a tiger escaping from its zoo.
<…nn>
The tiger─growled.
It didn’t care to let loose an affected
Then, coming to a halt, the tiger glared at me.
Oh no.
Our eyes had met.
Whether the tiger was real or an aberration─meeting eyes was a bad idea.
With a real tiger, of course, that was reason enough to get attacked─and if it was an aberration, it recognizing me was bad news, almost as bad, no, even worse than me recognizing it.
I instantly averted my gaze.
I put the tiger outside of my visual field.
Though this didn’t provoke the tiger into moving, again, at the same time, I couldn’t move from my spot, either─whether it was animal or aberration, my reaction to it ended up being lukewarm.
If I wanted to run, I should have run─why wasn’t I running away?
I’d be safe if I just ran.
Why not do it?
I.
“……”
How long did I stand there like that?
People often describe these situations as seeming to take hours, or the opposite, as happening in a flash, but to be honest with you, I didn’t have the space to think about it at all.
I have a surprisingly narrow mind.
Able neither to be here nor not here, which makes me sound like an aberration myself─and then, at last.
Thus─spoke the tiger.
Aberration confirmed.
As someone who’d never seen the creature we call a tiger up close before, I had no sense of perspective for this subject that had been fifteen feet ahead, but as soon as it passed by my side, it was impressed upon me that the position its torso occupied was higher than my head, that it was too huge, once again, to be real.
I probably shouldn’t have turned around.
If it was passing by me, I ought to have let it pass─it had decided to take its eyes off of me, so why follow it with my own?
But I.
White.
White─and how transparently so.
Ensnared by the words the tiger had spoken to me, I thoughtlessly, carelessly─
Turned around.
How completely foolish.
I’d hardly learned my lessons from first term, including Golden Week. How was I going to take Araragi to task about anything now?
No, when it comes to me.
I’m far worse than Araragi.
“…Oh.”
But, fortunately.
Or maybe not? It’s difficult to say.
Well, of course, it clearly wasn’t. But.
There was nothing there when I turned around─forget tigers, there wasn’t even a cat.
Just a plain street.
The same path to school as always.
“Oh, jeez.”
I said that not because the tiger had disappeared but having glanced at the watch on my left wrist.
Eight thirty.
It seemed like I was going to be tardy for the first time in my life.
005
“You have to hear this, Miss Senjogahara. I met a tiger on my way to school today.”
“Did you, now. So, Miss Hanekawa, am I obligated to listen to the details of this story? When you say ‘You have to hear this,’ is that not just a lead-in but an earnest request?”
As we’d walked in little groups back to our classrooms after the beginning-of-term ceremony, I’d run up to Miss Senjogahara, who was in my class.
Then I’d told her about my morning.
With a slightly bothered expression, however, she’d treated me to an openly bothered reaction.
Yet instead of pushing me away altogether, she urged, “What?”
She’d chopped off her hip-length hair at some point during summer break before going straight to her grandparents’ home on her dad’s side, so I wasn’t sure about Araragi, but a short-haired Miss Senjogahara was a new sight for me.
She always had very neat features, and any hairstyle, short or long, would look like a perfect fit on her, but the trim wiped out any trace of the air of a “cloistered princess” that surrounded her during our first term. It stirred quiet controversy among the rest of our classmates (possibly more than when I cut my hair), but in my opinion, “cloistered princess” is almost an insult for a high school girl, so this was good.
“Did you just say a tiger, Miss Hanekawa? Not a cat?”
“Yup. Not a cat, but a tiger.”
“Not a tiger-striped cat?”
“Nope. A tiger-striped tiger.”
“Not a tiger-striped striped hyena?”
“I think that would be a regular striped hyena, but nope, it wasn’t.”
“Don’t you think more people would be happy to earn stripes if we called them hyenas?”