Nekomonogatari (White)

by Nisioisin

  It was gone now.

  That home where I’d spent fifteen years of my life.

  It was lost forever.

  I asked my teacher if I could leave early despite having arrived late, and of course I immediately received permission. I’m not Miss Kanbaru, but I ran back to the house, and while the area was surrounded by fire engines and onlookers, it had already been put out.

  Put out.

  And nothing was left.

  Though the fire hadn’t spread to any neighboring homes, the Hanekawa residence was what you’d call razed, without a single column remaining.

  Extremely beneficial in making a fire insurance claim, that status was perhaps a saving grace. As vulgar as that sounds, it’s of paramount importance.

  Oh, wait. No, no.

  Of paramount importance, naturally, are human lives─but there was no need to worry about that. I’d been at school, and there was close to no chance that the “other two” who should be called my parents would ever return to the house in the morning.

  None of the three inhabitants─considered it a home.

  It was a place, not a home.

  But Roomba must have gone up in flames, I mourned the passing of the automatic vacuum cleaner that tirelessly woke me up each morning.

  Mourned more than the house.

  A lot of other things in addition to Roomba, or rather, everything had gone up in flames, but I was a mere high schooler with no remarkable possessions. That wasn’t going to be a problem for me.

  If you insist, losing all my clothes was a complication.

  Actually, it might have been the same for the persons who should be called my father and my mother─neither could have been keeping anything important in the house.

  They must have kept anything valuable at work.

  That was how I saw it.

  That house.

  It wasn’t a place for keeping anything of value.

  They’d get dirty.

  In any case, this just meant I was full of things I didn’t know─you only ever notice some stuff after a house burns down.

  I’ve never met the man in person, but was this one of those lessons to take home with me that the fraud, Mister Deishu Kaiki, likes to speak of?

  I wasn’t sure.

  I didn’t know.

  But whether or not I knew─this definitely meant I was being put out on the street.

  I had spots to go to for no particular reason on days off because I couldn’t stand being at home, but how fortunate I had been to have a place where I could go to bed─either way, the Hanekawas ended up having their first family discussion in a while as a result of this incident.

  A discussion?

  Well, even I can imagine that normal families wouldn’t call that a discussion.

  It wasn’t anything close to a family meeting.

  It was an exchange of opinions.

  Not social interaction.

  A house burning down naturally necessitated a lot of different complicated procedures─we didn’t even know the cause of the fire yet. It was frightening, there were even suspicions of arson─so it was going to be a long-term problem, not something that could be handled by me, who was still a child. What we discussed that day was our most pressing problem. In other words, where we would sleep that night.

  With no nearby relatives the Hanekawas could rely on, there wasn’t a whole lot of room for debate. We ended up booking the nearest hotel─but even that was a problem for us.

  The biggest problem, you could say, or maybe the single issue.

  We hadn’t slept in the same room in a very long time.

  There was me of course, who slept in the hallway, but even the married couple slept in different bedrooms. We couldn’t get two or three rooms at a hotel when it would only make this more expensive─

  “I’m fine. I’ll get a friend to let me stay with them for a while.”

  Before the discussion could get too deep, I said that.

  I proclaimed it.

  “Dad, Mom, this is a great chance for you two to spend some time alone together as husband and wife.”

  I wasn’t saying this as an excuse, but as how I truly felt, and I knew that was part of what made me so frightening and inhuman─I’d learned over Golden Week that it was one of my flaws.

  I didn’t want to go to bed in the same room as those two.

  Those personal feelings were no doubt there, but I was putting them far, far aside─and it was very unnatural.

  I knew that.

  Seeing the fire as a great chance didn’t exactly make me human.

  Araragi and Mister Oshino had taught me that.

  A lesson.

  Here I was, not having put it to use─but I just couldn’t help thinking those two might go back to being the way they ought to be.

  I was able to think it.

  Namely, that this could be the last chance for those two, who planned on getting divorced as soon as I ceased to be a minor.

  I thought so.

  It would take several months to rebuild the house when you factored everything in, and if they spent a few weeks alone together for the first time in fifteen years before we found a place to rent─then just maybe something could happen.

  I did think so.

  I was able to think so.

  I wanted to think so.

  The two agreed right away.

  They didn’t even try to stop me when I conveyed my intention to stay at various friends’ houses. In fact, they were visibly happy that I’d suggested it myself.

  Well, of course they were.

  It was easier for the two of them to be alone than for the three of us to be alone. The fire might have been a reasonably welcome thing for them, too, in that it let them drive off a source of annoyance in their lives.

  They were delighted.

  And I was happy that they were delighted, so I had to be pretty insane.

  007

  It put me in a difficult situation, though.

  Well, I was from the start, but the greatest difficulty now was the fact that I didn’t have any friends who could let me stay with them for a while.

  I have friends.

  I wouldn’t say a lot of them, because my personality is a little problematic, but I feel like I have the kinds of friendly relationships at school that any average student would.

  On that note, Araragi likes to talk about how few friends he has, almost boasting rather than roasting himself, but that is the one claim he makes that I will vouch for.

  He isn’t lying. It’s not an exaggeration, he doesn’t have friends.

  Actually, he was comporting himself so as not to make any friends, for a long time─according to him, it would lower his intensity as a human, or something.

  He really believed and really said that.

  While he seems to have abandoned that philosophy, he’s still in the thick of rehabilitation, and I’ve never seen him speak to another boy in our class.

  In fact, I’ve never seen him speak to anyone other than me and Miss Senjogahara.

  I wonder if he knows that just as Miss Senjogahara used to be the “cloistered princess,” he’s still being called the “unmovable silence.”

  So compared to him, I have friends.

  People are friends with me.

  But when I really think about it, I’ve never stayed over at a friend’s house.

  I have zero experience with so-called sleep-overs─hmm.

  Now that I’m thinking about it, why is that?

  I so loathed spending time at the house, but I never authentically “ran away,” either─

  Araragi would say it’s because I’m a model student, and he probably isn’t mistaken, but just maybe Miss Senjogahara’s view is the right one.

  In other words:

  Have you ever asked him to save you?

  Not just Araragi.

  I bet I can’t seek help from anyone other than myself─I don’t want to entrust anything decisive to others.

 
; I don’t want to let go of the casting board.

  I want to define my life on my own.

  And so─I became a cat.

  An aberration.

  I became me.

  “Well, it should be fine. I do have a lead, fortunately.”

  Saying so, not really even speaking to myself but to give myself courage, I began walking, my school bag the only thing I carried. It was the start of a new trimester, our beginning-of-term ceremony, so I had only my pencils and notebooks inside it, nothing much. But it was now my sole possession.

  A single bag being the sum total of my belongings made me like Anne Shirley when she first appears─I somewhat enjoyed my predicament, quite inappropriately, so I guess I’m not entirely grave and serious, after all─and as for my lead, it must be obvious.

  The ruins of that abandoned cram school.

  Apparently it was called Eikow Cram School while it was still in business.

  The place where Mister Oshino and Shinobu had lived for about three months─and Araragi lived there too over spring break. So no matter how ruined it looked, it had to feature a bare minimum of facilities a person needed to stay the night.

  That was my read on it.

  A proper floor and a roof over my head weren’t to be taken for granted.

  While it was far away on foot, I wanted to save money, considering what I faced, and didn’t use the bus.

  Mister Oshino used to have a barrier around the place that made it harder to reach than you thought, but it had been removed by now.

  You just needed to follow the path.

  And you’d get there.

  There was obviously no electricity in the building, so I needed to prepare a place to sleep while it was still bright out.

  Didn’t Mister Oshino and Araragi put desks and chairs together to create beds?

  In that case, I’d follow their example.

  I passed through the fence, entered the ruins, and began by climbing the stairs to the fourth floor─I chose it because Araragi had told me that Mister Oshino frequently resided there.

  In other words, I imagined that the fourth floor was easier to live on than the others, given the living patterns of the previous inhabitant─but this was a swing and a miss.

  Or maybe it was closer to striking out.

  The first classroom I entered on the fourth floor had a hole in the ceiling.

  The next classroom had an opening in its floor.

  Not even a proper floor or roof above my head…

  As for the remaining classroom, it was so messy it seemed like a wild animal had been set loose inside─almost like Araragi and Mayoi had one of their wild free-for-alls or something.

  I felt a tinge of regret. Maybe I’d been too hasty.

  I’d been sure the place wasn’t this bleak…

  Though I already had this location in mind when I declared my intent to stay at various friends’ houses, it was actually a harsher environment than I’d imagined.

  Forcing a smile and doing my best to feel excited, I went down to the third floor─where the first classroom I entered had holes in both the ceiling and the floor.

  The hole in the ceiling seemed connected to the hole I’d seen in the fourth-floor classroom─wow, really, what happened here? Judging by the edge’s color, the damage had to be fairly new… If this was the floor naturally caving in, the building’s earthquake-proofing left much to be desired.

  My heart was pounding as I ventured onward until at last, I arrived at a classroom whose ceiling, floor, and walls were all in decent shape.

  I couldn’t let myself feel relieved just yet and went straight to creating a bed. Though it reminded me a bit of a Boy Scout camp, I obviously have never been a Boy Scout.

  What I know is only what I know.

  It’s not experience.

  Miss Senjogahara was right about that, too.

  It’s as if I’m accumulating knowledge, and accumulating senselessness right next to it.

  Indeed, improvising a bed by tying together some available desks was nothing more than that, yet not easy. First of all, I didn’t have any strings to do the tying. I ended up having to leave the ruins to shop at the closest store.

  “Okay, all done. Mister Oshino’s bed used one more desk than this, but I’m not as tall as him. This size will do.”

  Still, making something with your own hands is fun.

  The completed bed seemed like a fairly impressive piece of work─unable to hold myself back, I lay down, still in my school uniform.

  “Ack.”

  This was no good.

  My high expectations translated into massive psychological damage.

  This really was no good.

  I felt seriously depressed.

  It was the same as sleeping on the floor.

  It was rough and bumpy.

  Finding it necessary to conduct a control experiment, I tried spreading out on the floor. There didn’t seem to be much of a difference after all.

  Actually, the connected sections of the desk-bed almost made it the harder of the two to sleep on.

  What a terrifying man Mister Oshino was.

  He could probably sleep on a bed of nails.

  Wondering what Araragi and Shinobu had done, I was reminded that Shinobu was in fact a vampire and that Araragi had been one too during his time here. They weren’t going to be useful points of comparison.

  Vampires can get a good day’s rest inside a cramped little casket, so I didn’t have a clue what sleeping entailed for them.

  “Bedding. I need bedding…”

  Muttering, I left the ruins again.

  I had my wallet with me, and it contained my debit card─so it wasn’t as if I couldn’t go shopping.

  It wasn’t such a hassle because I needed all sorts of things, and not just plastic strings─but as someone who even had to cut back on bus fares at the moment, I couldn’t possibly afford a warm futon. I had to find some kind of substitute.

  I remembered reading in some book that newspapers, magazines, and cardboard boxes were very economical ways to stay warm. I would probably be able to get cardboard boxes for free from a department store.

  Considering the amount of things I needed to buy, I would have to take the bus back, but I just had to be resigned on that point. One shouldn’t skimp on the essentials.

  Never let poverty slow the wit.

  What a beautiful saying.

  For precisely that reason, however, I walked there.

  I walked slowly.

  One step at a time, like I was packing the earth with my feet.

  My absolute essentials were food that would keep and water. I decided to use cardboard boxes as my mattress and newspapers, not magazines, as a blanket. With magazines, I’d have to tear out the pages, something I was afraid I couldn’t do. It just felt wrong to destroy reading material, even a magazine. With newspapers, their pages were already separated.

  Then came clothes.

  I couldn’t sleep in my uniform─although Araragi was starting to suspect that I didn’t own a single set of casual clothes, of course that wasn’t true.

  Those two had never behaved like parents for me, but that isn’t to say they completely neglected their child.

  They did do the bare minimum.

  As if they were fulfilling an obligation.

  So they did at least buy me clothes─I just didn’t want to wear them very much.

  And anyway, they all went up in flames.

  When they do, it’s the end.

  It feels like a reset.

  Yes─and while it was altogether inappropriate, I couldn’t deny a part of me felt refreshed.

  Of course, if anything was illusory, it was that freshness.

  Reset? No─there had been no reset.

  What else was my current situation but an emergency evacuation?

  Just because it was gone didn’t mean it never happened.

  Making my rounds through the department store’s general emporium, I saw that clo
thes were surprisingly expensive. I would have to get on a train, but maybe I needed to go to Uniqlo…or so I was beginning to think when I noticed the hundred-yen shop next door.