Nekomonogatari (White)

by Nisioisin

  While it may not have been home, it was at least a place where I felt at ease.

  But of course, I hadn’t come here today “when I didn’t need to”─I was about to do research.

  “Hello, Tsubasa. Welcome.”

  “Hello there.”

  I greeted a familiar employee before grabbing about five volumes that I already had in mind and sitting down in a window-side seat that was practically my reserved spot.

  The full digitalization of collections that seems to be taking place all around wasn’t being carried out here, which meant my only choice was to make my plodding way book by book. Although I’d read all of them before, it isn’t as if my memory is perfect. More to the point, it couldn’t be trusted on this issue.

  Because anything that’s inconvenient to me, I can cut loose.

  I’m able to do so.

  To draw on how Mrs. Araragi put it, I’m able to look away from anything I want.

  I’d even forgotten all that happened over Golden Week, and I still couldn’t remember it perfectly─no, I didn’t want to remember.

  I was forcing my painful memories and heartrending stress on someone else.

  I was forcing them─onto Black Hanekawa.

  Which is why my memories, my knowledge, and even my thoughts were of no use to me─if I still wanted to do something, if I wanted to struggle and flail to try to do something, I was going to have to go over and review everything like this.

  Line by line, word by word.

  Without looking away.

  I was going to have to read as if I was burning it all into my eyes.

  “…Hrmm.”

  But while I persisted until closing time─there was no book mentioning any aberration or supernatural creature that could be the Tyrannical Tiger, not only in those first five books, but in the fifteen in-depth tomes on the subject that I ended up digging through.

  I was even careful to look for any creatures with a similar name, thinking that maybe I had misheard─maybe it was the Pyretical Tiger, for example, which could make sense given that it was manifesting itself through fires─but that was another swing and a miss (I did find an aberration called the “Water Tiger,” but that was a kind of kappa, so it had to be unrelated).

  Hm.

  My intentions may have been good, but the results left much to be desired.

  I thought I would be able to start rattling off facts and citations at this point in the story like I was Mister Oshino, but…things don’t always go that smoothly.

  Or was there actually some bit about the tiger, and had I failed to register it? The possibility that it was in those books, but that I had looked away, not wanting to know─

  “I wouldn’t be able to trust anything if I started to say that.”

  No.

  I couldn’t trust anything from the start so long as I was me. The question was what to do given that situation─what I could try to do.

  If I couldn’t trust anything, then there should be some way to use that unreliability to my advantage.

  I’d have to use the internet for my research if the library had nothing, but honestly, I wasn’t very interested in taking that approach. While the internet is an incredible medium for tapping into what’s happening at the moment, it’s far too full of misinformation when it comes to researching info from the past.

  Frankly, it’s a poor choice when it comes to aberration lore.

  Still, there was a chance it could at least provide me with a clue. I couldn’t afford to have some silly antipathy toward electronic information since I had no other choice─and it was an approach, a method unavailable to Mister Oshino, with his inability to figure out technology.

  My phone was off because I was in the library, but I’d start searching once I got outside.

  Having decided, I began placing each of the books I’d grabbed back in their original spots. I didn’t know the extent to which my memory was accurate, but I seemed to remember at least where every book in the library went, so it was easy work.

  “Are you alone today, Tsubasa?”

  But as I did this, a different employee from the one who greeted me called to me. This one had seen me with Araragi multiple times, which explained the question. It seemed that some people thought that Araragi and I were a couple, and since he showed no signs of noticing this, I never went out of my way to correct them.

  “Yes, I’m by myself today.”

  I still came to the library alone quite often, as I mentioned, but maybe I wasn’t conspicuous (to this person) during those times.

  “Hm. The library’s about to close, are you all done with your research?”

  “I am.”

  I’d come up empty but finished reading what I could.

  “Looks heavy,” the employee said, taking a glance at the stack of books I was re-shelving. “I wonder if that weight will be completely foreign to people once e-books become the norm. No, actually, there won’t be much use left for libraries at all once that happens.”

  “Well, it’s hard to say. I think you’ll be quite all right so long as e-books are little more than digital photos. This weight is part of what makes a book a book… Books aren’t flat, they have volume. Figurine collectors didn’t start saying they were good with photos just because digital cameras took off. A book isn’t a book without a spine.”

  Digitizing a book─was the wrong way to think about it.

  Books and e-books ought to be seen as different things, like a book and a video─not a shift, not an evolution, but a new breed.

  “I sure hope so.” Apparently uninterested in having any kind of deep discussion with a high school girl, the employee let out a little laugh, looked at the titles of the books I held, and asked in puzzlement, “You’re interested in ghosts?”

  To be fair, none of the books were the kind that a girl in the flower of her youth would normally delve into, so I supposed I could understand the puzzlement. The more veteran employees knew about my tastes (as a voracious reader), but this one was still new.

  “Yes, a bit─it’s for schoolwork.”

  I wasn’t actually going to explain the whole situation and chose a vague and nice-sounding answer to paper things over.

  “In that case, we have a book like that in the New Reads section. Did you look at that one?”

  “No─not yet.” Now that I thought about it, I hadn’t checked out their new acquisitions.

  “I doubt there’s any time left to read it now, but you can always borrow it.”

  “Yes, I think I’ll do that.”

  I didn’t get my hopes up.

  It would be far too convenient a twist for this last, overlooked book to contain the info I needed about an aberration─but what did I have to lose?

  I followed the employee’s suggestion and borrowed the book before leaving the library.

  “Hm? Wait a second. A New Read…”

  New read─new breed.

  A thought suddenly came to me as I placed the book in my bag─no, it would be strange to say it came to me.

  After all, Miss Gaen had told me from the beginning.

  An aberration that I was going to name.

  “If I did all this research and couldn’t come up with so much as a hint… If that tiger, like Black Hanekawa, is a new breed of aberration─”

  057

  Once I had a place to start, the rest fell into place.

  They were quite literally keywords, and realizing this eliminated any need for a flashy display of references and quotations.

  In fact, I should have thought of it as soon as Miss Gaen had spoken those words.

  Yes, there was no need to go to the library, because this was a saying found in any Japanese middle schooler’s language textbook─an idiom that any Japanese person has heard at least once.

  “Tyranny is fiercer than any tiger.”

  A passage from the Tangong chapter in the Book of Rites.

  While it might not be necessary, allow me to recount the story in the way of
a review.

  There was once a woman whose father-in-law and husband were devoured by a wicked, man-eating tiger, and later it even went on to eat her child. So then, she was asked, why do you not leave this place inhabited by a man-eating tiger? Her answer: “No matter what fierce beasts may live here, it is better than living in a nation led by tyrants”─tyranny in this case meaning a government focused on nothing but heavy taxation, conscription, and the like.

  So if Miss Gaen is right and I’m going to name this tiger the Tyrannical Tiger─the saying would have to be the origin of its name. I say this because when I first learned the words in elementary school, I felt like some part of me just couldn’t agree. I had a strong feeling that it wasn’t true.

  Any government had to be better than a man-eating tiger─that’s what I thought.

  It wasn’t because I was a child who didn’t understand the text’s nuances. Her father-in-law and husband being eaten was one thing, but the issue I took with the story was the mindset of a woman, a mother, who’d impose such a philosophy even on her child. It was completely baffling to me.

  Of course, now that I knew there were vicious forms of government that were worse than tigers, I couldn’t claim not to understand her at all─but somewhere inside of me, it was still hard to swallow.

  “My theory is that this means the Tyrannical Tiger isn’t just an abbreviation of ‘Tyranny is fiercer than any tiger,’ but rather, ‘a tiger that’s not at least better than tyranny,’ or a tiger that transcends tigers. What do you think?” I asked.

  On the other side of the phone, Miss Senjogahara heard my hypothesis, paused for a bit, and disagreed.

  “I don’t buy it.” She flatly disagreed, at that. “Part of me feels like she’s leading you along. This Gaen person─from the sound of it, you didn’t name this thing, it was clearly her.”

  “Yeah. I guess that’s true.”

  It was hard for me to explain that part.

  Words fell short of describing the temperament of this woman who called herself Mister Oshino’s senior, Izuko Gaen─and in fact, even after seeing, meeting, and speaking to her directly, I didn’t feel like I really understood her.

  No wonder I couldn’t describe her.

  But there seemed to be no obvious reason for her to lead me along─for example, like the one Miss Senjogahara had when she manipulated the Fire Sisters.

  Miss Gaen just pushed me away─saying she had nothing to do with me.

  “You don’t know that, do you? She could have been lying. She could have had some indescribable reason,” argued Miss Senjogahara.

  “Indescribable reason...”

  “And by the way, that woman is probably Kanbaru’s something.”

  “What?” I wasn’t expecting that name to come up.

  “I want to say her mother’s maiden name was Gaen. I remember hearing it when I was in middle school─Kanbaru herself said that her name used to be Suruga Gaen. By the way, her mother’s name was Toé. We can’t know for sure until we ask the woman, but this feels a little too on-the-nose for them to be unrelated, or for it to be a coincidence, or for her to be just some distant relative.”

  “Yeah…” Suruga, Toé, and Izu─all three were names of old Japanese provinces. It would be stranger not to suspect that they were somehow related. The surname didn’t seem that common, either. In other words…

  “Kanbaru said that she received that Monkey’s Paw from her mom─so this Gaen person seems fishy to me, personally.”

  “Yeah─and I wouldn’t say otherwise, of course.”

  I truly meant that.

  Not because she was able to boss around Episode, and not because of all the different things she got right about me.

  ─I know everything.

  It was that line.

  That line─pierced me to my heart.

  Like a thorn.

  Like a stake.

  “Isn’t ‘Gaen’ an old word for a firefighter? In that case, you can probably blame her for your house fire and the abandoned cram school’s. You know, as in, it’s the opposite?”

  “Nope, nope.”

  As in, it’s the opposite?

  That wasn’t a path we wanted to be going down.

  “Speaking of which, Miss Senjogahara. Were you able to contact Miss Kanbaru?”

  She didn’t know that the cram school had burned down until I told her earlier, but she had to be concerned about the well-being of her dear junior. She had all the time in the world on her hands while she was out with the flu, so I could imagine her trying to call.

  “Yes,” she confirmed, as expected. She was a real woman of action. “But it didn’t go through─and went to her voicemail, which makes me think either her phone is off or she’s somewhere with no reception. And of course, I haven’t heard anything from her─it’s kids like those two who grow up to become college students who don’t even go home over New Year’s break.”

  “Well, they’re not going to have to do that much more growing up before that.”

  What a raw, vivid prediction.

  Were they really going to leave home, though?

  Especially Araragi─I felt like his little sisters weren’t going to let him. I could see them imprisoning him like in Misery if he said he was going to live in the dorms.

  “Still, Miss Hanekawa, I don’t think anything too terrible is going to happen if Kanbaru and Araragi were able to meet… But it also seems likely that Miss Gaen’s reason for coming to our town has something to do with Kanbaru. In other words, Araragi and that half-vampire boy might meet again, then fight again…”

  What is Araragi doing? sighed Miss Senjogahara.

  Hm. I had trouble figuring out a way to console her.

  I of course had my own thoughts about those two, but she seemed to be in a tougher spot, given their relationships.

  “Well, it’s fine,” she said nonetheless, willing herself to endure the fact and swallowing the many things she surely wanted to say. Her ability to suffer these things was incredible, rivaling even her ability to act. Perhaps it was because she’d spent more than two years living with an aberration. “I hate giving up, but I’m good at waiting─so as an adult woman, I’m going to do the mature thing and wait for him to return.”

  “Whoa…”

  “Because I can take it all out on him once he does.”

  “Wuh?”

  Maybe she wasn’t so mature after all?

  It seemed as though once Araragi and Miss Kanbaru managed to escape the crisis they found themselves in, yet another would be in store for them.

  “But let’s put that aside and focus on this problem. Going back to what we were talking about,” Miss Senjogahara reprised. “They might be in a tough situation, but so are we─the Tyrannical Tiger, was it? For argument’s sake, let’s say we do the brave thing and decide to believe this Miss Gaen.” Her sense of caution, evident from the emphatic “for argument’s sake,” must have been supported by her experience of being tricked by five frauds. And speaking of them, Deishu Kaiki, one of those frauds, was also one of Miss Gaen’s juniors, just like Mister Oshino─ “Personally, I’d associate ‘Tyrannical Tiger’ with history. You know, like the past.”

  “The past?”

  “Yes─more so than if it’s the ‘Pyretical Tiger,’ written with the character for ‘fire,’ right? And you can also relate it to the idea of a trauma from the past.”

  “Trauma…” Transliterated into Japanese, it sounded like a pun on tora (tiger) and uma (horse).

  “Oh dear. I guess that sounded like just another play on words.”

  Typical, she said in an embarrassed tone.

  It seemed to me like she was usually unabashed about making those kinds of jokes, that she even loved them with all her being. But it sounded like she didn’t want me to assume that one was on purpose.

  I did get what she was trying to say.

  History─and tyranny.

  “We can’t sit around just laughing it up,” Miss Senjogahara declare
d in an excessively serious manner, though no one was laughing. “Let’s put aside its name for now, and let’s also put aside the question of whether or not it’s a new breed. Doesn’t this aberration pose a pretty realistic threat? What I mean is that its aims are pointed not inward like my crab or Mayoi’s snail, but outward, just like Kanbaru’s left hand─”

  “Huh? What do you mean?”