by Nisioisin
“What do I mean? How could you possibly not see?”
Miss Senjogahara sounded exasperated, but I really didn’t see.
What was she saying?
I had only called her to sound out a third person about my name for this thing taught to me by Miss Gaen (I know that structure is a little tangled), the Tyrannical Tiger─and her reaction was fairly negative, which actually helped to calm me down.
“Come on, Miss Hanekawa. There were serial fires at your house and then the abandoned cram school, okay?”
“Yes, right. Unfortunately, though, I don’t have any proof at the moment linking that to my meeting with the tiger─”
“It doesn’t matter if they’re related or not. The only thing that matters is that in addition to the macro-sized, long-term factor they share in common, which is that they were places you know very well, there’s one very micro-sized, very short-term factor they also share, yes?”
“Huh?”
She’d said so much─but I still didn’t get it.
No, I probably did.
I was just─looking away from it.
“So you mean the fact that they caught on fire right after I saw the tiger on each of those days─”
“It’s not that, it’s─” interrupted Miss Senjogahara. It seemed hard for her to say─she must have wanted me to read between the lines and notice─but she came out and said it: “The fact that two places you had just slept in burned down in a row.”
“……!”
“In other words, unless we do something, aren’t my apartment and Araragi’s home going to burn down tragically some time around tonight?”
She’d said it coolly, but she was right.
There was no threat more realistic─than this.
058
I’d called Miss Senjogahara while sitting on a park bench─it was actually the same park where Araragi met Mayoi for the first time.
The thought also made me realize that it was where he and Miss Senjogahara decided to become boyfriend and girlfriend, giving it an even more important place in their hearts than the abandoned school building.
To me, of course, it was nothing more than a regular park close to where I lived, and I felt no special attachment. Part of the route I’d always taken on my walks, it bore no particularly deep meaning as the source point of my call. Thinking I would go see the remains of the burned-down Hanekawa residence, I’d headed to this spot from the library, but filled with dread as I got close, I decided to call Miss Senjogahara first.
It may have been more a way to avert my eyes than fear, but at this point I was starting to lose any idea of what it meant to look away from things.
I wasn’t freaking out.
But I was fretting.
Indeed, Miss Senjogahara had pointed out something I wasn’t expecting to hear─but even that, as she said, seemed like something I should have noticed without needing to be told.
Seeing the Hanekawa residence as “a place where I had just slept” required a bit of an imaginative leap (the obviousness of sleeping at one’s house makes it rather hard to define it as such), but I should have at least thought of the abandoned cram school as “a place where I had stayed the night only yesterday.”
It burned down because I stayed the night there─even if I couldn’t believe such a thing, one day later and I might have died. That fear, I should have felt.
But I hadn’t even come close, and it didn’t seem like a lack of imagination so much as─
Looking away.
Turning my back on reality.
Maybe that was it.
That was probably it.
True, I couldn’t unquestioningly agree with Miss Senjogahara’s point─it wasn’t a conclusion you could jump to, and there just wasn’t enough data.
You couldn’t draw a logical conclusion based on a two-building sample size.
At the same time, that didn’t mean I could wait for a third and fourth sample.
After my call with Miss Senjogahara, I prepared myself once more and headed out to the charred remains of my house─but where I expected something, I saw nothing.
Once again.
There was so little there it was stunning.
Not a single rubbernecker now, it was a scorched field that looked like it could have been that way for the last fifteen years. No police tape or fences cordoning it off like the scene of some crime─it was what you’d call an empty lot.
There was nothing─I felt nothing.
I had trouble readily believing even this feeling of feeling nothing─but it wasn’t as if I had lived on the plot, I had lived in a house. I thought I could at least half-believe the feeling.
Yes, indeed.
There was nothing here.
“……”
I stayed there for only about a minute, since I might attract attention if I stood still for too long, and quickly moved along.
“Two places you had just slept in burned down in a row─in other words, unless we do something, aren’t my apartment and Araragi’s home going to burn down tragically some time around tonight?”
Miss Senjogahara’s fear seemed like a stretch even after I’d seen the scorched field, but it did bring to mind a relevant case: the story of Oshichi the Grocer.
Oshichi fell in love with a man whom she saw during a great fire, and to meet him again, she set her own fire, to her home─a dreadful idea that chills the spine rather than warms the heart. Yet her passion seems of a piece with ordinary romantic love.
Oshichi was born in hinoe-uma, the year of the fire horse, and women born under that zodiac sign have been said to be headstrong, which isn’t even any aberration lore but just superstition, or rather, mere prejudice.
Because everyone alike has such feelings.
It’s a fortune that could apply to anyone.
But─in this case, the term hinoe-uma seemed to carry special meaning.
Well, I knew it had no meaning.
Uma.
Horse.
Miss Senjogahara was embarrassed by how “trauma” sounded like a play on words, but puns seemed to form half of the basis of many a tale of an aberration. It certainly held true for hinoe-uma, about which they told that horses go mad when they see fire.
Tiger and horse, tora and uma─trauma.
Psychic wounds.
“I could come up with lots of possibilities─I’m not at a conclusion yet.”
However, I did feel like one was on the horizon.
The question was if I could face it─even if it was a stretch, for example, the suggestion that Miss Senjogahara’s apartment and Araragi’s home might burn down was enough to make me fret.
Right.
It was time for me to settle this.
This tale about fires─this tale about me.
“…Um, pardon the intrusion.”
Araragi’s home was far enough from the (remains of the) Hanekawa residence that I could have taken a bus, but I ended up walking back instead of using public transportation.
I was able to enter without using the intercom because I’d been given a spare key (how trusting of them), but I still felt nervous. They could tell me to make myself at home, but I couldn’t do that.
What did they mean─make myself at home?
I didn’t know what it was to be at home.
In fact.
I didn’t know myself.
Of course, I shouldn’t be returning to Araragi’s home if every place where I slept was going to go up in flames, but then, it was also too late now that I’d spent a night there, in which case it was fine to come back─I’d established a strange kind of logic for myself.
…Still.
My heart was so poor that I needed a logical reason just to go back to my bed for the night─and that made me want to die a little.
“Welcome back, Tsubasa. You’re late, where’d you go?”
Karen emerged from the living room to greet me as I took off my shoes. She’d welcomed me back, but it wasn’t like
I could announce that I was home.
“I was at a park in the area for a bit. Just stopping by.”
“Hm.”
“Have you heard anything from Araragi?”
“Nope, we haven’t. How prodigal does my brother think he can be? I’m kicking his ass once he gets back. As hard as I can,” menaced Karen, showing me an actual kick.
A too-beautiful double jumping kick.
Even if he managed to get home safely after solving whatever case he was on, Araragi would be facing another predicament or two.
No, I shouldn’t be talking about it like it was someone else’s problem. Nope.
It made me really want to solve my own problem─so that I could chew him out too.
I wanted to be a predicament for him to come back to.
“Whatever, forget about that forgettable brother of mine. I was waiting for you, Tsubasa. You could even say I was on edge waiting for you. Or maybe that I was on pins and needles?”
“There’s not much of a difference between those two phrases.”
“Tsukihi’s home too, so let’s play a game or something. We already have cards lying ready on the living-room table.”
“Cards?”
So she didn’t mean a videogame.
I was somewhat surprised.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Karen. There’s something I wanted to think about in Araragi’s room─”
“C’mon, it’s fine!”
As I tried to turn down Karen’s invitation, she took my arm and started leading me into the living room.
“R-Really─”
“They say it’s better for people not to think about things, you know.”
“What?! What kind of logic is that?!”
“Logic, really? That stuff just makes your head hurt. I know they say that man is a thinking reed, but who decided it’s wrong to be an unthinking reed?”
“What a bold opinion!”
But wasn’t an unthinking reed just a plain reed?
Was she all right with being a plain reed?!
“C’mon, hurry up. You better not think you can put up a fight against me!”
“H-Hey. Okay, okay, just let me get these off, I need to take my shoes off! I’ll do it, okay? I’ll play cards with you!”
“Hooray!”
Karen threw up both arms.
She was such an innocent girl.
I really didn’t have time to be enjoying card games when I had something that I didn’t just want, but needed to think about─so no matter how forceful her invitation, perhaps I should have turned her down saying I didn’t have the time.
But I didn’t because I also knew full well how pointless it was to think about this alone─not to agree with Karen’s opinion about there being nothing wrong with an unthinking reed, of course.
I didn’t want to be a plain reed.
Yet─I was just as unwilling to be either a thinking me or an unthinking me.
I could think.
I could think and think, and no matter what I came to realize─if that realization was inconvenient to me, I would just look away, pry it loose from my mind, forget it, and perhaps ultimately be unable even to think about it.
So you could say what Miss Senjogahara had done for me earlier─in order to grab onto clues in the context of an exchange, a dialogue─was the smart way.
While my better judgment told me I shouldn’t involve Karen and Tsukihi, middle schoolers, in this, I was already intruding on their lives. Weirdly standing on ceremony would only be counterproductive─and, above all, who better to talk to about fire than these girls?
They were Tsuganoki Second Middle School’s Fire Sisters, after all.
A duo whose names both contained the character for fire.
059
“Fire? What do I think of when I hear the word? Isn’t it obvious? The blazing heart that resides in my chest,” Karen replied to my question with a somewhat dashing look. The certainty in her voice made me think she’d answered it often enough.
Quicker than I could’ve imagined.
It was like she’d answered before I even asked.
“So the short version would be passion,” she said.
“Huh…”
I heard we’d be playing cards and expected poker, or blackjack, or sevens, or some other game like that, but to my surprise, Tsukihi proposed that we all build our own house of cards.
The rules were that we would share ten decks and that whoever built the highest house the quickest would win.
I’m sorry, but that’s not fun.
It was like playing with building blocks, only with most of the creativity removed.
At the very least, it didn’t seem like something to do in a group…but maybe that’s what they call a generation gap speaking.
Still, this was a designated time and place for the three of us to play cards. I couldn’t phone it in, and I’d build triangles out of cards as I asked the two questions disguised as small talk.
“In that case, what do you think of when you hear the word ‘flames’?”
“Blazing passion that’s even hotter,” Karen declared. She really was certain about this. “Justice. To put it in a word, justice.”
“Hmm. I see.” I nodded vaguely, uncertain to the point of contrast. At least, it wasn’t a definition that I could agree with given my current mental state. “So is that why the two of you call yourselves the Fire Sisters?”
“That’s right!” affirmed Karen. “The Fire Sisters, or in other words, the siblings of justice!”
“If we’re being precise about this, she’s completely wrong.”
Karen’s affirmation was blithely negated by Tsukihi, who sat next to her.
Negated with a smile.
How merciless.
“We’re called the Fire Sisters because both of us have the character for ‘fire’ in our names, that’s all. I feel bad for how plain the reason is, though. People have been calling us that since we were in elementary school. Even before we began acting in the name of justice.”
“Really?” asked Karen, tilting her head.
Her memory seemed to be cloudy.
I knew that was probably the case, but I supposed it was better than if they had named themselves the way the Valhalla Duo had.
“By the way, I personally associate words like ‘fire’ and ‘flames’ with romantic love,” Tsukihi said.
“Love.”
Indeed.
In fact, the story of Oshichi the Grocer referenced romantic love, too, though it deviated a bit from the theme─and it was also common to speak of someone’s “burning love.”
………
Then I was distracted from the thought by how incredibly fast Tsukihi was building her house of cards. She was outstanding when it came to tasks that required precision.
It seemed she possessed casually superb powers of concentration.
I had actually been playing this fire-based word association game by myself all the way back from the park─but had come up empty-handed on my own.
I’d only hit upon words that seemed to miss the mark, like “red,” or “heat,” or “civilization.”
One person only being able to devise so many patterns, a lack of imagination─it couldn’t have been because of any such generic-sounding reason that I’d come up empty-handed.
I was probably thinking in a way that intentionally avoided the word that would prove decisive.
My thoughts were proceeding in a way that avoided any hints.
So instead of continuing to deliberate further on my own, I’d transitioned to looking for an answer while playing with Karen and Tsukihi, but─
“Romantic love, huh?”
That was indeed something my mind wouldn’t have associated with “fire”─not even while I was thinking of Oshichi’s story─but as with “justice,” it wasn’t hitting home.
Somehow it felt─off the mark.
Tsukihi gave me a cute nod. “M-hm. You might not know, but the Fire Sisters don’t ju
st act in the name of justice, you see. We also give romantic advice.”
