Nekomonogatari (White)

  001

  Though the tale of Tsubasa Hanekawa is my tale, it is not one that I can tell. That’s because I can’t even define the extent to which I am me. I believe there was once a great author who said he found it hard to believe that he was himself down to the tips of his outstretched toes, but I don’t even need to extend my legs. It’s uncertain whether my very heart is my own.

  Am I me?

  What am I?

  Who am I?

  Who─is me.

  What─is me.

  For example, could we really say that I am these thoughts that so closely consider this pointlessness? Maybe we could say that, if we’re only going to say it. These are only feelings, thoughts, and maybe even memories, but we might say that they’re nothing more than accumulated knowledge. If we’re saying that I am my experiences, does that mean we can also say a human with the exact same experiences as me would actually be me?

  That there could be a me other than me that was still me?

  In that case, if I were being unlike myself, would I no longer be me? What to think about that, how to feel?

  To begin with, the name Tsubasa Hanekawa is already unstable.

  My family name has changed a number of times.

  So I can’t look for my identity in my name, not even a bit. I understand on quite a deep-rooted level the idea that names are nothing more than signifiers. We could even say I understand it on a bodily level.

  In facing an aberration, nothing is more important than knowing its name─or at least, that’s supposed to be the first step in the process. So maybe the fact that I never recognized my name as my own was a major reason I haven’t been facing myself.

  In that case, I need to begin by knowing my name.

  I need to know Tsubasa Hanekawa as myself.

  Then maybe I can define myself for the first time.

  Of course, when I think about how Araragi most likely doesn’t worry himself into a standstill with these kinds of ideas, my self-imposed stalemate seems silly and absurd. He can become a vampire, lose his humanity, and be dragged into the other world by a host of different aberrations, but he always continues to be Koyomi Araragi, with his unshakable self, his unshakable ego, and I feel embarrassed when I think about that.

  Maybe he doesn’t realize it.

  It’s clear to anyone around him, as clear as day that he always continues to be himself no matter the place or time, but just maybe he doesn’t realize it.

  He doesn’t have to realize it.

  Koyomi Araragi can be Koyomi Araragi in confidence.

  That’s probably why he can always tell his own tale.

  That’s why I love him.

  Tsubasa Hanekawa loves Koyomi Araragi.

  In the end, any me I can speak about would have to begin there. Amusingly enough, that is the only certain thing in me. Like when I’m studying alone at a library desk and suddenly decide to write the name “Koyomi Araragi” in the corner of my notes and can’t help but smile.

  That is all my tale needs to be.

  Of all sixty stories about the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the famed detective created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, only two shorts exist that are narrated not by his assistant, Dr. Watson, but by Sherlock Holmes himself. These are controversial works among Sherlockians, even treated as apocryphal at times, but in one of them, “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier,” Mr. Holmes begins with these words:

  “The ideas of my friend Watson, though limited, are exceedingly pertinacious. For a long time he has worried me to write an experience of my own. Perhaps I have rather invited this persecution, since I have often had occasion to point out to him how superficial are his own accounts and to accuse him of pandering to popular taste instead of confining himself rigidly to fact and figures. ‘Try it yourself, Holmes!’ he has retorted, and I am compelled to admit that, having taken my pen in my hand, I do begin to realize that the matter must be presented in such a way as may interest the reader.”

  Like most, I was fascinated by Sherlock Holmes’s near-superhuman abilities as I read about his exploits, which is why I was taken aback when he abruptly gave voice to these “true feelings.”

  To be frank, I was disappointed.

  Why would this man who had made one extraordinary display after another now choose to say such a human thing? I felt betrayed.

  But now I understand. I understand his humanity, which could no longer bear the gap between him as the “superman” spoken of by Dr. Watson, and him as himself.

  His feelings of wanting to make an excuse for himself.

  Ultimately, those two stories are positioned as the outcome of a renowned detective’s assistant talking back to him: “Then why don’t you write it yourself!” Let me say here from the start that this tale is the same for me.

  A tale to let you know that contrary to Araragi’s portrayals of me as some kind of historical saint or holy mother, I am but a human being.

  To let you know that I am a cat, and that I am a tiger.

  And that I am a person. A tale of betrayal made to let everyone down.

  I don’t think I’ll be able to tell it well, the way Araragi can, but I’d like to play it by ear and try my best. I imagine that’s the way anyone would talk about his or her own life.

  Now.

  The time has come to wake from this nightmare.

  002

  Rumor has it that Araragi dutifully gets woken up every morning by his little sisters Karen and Tsukihi. That their efforts are tireless, regardless of whether it’s a weekday, weekend, or holiday. He seems quite bothered by it, but from where I stand, they just sound like close siblings to me.

  Actually, I’m just plain jealous.

  Honestly, truly.

  How many older brothers exist in this world so loved they’re woken up each and every morning? But more than anything─it may not be Araragi himself I’m jealous of here, but Karen and Tsukihi, who get to see his sleeping face every day.

  Really, jealous as can be.

  Honestly, truly.

  So, how do I, Tsubasa Hanekawa, get up each morning? Just as Araragi has his sisters, Roomba wakes me up every morning. Of course, Roomba isn’t the Hanekawa family cat, nor the eccentric name of little sister Roomba Hanekawa. It is indeed, simply, the automatic vacuum made by iRobot, the Roomba 577 if you were to call it by its model number.

  This high-performance vacuum cleaner, timer set to go into action automatically at six each morning, klonks into my head and wakes me up.

  A refreshing start.

  Still, Roomba generates a good bit of noise while it cleans, as all vacuums do, so really I’m awake by the time it creeps down the hallway toward me─and yet I keep my eyes closed, waiting for that klonk to come, not getting up until my head is bumped, perhaps because I yearn for that feeling of someone waking me up, that feeling of being woken up.

  Like I’m Sleeping Beauty, to put it poetically.

  Well, no─nothing about the situation could be poetic when it’s a vacuum cleaner waking me up.

  Sleeping Beauty. Did I really just say that about myself?

  I must be nothing more than a nuisance from Roomba’s perspective, some sleeping person blocking the hallway it’s cleaning.

  That’s right, I sleep in the hallway.

  I sleep on a futon in the second-floor hallway of a house.

  I used to think it’s normal and utterly natural, but apparently it isn’t. Ever since I unwittingly talked about this and lost a friend, I’ve made it a point not to discuss the matter too openly.

  Even then, I don’t particularly desire my own bed, not after all this time.

  It’s become natural.

  I don’t want to change what’s natural.

  I never had the
childish thought of wanting my own room, and you know, I did talk about this with my classmate Miss Senjogahara after we became friends, because it felt like it would be okay to tell her.

  “Hey, that’s nothing,” she replied. “My place doesn’t even have a hallway.”

  Maybe it seemed like a first-world problem to Miss Senjogahara, who lives with her father in a one-room apartment, and I didn’t see it as a problem in the first place.

  No.

  Maybe I’m wrong.

  To take a guess, perhaps I don’t want this house to become “my place.” Like the opposite of how an animal marks its territory─maybe I want to distance myself from this house.

  Not even a trace.

  Not leaving any whatsoever at this house.

  Maybe that’s what it is.

  …Let’s put aside why I’m having to take guesses about my own heart and mind, or why I can only say “perhaps” and “maybe.”

  “Well, however I feel about it, it’s not going to matter a few months from now, so I should try not to think too much,” I say to myself as I fold my futon.

  I don’t have much trouble getting up in the morning.

  In fact, I don’t really understand what it feels like to be “still asleep” after waking up.

  My consciousness being on or off is, in my case, probably more clear-cut than it needs to be.

  If you feel sleepy, then just sleep.

  That’s what I end up thinking.

  “That must be where I don’t match up with other people. Araragi tells me things like, ‘What you find only natural to be able to do is nothing less than a miracle for me’ all the time─but ‘miracle’ is going too far, isn’t it,” I continue to talk to myself.

  I don’t do it when I’m outside, but I can’t keep from talking to myself when I’m in the house. Because if I don’t, I feel like I’d forget how to speak.

  I do think that’s an issue.

  I also think it’s an issue that I naturally begin to smile when I think of Araragi as I speak to myself.

  I place my futon in the closet and go to the bathroom to wash my face.

  Then, I put in my contact lenses.

  Back when I wore glasses, I was so terrified of sticking lenses directly onto my eyeballs that I didn’t even want to consider the idea, and when I first started using them, I was indeed so terrified that I practically kept my eyes closed throughout the whole ordeal (that’s a figure of speech), but now that I’m used to it, it’s no problem at all.

  We can get accustomed to anything.

  In fact, with a burden lifted off of my nose and ears, it’s more comfortable.

  When I think of my future starting next year, though, whether it’s contact lenses or glasses, I’ll be hindered in a way. I’ve been wondering lately if I should just be brave and go through with LASIK surgery while I’m still a student.

  After making myself look presentable, I head to the dining room.

  There, someone who should be called my father and someone who should be called my mother are, as always, eating breakfast separately at the same table.

  They don’t even look at me as I enter.

  I don’t even look at them, either.

  Something entering your field of vision doesn’t mean you’ve looked. The heart’s eyes can always be averted. It may be hard to see with the heart, but it is easy not to.

  The only sound to echo through the dining room is the voice of the TV anchor reporting the day’s top stories.

  Why?

  The news anchor, surely at a distant television station, feels closer to me than these two persons in the same room.

  Why indeed.

  To the point that I want to greet her with a “good morning.”

  Speaking of which, how many years was it since I last uttered the words “good morning” in this house? I tried searching through my memories only to come up with nothing. I did remember saying good morning to Roomba five times (as mentioned earlier, not just mumbling in my sleep but plainly. There’s something oddly alive about the way that automatic cleaner moves), but I seriously couldn’t recall a single time I said it to the persons who should be called my father and my mother.

  Not even once.

  Huh.

  That is surprising.

  I once said to Araragi something like, “I think, for my part, I’ve tried to meet my parents halfway,” but it seems those words weren’t truthful. Then again, it’s not like everything that comes out of my mouth being a lie is anything new.

  I am made of lies.

  An existence far from the truth─that is who I, Tsubasa Hanekawa, am.

  Even my family name is a sham.

  I close the door without a sound and head to the kitchen, not the table. To make breakfast, yes, but that isn’t to say I don’t feel like delaying, for as long as possible, the moment when I have to approach the table where those two sat.

  I know resistance is futile, or rather, empty.

  Allow me that degree of resistance, even so.

  It’s not exactly a coup d’état.

  The Hanekawas’ kitchen, which I would personally prefer not to call my home’s, has a lot of cookware. It has three cutting boards and three kitchen knives. It also has three each of milk pans and frying pans. That is to say, there is three of everything. If you want to know what this means, then yes, the three of us living in the house each use our own separate sets of cookware.

  This is another anecdote whose telling lost me a friend.

  I have too many of these kinds of anecdotes to count, like how we each prepare our own bath and then drain the tub for it to be refilled, or how we do our laundry separately, but it’s strange.

  I don’t find any of this odd, and no matter how many friends I lose, I don’t feel like the Hanekawa household ought to adopt the ways of other homes.

  Since we leave the house at about the same hour, our breakfast times “happen” to coincide, but it’s like finding seats at the same table in a cafeteria, there is no conversation, and none of us ever makes breakfast for the other two while we are at it preparing our own.

  I select my personal cookware and commence my domestic chore.

  But I don’t make an elaborate breakfast like that wording might suggest.

  I dish out the single serving of rice I cooked, prepare my miso soup, rolled omelet, grilled fish, and salad (I’m told that’s too much, but I’m the type to go for hearty breakfasts), and ferry it to the table over three trips. I then take one last round trip to pour myself some tea. There’d be no need for four-and-a-half round trips if someone helped me, but of course, no one in this house does. Even Roomba doesn’t help out to that extent.

  I sit down thinking how nice it’d be if Araragi were around to help me.

  “Thank you for this meal,” I say putting my hands together and pick up my chopsticks.

  I’ve never heard the other two mouth those words; nonetheless, while I don’t say “good morning” or “good night,” I seldom fail to show my thanks before and after a meal.

  Especially after spring break. Not even once since then.

  After all, the words are for the plants and animals that will become my flesh and blood, once alive before they were made into food.

  Lives killed for my sake, of all creatures.

  Thank you. I humbly accept you.

  003

  I finished eating breakfast, changed from my pajamas into my school uniform, and immediately left the house. I understand it takes Araragi about eighty pages to leave his home, but that’s all I need. It seems clear this is the difference between having a family that won’t let you leave your room and not having one.

  Anyway, today was the start of a new term at school.

  It was a relief to know that.

  It felt, from the bottom of my heart, like I’d been saved.

  I felt like I owed my life to each new trimester that came along.

  Days off are days for walking─but even then, there’s only so much wandering
one can do. I could even put a delinquent to shame. While acting as Araragi’s private college-exam tutor was, in some sense, something I did to improve his grades, it must have also been a handy excuse for not returning to my house.

  Which is why having school─was a relief.

  I let out a sigh of relief.

  Then again, it didn’t matter. Walking around, being a home tutor.