Tsukimonogatari Read online

  001

  Yotsugi Ononoki is a doll. To put it another way, she’s not human. Not a person, not a living being, not a part of the natural world─that’s Yotsugi Ononoki, a tsukumogami possession employed as a shikigami familiar.

  Though to all appearances she’s just an adorable tween.

  This expressionless child, who delights all and sundry with her eccentricities, is in truth an aberration, an apparition, a monster, one of the endless varieties of ghosts ’n goblins with which nature abounds.

  For which reason.

  She’s hopelessly incompatible with human society.

  “Nay, truth to tell, my lord, ’tis not so─not that lass,” came Shinobu’s response. From within my shadow. “For she springs originally from a human corpse, and is a doll─a creation patterned after humankind. An imitation of a person.”

  Then.

  Then does that mean she’s trying to be, or become, human? But when I voiced this question, Shinobu informed me that I was still off the mark.

  To be patterned.

  Proves you aren’t trying to be it.

  It’s only a means for mingling with human society─for making her compatible─and not a means for assimilation.

  “However skillful thou mayst become in a foreign tongue, however much dost study it and speak it like ’twere thine own, ’tis only ever for the sake of communicating with the people of a foreign land, and thou mayst not wish to become their countryman─’tis much the same. She was made in the image of humankind, but not for the sake of being human or becoming human. ’Twas for being with humans.”

  Not to be, nor to become.

  To be with.

  That foreign language analogy really did the job─well, bringing other countries into the mix makes it all terribly global, but framing it in terms of other cultures does put us back in the realm of everyday conversation for me, or for anyone, I bet.

  In order to forge a positive relationship with someone from another culture, you’ve got to see through the eyes of that culture─when in Rome, as they say.

  “Come, my lord. Hast thou never considered why aberrations, why monstrous beings of legend, wear the aspects of human beings or of animals─to wit, why the form of the unreal is founded in reality?”

  I never had.

  I mean, can’t we just say that our imagination has its limits? We can’t picture, can’t visualize, things that aren’t, so we fashion them by spicing up things that are.

  Take Shinobu Oshino’s base form, Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade, for instance─though a vampire, a beautiful demon, she was ultimately modeled on a human being.

  When she sprouted wings, they were a bat’s.

  When she bared her fangs, they were a wolf’s.

  Though she embodied the unreal and surreal as a vampire, substantially she was an assemblage of realistic elements─no more than an idealization.

  A beauty that no painting can capture isn’t going to be captured in a painting.

  A beauty that our eyes can’t behold isn’t going to be beheld by our eyes.

  To resort to another linguistic analogy, people can only relate reality using the words available to them─however inexpressible the reality, however inexhaustible the dream, in the end we have to rely on our voices and our pens.

  Expressing with words.

  Exhausting them.

  But we can’t just say that, I suppose. Aberrations, whose appearances are modeled on, and dictated by, the limits of our imagination aren’t going to take it lying down. Sure, they’re unstable, they change their appearance depending on the observer and transform depending on their surroundings, but I bet they desire a fixed form.

  So I couldn’t say anything─certainly not to the aberration right there in front of me, Shinobu, a former vampire who now looked like an eight-year-old blonde of all things.

  Having read my thoughts, and for that reason not touching on the matter, she said, “All in all, ’tis because people exist, because they are, that aberrations are too. Which meanest not the latter are dependent upon the former─’tis simply that if none observe, none are observed either.”

  I had to wonder.

  I assumed she was talking about the so-called Observer Effect, but this sounded different─it was something else, not some theory, but more emotional and sentimental, so to speak.

  “Every presence, every act, requireth a witness lest it be devoid of meaning. Untold, any tale of heroes or of aberrations may as well have ne’er been.” Shinobu seemed to be reflecting on her own experiences. “I have been called a legendary vampire─but if those legends did not exist, ’twould be as if I were no vampire at all. An aberration that goes unheralded is not worthy of the name.”

  Weird tales─must be weird in the telling, she remarked.

  “Though ’tis less mine own thinking or values than that execrable Aloha shirt’s, ultimately an aberration is a deep attachment.”

  Deep attachment─feeling.

  Like empathizing with a doll? You could say that’s how tsukumogami, or more generally the spirit of not being wasteful, the mottainai obake, is born.

  They say the belief that gods reside in everything, that there are eight million of them, is native to Japan, but empathizing with something that isn’t human, be it living or inanimate, isn’t unique to one culture.

  Which is why tales of aberrations are told throughout the world.

  Told─by humans.

  It was a pretty convincing argument, or rather, an argument I had no choice but to be convinced by, as someone who’s spoken of so many aberrations.

  And told their tales.

  Of a vampire.

  Of a cat.

  Of a crab.

  Of a snail.

  Of a monkey.

  Of a snake.

  Of a bee.

  Of a phoenix.

  As someone who has, I had no choice but to be convinced.

  And now I’m about to speak again, of a doll this time, but I have the sneaking feeling that I’ve been telling too many tales.

  Urban legend, word on the street, or secondhand gossip, it’s all just idle chatter if you speak of it too much. It ceases to be eerie, or alarming─when I think back to the beginning of second term and the bizarre “Darkness,” or to the matter of Nadeko Sengoku’s godly serpent-god from around New Year’s, I have to ask how long this is going to continue, and feel a little exhausted. Since my tricks are starting not to work on these aberrations that keep coming out of the woodwork, I’m kind of sinking into despair─though that feeling is a luxury.

  Forever, is how long.

  Our world doesn’t afford that luxury, I ought to have known by now─but it’s a little too late for ought’s.

  Every tale comes to an end.

  My, my, I guess the crazy times weren’t quite over yet─even that refrain has its limits.

  Because the story I’m about to tell you about a doll is also the story of how I “learned that”─learned it, whether I liked it or not.

  So this is the beginning of the end.

  The tale of how I, the human being called Koyomi Araragi─began to end.

  002

  “Rise and shine, big brother!”

  “Come on, you can’t sleep all day!”

  That morning I developed a sudden philosophical interest on the issue of alarm clocks. To be frank, I dislike the term alarm clock almost as much as the existence of the things themselves. I’ve never liked them. At all. In fact, they disgust me. I’ve never liked them for a single moment. I feel a singular, momentous disdain for alarm clocks.

  But as to why I dislike them so much, the answer is guaranteed to come out sounding like some kind of Zen exercise. Do I hate them for being alarm clocks, are they alarm clocks because I hat
e them, or are they hate clocks because I alarm them? While the unvarnished truth is that I’ve wished for every single alarm clock in the world to go to hell, I don’t believe that everything that goes to hell must be an alarm clock. That thought never even crossed my mind. If that proposition were true, wouldn’t it mean that I myself am an alarm clock, since I’m almost certainly headed for hell?

  You, yourself, being an alarm clock─who’d ever want to grapple with that fear?

  There is one proposition that I have considered, however, and I’d love to run it by you. I need to run it by you. It inevitably arises when I consider the question of why I, or in fact, probably everyone in the world, or at least most people, the vast majority of the majority anyway, loathe and abhor alarm clocks as if they’ve wronged our loved ones. Perhaps it’s not a proposition but the proper position─I honestly feel sheepish about describing my own realization as if it’s some kind of grand discovery, but anyway, maybe people find alarm clocks so difficult to like because the words clock and alarm together sound too much like lukewarm.

  Something that’s not hot enough.

  Something you took the trouble to heat up that went and cooled down.

  All for naught, a wasted effort.

  That act, which even smacks of a blasphemous revolt against the law of entropy, shares something with the irritation of being jolted from sleep, and this is why I, we, why all the world holds such a deep hatred for alarm clocks─I call it the Nuance Proposition. And it doesn’t end there; I propose that similar words end up with similar implications and drag similar emotional responses along behind them. I can give you any number of examples. Take Bruce Lee and brûlée. I think we can all agree that they share the quality of being awesome.

  But even putting aside the veracity of the Nuance Proposition, it must be noted that there are some minor issues with its application to our hatred of alarm clocks. First of all, as I’ve discussed at length, it’s an affliction shared by humanity the world over, whereas the likeness between the clock-alarm combo and lukewarm is specific to one language, unfortunately rendering the proposition’s use as the sole expositor of the phenomenon somewhat vexed. I haven’t thoroughly examined the literature on the subject, but nonetheless suspect that the alarm clock predates modern English. It calls for a trial translation of both phrases into, say, ancient Greek, but a second piece of counter-evidence frees us from that need.

  This second point is a so-called irrefutable rebuttal, and thus not really the second but the ultimate piece of counter-evidence: even if we limit the field of inquiry to languages where the two phrases are indeed similar, the average person probably learns the term alarm clock prior to lukewarm.

  That’s some counter-evidence.

  You might say irrefutable.

  Upon reflection, I myself feel unclear to this day about the precise meaning of lukewarm. Luke, warm. From the word itself I can just about grasp that something has been at least partially warmed, but any request for a concise definition would be greeted with grave silence on my part. I would remain as silent as the grave. In fact, if we refuse to let go of the Nuance Proposition, perhaps what we’re really talking about here is alarm clock having a negative influence on lukewarm rather than the other way around.

  Still, I hate alarm clocks.

  A wise man once said there’s no accounting for taste, some people have a taste for accounting─which is all well and good, but it’s equally true that no one wants to feel like the kind of nobody whose preferences are based on nothing. Everybody wants to be a somebody. Surely I am no snob to want to ascribe a reason to them, for the sake of my own worth, even if it requires straining interpretation.

  And I trust we can also agree that it is because I’m not a snob that I’m about to lead the discussion into even more profound territory. “I am not unthinking, therefore I am unthinkable”─well put, or actually it’s me putting it like some maxim, I must be the first person in human history to put down those cryptic (or crappy) words. All thinkers must of course recognize the debt they owe to their predecessors, but you don’t get to blame them for your stupidity.

  Anyway, back to alarm clocks.

  Alarm clocks, for waking up.

  I’m not sure how this could have happened, but I somehow forgot to explain the second law of the Nuance Proposition: the appearance clause, which goes beyond the way it sounds. Words with similar appearances provide similar sensations, and what’s similar is assumed to be the same. If the first hypothesis is auditory, then this second is visual.

  Take for example E and F. They don’t sound a thing alike, but because their shape is ninety-percent similar, the nuance we derive must be similarly similar. I and L would of course provide an equally valid demonstration of this principle.

  And from this we can derive the similarity between a lack of self-awareness and a clock of self-awakeness─it’d be no surprise if some people deemed them equivalent, synonymous. Leaving aside the initial c, a little bit of pressure turns an a into an o, and surely no one will dispute that with the addition of a small line or two, r becomes k.

  In which case a lack of self-awareness and a clock of self-awakeness are the same thing.

  Even if they’re not identical, they’re nearly identical. No evidence has yet been offered to refute this.

  And the word, or rather phrase, or maybe I should call it a line… Anyway, whatever you call it, however you put it, “a lack of self-awareness” does not carry a positive implication.

  They say it’s not about what was said but who said it, and they’ve said it so many times that I’m sick of hearing it, but no matter who utters the phrase “a lack of self-awareness”─no matter who told you that─it’s uniformly and fundamentally a rebuke, or dare I say an insult.

  You’re not very self-aware, huh?

  Not too self-aware, are ya, buddy.

  No one would take such a remark as a compliment─even if it were said affectionately by one’s teacher or master, even knowing it was said with one’s best interests at heart, there’s not a person on earth whose feelings wouldn’t be at least a bit hurt.

  The notion that this antipathy might be connected to our negative emotions toward alarm clocks is both logically and intellectually compelling, and as far as I’m concerned it leaves no room for argument. Alarm clocks are themselves manifestations of a lack of self-awareness, so to speak.

  If I am hesitant to present this theory in academic circles, it is by no means because I have reservations about accepting the concomitant honor and prestige, but rather for the two reasons outlined above. In other words, the congruence between a lack of self-awareness and a clock of self-awakeness is once again a phenomenon specific to one language, and while I cannot make such an extreme pronouncement as I did regarding lukewarm, people learning about their own lack of self-awareness before learning about alarm clocks strikes me as a contradiction.

  Leaving aside our vocabularies, or our order of linguistic acquisition, it makes some kind of intuitive sense that a person wouldn’t be scolded for a lack of self-awareness before “waking up” from some kind of standby state. It seems slightly foolish to rely on gut feelings in the course of our reasoning, and yet intuition can prove to be a surprisingly reliable tool.

  When people say, “I have a bad feeling about this,” for instance, they’re often correct. Because, alas, we can say with certainty that there’s no such thing as a life, or even a day, when not a single bad thing happens. Not a single such day in our entire lives. And that’s why it’s much more auspicious to blatantly disregard this fact and declare first thing in the morning, in the way of autosuggestion, “Seems like something good will happen again today!” Just tell yourself, “I’ve got a good feeling about this,” whether or not you do. Because there’s also no such thing as a life, or a day, when not a single good thing happens─in fact, if you’ve woken up in circumstances where you can still make that statement, you’re having a pretty good day. In any event, trust your instincts. In fact, alarm cl
ocks and a lack of self-awareness having precious little to do with each other is something you might realize quite well without having to think about it, even if you can’t explain why.

  Let us forget about the Nuance Proposition for now, if we may.

  It was a bad joke, okay?

  Like waking up on the wrong side of the bed.

  If seeking things that are like an alarm clock is a futile endeavor, just as seeking people who are like ourselves often is, might we not instead consider the thing itself? They say like attracts like, but if we interpret this as friendship, or fellow feeling, then it’s hard to imagine an alarm clock having any friends, or fellows. Hence, it is only in speaking about the alarm clock as a unique entity in the world, a unique concept, that we can discover the true nature of our loathing. It is only in so doing that the man can become the master.