Nisenmonogatari Part 2 Read online

A conman.

  Senjogahara’s reunion with him played a big part.

  In fact, it’s the only cause, really.

  All there is to it.

  Kaiki was a useless fraud and a terrible nuisance─but a chance encounter with the man who had swindled her family served as wonderful shock treatment a few years later.

  It wasn’t good fortune, nor was it a miracle. According to Hitagi Senjogahara’s own words, thanks to her reunion, her rematch, with Deishu Kaiki, she─settled it.

  She must’ve expelled all the poison in her on that occasion.

  A detox.

  The venom festering in her system for two years─was countered.

  It probably isn’t necessary for me to say this, but just in case, I want to state in no uncertain terms that it wasn’t thanks to Kaiki─he doesn’t deserve a single ounce of gratitude.

  He didn’t do a damn thing.

  To borrow a phrase from Oshino, Senjogahara got saved all on her own. Not thanks to Kaiki.

  Of course, it isn’t thanks to Koyomi Araragi or Tsubasa Hanekawa, either─this is a triumphant rehabilitation that Hitagi Senjogahara wrested from a loathsome con artist through her own will and action.

  And thus, in that manner, she became sweet and affectionate─totally the dere in tsundere, so to speak.

  Karen this morning didn’t hold a candle to her.

  Color me surprised, for my part, that Miss ’Gahara actually included the non-dismissive mode.

  If I told you that it affected her ability to tutor me for college exams, and that Hanekawa and I, after serious deliberation, dismissed her before the holidays (hence Senjogahara was currently away visiting her father’s family), maybe you’d get a picture of just how fawning she became.

  But you’d be picturing it wrong, or should I say, insufficiently.

  Her sweetness exceeded those dimensions.

  Calling me for no reason (before, she even blocked me some days), sending texts with emoji (she used to forward spam to me), and giving me cute pet names (instead of making do with belittlement) was just the beginning.

  She no longer tore off flowers.

  She no longer squashed insects.

  She didn’t initiate conversations by bitching.

  She spoke frank words of praise where they were due.

  She reserved stationery for its intended uses.

  This wasn’t limited to stationery, so using a potato peeler to julienne off my skin if I said anything remotely negative about her cooking was a thing of the past, too.

  So was her threat to perform amputations if her bare legs were ever witnessed (meaning, of course, the viewer’s legs). No longer so reluctant to expose her skin, she wore shorter skirts (the hem moving from below to above her knees) and lighter clothes that were decently appropriate for midsummer.

  Even her expressionless iron mask was gone, her once monotone and mechanical speech featured a certain amount of intonation, and, more than anything, she laughed often. Laughed pleasantly.

  In other words─she’d become an ordinary girl.

  It was such a drastic shift in personality that I wondered if someone had taken her place while I wasn’t looking.

  It wasn’t a polite front, either.

  Not a cloistered princess, not a shy kitty, but a normal, cute high-school girl acting her age.

  Neither risqué nor outré, neither weirdly closed off nor combative, reacting normally to normal events, she was a normal high-school girl.

  Back in junior high, she’d been a track-and-field ace, respected and popular, and thinking that maybe this was what she’d been like, and that Hanekawa and Kanbaru had gotten to spend their middle-school years near such a beautiful presence, I sulked, You cheaters, I am so, so disappointed in you, but according to them─

  “This goes beyond the way she was then.”

  Senjogahara was being so sugary sweet that even Kanbaru, who revered her as a goddess and fully accepted even her most biting remarks, was a little taken aback.

  I don’t know, I’m not sure “tsundere” described it anymore.

  Tsunderrhage, maybe?

  The genre was niche to begin with, so why was Senjogahara striving to break new ground?

  ……

  Tsunderrhage makes it sound like an official medical emergency, and I suppose in a way that was how it felt to me. Well, not official, maybe, but personally alarming. That’s because I was worried that all of it might be an unbelievably long setup. In fact, her rehabilitation and sweetness being an epic prank was an easier idea to swallow for me.

  If that was it, though, she was taking the joke too far.

  Even for a nasty prank.

  If she was being malicious, then she wasn’t just trying to make me fidget. I was being shaken down.

  After all─as part of her sickly sweet offensive, Senjogahara had cut her straight black hair, which she’d grown out for ages.

  From what I’ve heard, she’d worn the same hairstyle since grade school, like Karen─though, of course, unlike with my sister’s ponytail, Senjogahara didn’t hack her own hair off impulsively, not being a moron.

  She made a decision and an appointment and went to a hair salon. She paid the appropriate price─and came out of it with short hair.

  She’d even gotten rid of her straight bangs, replacing them with an exaggerated shag that looked like a saw.

  Tsubasa Hanekawa, Suruga Kanbaru, and now Hitagi Senjogahara─not one of the Naoetsu High straight-bangs sisterhood remained.

  That was just sad. Not being able to call Senjogahara “the last line of defense” anymore fills me with regret.

  Since Kanbaru was growing her hair out (by the way, hers now hung down in two bunches, i.e. low pigtails, a tantalizing contrast with her boyish speech), Senjogahara’s hair was even shorter than Kanbaru’s.

  Since some girls cut their hair out of heartache, why shouldn’t other girls do it out of love? That was Senjogahara’s own take. The former must have been a reference to Hanekawa, who changed her hairstyle after the culture festival.

  She, too, broke with the past that way. She’d always been overly serious but was taking it easier since then, relaxing her draconian measures against herself.

  I guess you could say Hanekawa had become a normal girl as well. Perhaps, in the same way that Hanekawa was my role model, she was also Senjogahara’s.

  Normal.

  For people who had led their kinds of lives, whether for a long or brief while, those two syllables were in no way business as usual.

  Because it was too lofty an ambition─to say they yearned for it didn’t come close.

  That’s why.

  In any case, my significant other insisting that she was going to cut her hair out of love didn’t feel all that bad (in fact, any rhetoric that it was just sad or that I was filled with regret to the contrary, as a matter of taste, I rather like it when girls change their hairstyles), but I can’t help but conjecture that it was really her way of finding closure.

  A clean break of a haircut, not setting but resetting.

  Especially because long hair with straight bangs─a “princess” cut sounds nice and all, but the old-fashioned, doll-like style, rare these days─had been chosen for Senjogahara when she was little, by her estranged mother, who said it looked good on her daughter.

  It had occurred to me before that despite her grownup visuals, her hairstyle was pretty Lolita, and it was in fact a holdover from her Lolita days.

  From a certain perspective, the style wasn’t just a sentimental issue but, if I may exaggerate, one of identity. It might sound silly to make so much of hair─but what else was there for Senjogahara to rely on?

  She didn’t mess with it throughout middle school and practically forgot to in high school.

  For her, it meant more than a style update or wanting to try something different, but a turning point.

  Neither forgetting it, nor carrying it as a burden, but accepting it was what made it the past.

  In that s
ense, Hitagi Senjogahara didn’t change or turn a new leaf, didn’t revert or redeem─let alone become oversweet.

  She overcame a complex.

  She managed to grow up, that’s what we ought to say.

  ………

  Maybe, along with the fizz, she’d lost a great deal of charm as a character, but she also acquired more depth as a person, so that’s that.

  That goes for Hanekawa, too. Being asked to maintain such an extreme personality indefinitely is nothing if not a nightmare. Being flexible and growing as they did is necessary.

  It’s not like they can’t die or age.

  In practice, unless you’re Deishu Kaiki─no one would say that Senjogahara’s growth made her a boring woman.

  To begin with, I’d hate to share the opinion of someone whose last name reads like you typed it out by mistake.

  Speaking of which, Hanekawa once noted that Senjogahara seemed prettier and more evanescent than she was in middle school─but recently expanded on that by adding, “This Senjogahara is the best so far.”

  Yup.

  I knew this day would come.

  I’d wished for the day.

  I’d believed in the day.

  Congratulations, Hitagi Senjogahara.

  Congratulations to me, too.

  Even putting aside my personal relief that I was no longer in mortal danger, when I took in all this, I was simply glad, as someone close to Senjogahara, and I also felt inspired to truly live.

  Not that I was dead, or anything.

  I had yet to do a pinky’s worth of lifting my own complex regarding aberrations, though.

  That’s too serious a matter to say enough small talk, but let’s put it aside for now and get back to the story at hand.

  Afterwards, I (still riding on her shoulders) safely dropped Karen off at Kanbaru’s house and introduced both parties at the gate.

  “Karen, meet Suruga Kanbaru, a junior at Naoetsu High. Be careful, she’s a pervert. This is Karen Araragi, in her last year at Tsuganoki Second Middle School. Be careful, she’s stupid.”

  After much fretting, I’d given up and decided to go the honest route.

  You just don’t tell lies that aren’t gonna hold up. No point in upselling.

  I didn’t want them demanding a cooling-off period because I’d omitted important details.

  I had a strict no-returns policy in place.

  “Aww.”

  “Aww.”

  ………

  Why were they blushing in unison?

  I wasn’t complimenting them!

  That was something of a digression, or a joke session, but having introduced them, and trusting that Kanbaru wouldn’t actually try to put the moves on my little sister (any lapse of self-control would be resisted by Karen’s combat skills), I figured that I was done and decided to go home. That was when Kanbaru invited Karen in of all things, a barbaric deed that I promptly thwarted with a flying dropkick to Kanbaru’s back.

  Out of concern not for Karen’s chastity but for Kanbaru’s good name.

  I hadn’t been over to tidy up since the end of July, and the next visit was scheduled for the fifteenth, in other words, tomorrow, which meant that Kanbaru’s room was at its most festering state of disarray at the moment. So you see, it was a drop kick of love.

  “What do you think you’re doing to Kanbaru-sensei?!”

  Exploding in a fury the way I might if someone slandered Hanekawa, Karen slammed me with her knee before I could even land.

  Talk about a burst of speed.

  I did not stick my landing.

  “What do you think you’re doing to my senior Araragi?!”

  Fearing a follow-up attack if I lay there sprawled, I quickly righted myself just in time to catch sight of Kanbaru rushing in to berate Karen.

  Uh, so my flying drop kick had done absolutely zero damage… What had I been kneed for?

  Hmm. Some weird love triangle was forming here.

  Or should I say a three-way standoff?

  How about an unlovely triangle?

  At any rate, as I headed home alone, walking neither on my hands nor carried on anyone’s shoulders, at last─

  Mayoi Hachikuji made her appearance.

  About halfway between my house and Kanbaru’s─on a street corner a little past the mailbox where Kagenui had asked me for directions.

  I spotted a fifth grader with pigtails and a knapsack. Hachikuji.

  Enter Mayoi Hachikuji.

  She had yet to notice me in turn.

  “……”

  I fell silent. And then exhaled a long, slow breath.

  Now, now… I’m sure you’re all expecting me to make a big scene and run up and tackle her. A little girl standing there obliviously like a fawn that knows not the meaning of danger─I bet you think I’m going to hug her from behind and rub my cheeks all over her face, or something.

  Please.

  Fine. I admit that there was a time when I would have.

  It’s true.

  But that’s such a long time ago. Ancient history, as they say.

  As a person, I was still a work in progress back then. I hadn’t grown up yet. They’re episodes from a bygone era when I was a boy, and emotionally immature.

  As much as I’d like to summon and unspool some of those memories now, um, I honestly don’t remember much of it.

  Understand if I don’t exactly welcome people digging up every little thing that may or may not have happened back in those days.

  Does that make me small?

  If you dredge up stories about when I was a brat every time I see your face, I might start to avoid you. Who wouldn’t be baffled if, say, your first crush was your teacher in kindergarten, and people brought it up after you’ve become an adult?

  I’m an adult now, okay? Those days are over.

  Biologically speaking, the past Koyomi Araragi and the present Koyomi Araragi are practically different people. After all, the cells in my body are constantly being replaced.

  No one stays the same forever.

  That time in my life was fun while it lasted, but everyone has to graduate from kindergarten at some point.

  Yeah, that happened, didn’t it?

  That’s the only impression that the remembrance sequence requires.

  That’s what living means.

  Sad or not, it can’t be helped.

  Because there’s no life without growth, is there?

  Hitagi Senjogahara grew up.

  Tsubasa Hanekawa grew up.

  Now I had to as well. Didn’t I just say so?

  Complexes are meant to be overcome.

  Lolicon included.

  During our elementary-school safety drills, they taught us not to SDT (shove, dash, or talk), and I somehow came to think of that as Small Darling Tweens, but that, too, is only a fond memory.

  Yes, our interests and tastes keep changing, shifting.

  No child plays with transformer robots or Barbie dolls forever.

  Moving on is almost a duty.

  In the first place, who gets excited over grade schoolers with pigtails in this day and age?

  Pigtails? Grade schoolers?

  A bit dated, no? May I say, out of touch?

  I, for one, have lost all interest in this girl Mayoi Hachikuji. Sure, depending on your perspective, long ago there might have been a time when I really liked her. Even if there had been, in the grand scheme of things, that past is so long gone as to be B.C. It’s passé, as the French would say.

  Currently, I’m only interested in, you know, Sima Qian. Great historian.

  That’s right, I’m moé for Sima Qian.

  Yup.

  Well…

  Well, well.

  Well, well, well, well, that said, precisely because I had lost interest in Hachikuji, maybe there was no reason to ignore her now.

  I didn’t care enough about her to ignore her.

  In fact, if I did ignore her, wouldn’t people make the outlandish, uncalled-for assumption
that I was trying to overcompensate?

  You could say ignoring someone was a backhanded compliment.