Nekomonogatari (White) Read online

  “I take mine black, thank you.”

  Okay, she said, ending her questions.

  It felt like I had just undergone some sort of psychological test, but I did understand now what was making her so upset.

  “Oh, I get it, I get it. I’m sorry, Miss Senjogahara, you’re one of those people who puts dressing on their salads. And that’s why you were making such a funny face.”

  “No, it’s that I didn’t know there was a no-dressing faction. And it’s my first time seeing a plain fried egg, and it’s also my first time being served just a piece of bread. Are you, let’s say, someone who rejects the idea of seasoning food? Perhaps you want to savor the ingredients as they are?”

  “Hunh?”

  It took a moment for me to understand what she was saying, and then it took a few more for me to think it through before I replied, Ah, no.

  “It isn’t like that at all. I think salad tastes just as good with dressing on it, and I can eat fried eggs all the same even if they do have Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, or salt and pepper on them, and I love pizza just the same with or without pineapple on it.”

  “We’re not talking about pizza toppings,” she shot back.

  Aw, I was so happy.

  My setup hadn’t been for nothing.

  “But doesn’t food taste good even if it doesn’t have any flavor?” I asked.

  “And there we have it. The clincher.”

  “What? But all I said is that food’s the same whether or not it has flavor.”

  “So this is why they say the best way to get a secret out of someone is to ask them how their day went.”

  Though I guess all I did was ask you directly, she added, putting down her chopsticks.

  She hadn’t given up on her meal, though. It was very much like her to have cleaned her plate.

  “Thank you for the meal,” she made sure to say, before continuing, “I take back every word I said about the two of us having similar tastes.”

  They’d been annulled.

  “You’re like the opposite of a picky eater, aren’t you? But it’s not that you don’t have dislikes, either.”

  “I’m sorry, I still don’t understand what you’re trying to say.”

  “The taste of home cooking, huh?” she ignored my query, as if lost in thought. “But no, it’s not like that. Maybe you’re someone who accepts the taste of anything… It might be an exaggeration, but you only care that your food provides you with nutrition. No, maybe nutrition doesn’t even matter so long as you’ve filled your stomach…”

  “Don’t make it sound like I’m a warrior or something.”

  “In that case, your sense of taste is only a burden. If you aren’t enjoying the flavor of the ingredients─then, in the end, you aren’t bothered by trivial details? When I think about it, being fixated on how something is seasoned might be a luxury.”

  Still, you did manage to smash straight through what I believed to be common sense, she said, staring straight at me as my portions sat on my plate. “But you know…I’m not so sure about living that way. It’s not just how you deal with food. You, well─”

  She seemed to be choosing her words carefully.

  That was rare.

  “─you accept everything that comes to you, don’t you?” she went with the same verb she used earlier. “It’s important to have things you love, but isn’t it just about as important to have things you hate? But you accept it all. And I wonder if that’s what you’re doing with me, and with Araragi, too.”

  “Huh?”

  Did our conversation change subjects?

  Did our conversation get derailed?

  Did our conversation just turn into something bigger?

  No─it hadn’t.

  We were on the same subject, and we hadn’t been derailed.

  The scale of our conversation was the same, too.

  We were talking about how I lived my life.

  Tsubasa Hanekawa’s lifestyle.

  “It wasn’t that we have similar tastes, my tastes are simply subsumed by yours─no, maybe I shouldn’t call what you have tastes, Miss Hanekawa. It’s probably better that I don’t. After all, if you like everything that’s out there, it’s like everything is all the same to you.”

  “……”

  “Miss Hanekawa?” she asked, still looking into my eyes.

  And it was just a hint.

  But something in her tone sounded flat─the way it used to.

  “Did you really love Araragi?”

  And then another question.

  “Are you still able to say, now, that you love Araragi?”

  022

  Miss Senjogahara and I both actually meant to attend school that day, but just before we left, we realized that she wouldn’t be able to for a whole week thanks to the unnecessarily big lie she’d told the day before, namely that she had the flu.

  “This is what they call being hoist by your own petard,” she lamented, but it seemed more comical to me than that, like she’d tried to shoot a Roman candle at someone but held it the wrong way around. “Now I have to stay here at home like a good girl for a whole week… I can’t believe it. I’ve been grounded when I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  However funny this turn of events seemed to me, it seemed to be a grave situation for our perpetrator who now had her hands to her head. Of course, lying absolutely counts as doing something wrong, so this could safely be classified as chickens coming home to roost.

  Or maybe the fowler getting caught in her own net.

  “My dad’s going to be so mad at me…”

  “……”

  She, a girl in her last year of high school, appeared to be afraid of her father being upset with her.

  It was so cute.

  “But it seems Araragi won’t be able to come to school for a while, either, so maybe it works out just right,” I reminded her, not particularly to comfort her but in the way of a little sarcasm.

  “You’ve got a point,” she responded, quickly putting her hands back to her sides.

  What a pair of lovebirds.

  And so I went to school all alone─where a whirlwind of questions awaited me, though I’d expected it. They had a bit of a curious, gawking bent to them, but that couldn’t be helped. I was happy that my classmates were concerned about me.

  Classes had now started for me.

  As I flipped through the textbooks I’d borrowed from Miss Senjogahara, who’d lent them to me saying, “It’s not like I can use them for a week,” I thought back to something else she’d said that morning.

  “You know, I’d always thought that the world must look so bland to people as smart as you─that because you understand so much of it, nothing’s exciting or thrilling. But I might have been only half-right about that and wrong about the other half. There was never any guarantee that you and I interpreted what it means to be bland in the same way. Yes, my very premise was faulty.”

  I didn’t imagine anyone could be fine with tediousness, and even crappiness─said Miss Senjogahara.

  How could I not give a panicked reply to that?

  “No, I’ve never thought that the world is bland. And I don’t like tediousness, and I think crappiness is bad.”

  “I wonder. Something makes me suspect that you’re just saying so─or rather just thinking so.” She wouldn’t accept my defense. “Actually, I’ve been wondering for a while. What the difference is between you and Araragi─both of you are willing to do anything for the sake of others, even putting yourselves at risk, but from where I stand, the two of you seem completely different─you don’t even seem to resemble each other. To put it simply, Araragi looks fake, while you look like the real deal. It made me wonder why, especially because your behavior is the same─but I think I understand now after eating this meal you cooked.”

  “What do you mean, you think you understand…”

  “Of course, claiming that I understand someone’s temperament because I ate their food makes it sound lik
e I’m in a cooking manga that will go unnamed,” she said. “It sounds like I’m in Oishinbo.”

  “Why go back and provide the title you just censored?”

  “You and Araragi understand danger in different ways. For example, if there’s a cat that’s been run over in the middle of the street─giving it a proper burial is probably the right thing to do. I think you would, and while he’d moan and groan about it, Araragi might too at the end of the day.”

  “……”

  “And I think the difference here is that moaning and groaning─the reason so many people would ignore a dead cat run over in the middle of the street, passing by as if they didn’t see it at all, is that it’s ‘dangerous’ to bury it. It’s extremely risky in our society for people around you to know that you’re a ‘good’ or ‘virtuous’ person─it becomes extremely likely that people will start to take advantage of you.”

  At some point, children intentionally start to act bad because they think it’s “embarrassing” to do good, but it’s not really because they’re embarrassed. It’s because such goodness is nothing more than a weak point, a liability amidst “the malice” out there in the world─Miss Senjogahara thought out loud.

  She continued to lay out her unique theory.

  “Araragi probably knows it’s safer to act bad─he knows just how much of a risk he’s taking by being a ‘good person.’ Again and again he’s acted like some defender of justice knowing there’s a chance he could die in the process, or at least fall by the wayside. When he was in middle school, and now that he’s in high school, too. That’s the reason he ended up washing out, but I think he always understood the risk that he might. He’s doing it even though he knows. Well, maybe not the risk of dying and then coming back to life like during spring break, but that aside.”

  “Spring break…”

  That time─he did regret it.

  He definitely regretted his actions then─but.

  He definitely faced those regrets.

  There was no mistaking it, and Miss Senjogahara was exactly right.

  Me, on the other hand.

  “You, on the other hand, don’t understand any of that─no, that’s not it. Even you must be aware of those risks. But you don’t think they’re anything to be worried about─that must be what it is. You don’t regret anything. It’s like you don’t find the malice and crappiness daunting. No, actually, you accept it. This all sounds like I’m describing just how incredible you are, but that’s not it at all. I had an incredible amount of respect for you until today─but it’s as if those feelings just vanished into thin air.”

  Indeed, the sense I got from Miss Senjogahara as she spoke─was that she wasn’t praising me at all.

  It wasn’t high praise in the least.

  If anything─

  She was mad.

  Just like when she discovered me sleeping in those ruins yesterday morning─or possibly madder.

  “I’m pretty hurt you said my cooking tasted good if that’s how you feel. Araragi didn’t show any signs of enjoying it, but you’re even worse.”

  “Miss Senjogahara…”

  “For example, what do you think about the way I live?” With that question, she spread her arms to present Room 201 of the Tamikura Apartments. “My shaky single-father household, my single-room apartment of a hundred-or-so square feet, no bathtub but saved so fortunately by my shower that sometimes has no hot water, my truly meager kitchen with only a single gas burner, my circuit breaker that trips if you use a hair dryer while running the washing machine─what do you think about my lifestyle?”

  “What do I think about it?”

  “You don’t think anything about it, do you? You don’t sympathize with the way I live or recoil from it, do you? And I’m sure that’s a wonderful thing. If we were in a novel or a manga or something, that is─or if we were talking about great historical figures, yes, that would be incredible. I might even find myself moved. But, Miss Hanekawa, you’re a real human being, aren’t you?” she put to me.

  While her tone remained flat─she seemed to be holding herself back with all she had so it wouldn’t get away from her and turn rough.

  “After all, even I think this way of living is the worst, and this is about me. I don’t believe, like some enlightened person, that this is a far more human life than the one in the mansion prior to my parents’ divorce. There’s no way I could. I don’t think for a second there’s anything more human about living in poverty. In fact, I agree with the saying─poverty dulls the wit. My father is working himself to the bone to repay our debts and get us out of this life. He’s working so frantically that I wouldn’t be surprised if his health failed any day now─and it’s all because we know how dangerous it is for us to continue living this way.”

  But you don’t feel that kind of danger, she said.

  “You realize that the danger is there, but you don’t feel a shred of it. That’s why you’re able to spend a whole night in those ruins.”

  “When you put it that way…”

  I was cornered.

  I couldn’t argue back even if I wanted to.

  “I think it’s that you’re too white─too pure and white. You must not understand how heartless it is to tell foolish people it’s okay to be foolish, how cruel it is to tell crappy people it’s okay to be crappy─and you don’t even attempt to understand why seeing defects and calling them virtues is sheer malice. You don’t have a clue about how irreversibly damaging it is to affirm something that’s negative. You can’t accept everything. If you did, no one would bother trying anymore. They’d lose the will to improve─but you aren’t the least bit wary of foolishness or crappiness. You always run straight off to do the right thing knowing that people are going to try to take advantage of you because you don’t pay the fact any mind, and you try to act ethically even though you know it makes you stick out like a sore thumb. What could be more frightening than that? I’m impressed that you’ve managed to live your life on such a razor’s edge and still be in sound health, I’ll give you that. So in conclusion, you’re not a good person, you’re not a saint, you’re not a holy mother─you’re just dull when it comes to darkness. That just makes you…a failure as a creature.”

  A failure.

  It was the first time anyone had called me that, and it was a little depressing to hear.

  We cut the conversation short there because it was almost time for me to go to school, but her words continued to swirl around in my head while I was on my way and all during class, too.

  You’re not a good person, just dull when it comes to darkness.

  Just dull when it comes to darkness.

  A failure, a failure, a failure, a failure─in other words.

  White.

  Too white.

  Pure and white.

  Transparently─white.

  “……”

  But now that I was in class and distracted by the doodles in the margins of Miss Senjogahara’s textbooks, I couldn’t deny feeling that those words felt a bit in vain.

  There were FMA drawings on every single page.

  They were ridiculously good, too.

  And she was preparing for college?

  023

  Miss Senjogahara probably felt frustrated.

  I ended up not understanding half of what she’d said and what she’d wanted to say, but that was still the impression I got.

  It really was just an impression.

  It was nothing more.

  Lunch came around, and I left the classroom and headed to the cafeteria─I usually pack my own lunch, but I wasn’t going to use someone else’s kitchen for that.

  No, I probably wouldn’t feel like making lunch in any kitchen, even the one in my own house, after being told all of those things by Miss Senjogahara.

  My own house.

  Would I, too, have made flavorful food if I actually had one─or so I wondered.

  When.

  “…Oh.”

  I saw a familiar
figure in front of me after I’d walked a ways down the halls─it was Suruga Kanbaru.

  She was walking from there to here, in the opposite direction as me (she really did seem like a cheerful person, just from the way she walked. Even from my distance I could tell she was humming some kind of tune), and she noticed me at the same time.

  “Ohh!” she exclaimed louder than you’d ever expect in a hallway, then dashed over to my side faster than you’d ever expect in a hallway.