Onimonogatari Read online

  “Don’t get serious like that with zero warning…”

  “We, at least, ought to remain free among it all! I’m Mayoi Hachikuji, ten years old! I’ll show you my panties!”

  “That’s a little too free!”

  “Oh, but was just showing panties all right? I heard that the ordinance wouldn’t affect my friend Shizuka from Doraemon.”

  “Well, I doubt they can regulate Doraemon.”

  And wait, why “my friend” Shizuka? Who are you anyway, are you important?

  “Yes,” Hachikuji agreed, “Doraemon is something of a national manga… Worst case, you’d even alienate international opinion. Still, if I may, Doraemon simply is erotic.”

  “No weird readings of that historic masterpiece!”

  But sure, all of its secret tools are true to human desire and can easily be abused all day long…

  “I believe, Mister Araragi, that four out of five elementary school boys owe their sexual awakening to Doraemon. How long is the Agency of Cultural Affairs going to turn a blind eye to this state of affairs?”

  “I’m curious about the fifth boy…”

  “Wakame from Sazae-san.”

  “…”

  Our conversation gave me a lot to think about the legacy, both positive and negative, of nationally acclaimed manga; I also felt that the fifth boy was kinda kinky.

  Wait, that had to be fake data.

  Stop making things up.

  “In that case…just wait here for a minute. I’ll run and grab your backpack.”

  “You have ten seconds. Sprint.”

  “A haughty tone?!”

  For some reason, I was now a ten-year-old girl’s gofer.

  No, a twenty-one-year-old woman’s?

  Makes my body tingle either way.

  Well, since her eleven years as a ghost weren’t any that “accumulated,” Hachikuji would never turn twenty-one…

  That, too─my time traveling had made painfully clear.

  A historical fact.

  Leaving Hachikuji to wait at our freshly built gate, I went in and climbed the stairs to get her backpack from my room.

  I felt like swapping out her backpack’s contents and filling it with stones in a pang of goatish mischief, but no stones were to be found in my room, naturally, so I gave up on the idea.

  Now, let me swear to all the gods above while I’m narrating that I really didn’t mess with the backpack after Hachikuji left it in my room the day before.

  I may be a nasty parasite, but I’m not so criminal that I’d put my hands on a girl’s personal belongings.

  I’m chivalrous.

  A gentleman.

  I didn’t want to make Hachikuji wait for too long, so I shouldered her backpack and headed outside again, not stopping to sit down or enjoy a cup of coffee.

  “Ahh! Hey, don’t be touching my property!”

  “That’s asking for too much…”

  “Yikes, I’ll have to take it to the cleaner’s.”

  “Um… Haven’t you been hating me a little too hard today?”

  “I don’t want it anymore. Go ahead and throw it out.”

  “Weren’t we saying you’d turn into Mayoi Muckyoozy without this?”

  “The way you’re forcing it onto me is creepy. You’ve bugged it, haven’t you? Ugh, you scum!”

  “Why be that suspicious of me… What a hassle, just read Kabuki. It’ll prove my innocence.”

  “I’m not buying such an expensive book.”

  “Don’t call it expensive…”

  “Sixteen dollars?! Imagine how many eight-dollar pocket-sized books I could buy with that kind of money!”

  “Just two. Can’t you at least call it bulky instead of expensive? The total word count should be about even.”

  Give me a break. Why the negative promotion when she’s in its chapter title?

  “Of course,” she said, “fixed retail prices for books could become a thing of the past in Japan, too. The current resale system seems to be reaching its limits, and we’re getting closer and closer to the age of electronic books. I don’t know if they’re a black ship, a rescue boat, or a privateer vessel.”

  “E-books, huh? You know, they’re surprisingly good for reading manga. It’s shocking how well the color black shows up on them.”

  “Yes, that’s true. The ink can sometimes be too light in magazines. It could be that the better the art, the more you want to see it as digital data.”

  “If there’s a problem with the format, it’s the two-page spreads. Phones will show you one panel at a time, but manga’s strength is its free control of the display size… Still, we might end up getting used to it.”

  “After all, panel layouts were incredibly straightforward until just a couple of dozen years ago. Like four long, horizontal panels in a row. The art was simple, too. It could be that we’re experiencing a Renaissance in many ways.”

  “Calling it a Renaissance implies that we’re learning from the past, though…”

  Maybe that was the case for the panel layouts… Yet while I did bring it up, I’m not too knowledgeable on the topic. How do cellular phones deal with the complicated paneling you typically find in girls’ comics?

  Spreads might be the least of our problems…

  “And more manga is getting serialized on the internet,” Hachikuji noted.

  “Right, online magazines. In that sense the manga industry’s gates have widened for rookies. Not to mention the new print magazines that keep getting launched.” Closing our eyes, for the moment, to the fact that existing ones are going under─sorry, “on hiatus”─one after the other. “In light of those developments, manga might actually be a super-stable line of work. Lots of long-running series nowadays, and the skills are pretty transferable.”

  “That’s an awfully optimistic view… But like you were saying about the paneling, and how manga’s strength is adjusting the display size, I think another strength is being able to continue one story for as long as its popularity and its creator’s stamina lasts.”

  “Well, culturally, novels are a bit different in that regard.”

  I think it’s a matter of different release formats.

  The magazine serialization is the main thing for comics, but it’s the book for fiction. A novel’s nature is that of a “one-shot” in terms of comics. It’s very discrete, whether you like it or not.

  “Don’t forget the fiction franchise that repeatedly pretends the series is over but comes back to life like a zombie each time and chooses to drag on forever!”

  “Stop it,” I begged. “Stop with the masochism.”

  “That aside, I think electronic books will become prevalent all at once if they can solve the pricing issue. Just as long as they set it at a point that won’t see anyone starving.”

  “Starving… In this slump, that feels like it’s easier said than done.”

  “Considering the bother of turning them into convenient electronic data, I think they could be sold for more than real books, in fact.”

  “How patronizing.” As if it were a seller’s market.

  “There just needs to be more added value. Like search functions, or links to foreshadowing that let you come right back to it, or the ability to revisit the character intro at any moment, or voice actors reading the lines.”

  “All of those are pretty far from our image of a book…”

  I could feel myself being left behind by the times.

  And I’m only in high school.

  Still, it’s not something you can readily accept without an elite education in it, so to speak, from your earliest days. I don’t even feel comfortable with cell phones, not having gotten one until I was a high school student.

  Text messages? They make me panic a little even now.

  “It’s fine, Mister Araragi, be glad that you’re present for the genesis of a new culture and aware of the fact.”

  “I wonder. I’d have preferred to take my sweet time enjoying it after it’s become the nor
m.”

  Also, a ghost telling me how I should feel over being “present”? Not that a half-vampire could say it better.

  “I envy people who were there for the emergence of cell phones,” remarked Hachikuji. “They composed their own incoming call notifications with chords!”

  “Is that so enviable?”

  “Now you can download a ringtone by pressing a button… But either way, isn’t it a good opportunity? The publishing industry could use a revolution.”

  “A revolution… I just hope it doesn’t implode in the process.”

  Brooding over the future of publishing with an elementary schooler, I started to get hungry.

  It was getting to be about that time.

  As a vampire I don’t need to adhere to that strict of a meal schedule, but habits, not to harken back to what we were saying, are hard to shake, and it wasn’t every day that I ran into Hachikuji.

  Why not treat ourselves to lunch?

  “Is there anything you want to eat, Hachikuji?”

  “I could name many dishes, but no, nothing, if it has to be with you.”

  “Hey, hey…”

  Weird. Did Hachikuji always hate me this much?

  It’s been so long, I couldn’t even guess why…

  Come to think of it, was the last time we talked at this much length actually Nise?

  That, indeed, would be quite a while ago.

  “Well, Miss Hanekawa and Miss Kanbaru and Miss Sengoku did organize coups d’état and hijack your role as narrator.”

  “Hold on a second. Chronologically, it wouldn’t make sense for us to know about Kanbaru and Sengoku.”

  “I never thought that Miss Sengoku would turn out that way. How frightening.”

  “Stop it, it really would cause a time paradox if I knew about that now. Sengoku is just my cute little junior.”

  “I want to say that was the problem…”

  “By the way, aren’t you ever going to narrate?”

  “The rule is that beings that are nothing but aberrations can’t become narrators.”

  “So there was a rule about that…”

  I looked down at my shadow.

  Ah.

  Right, so this time, too…

  “All joking aside, isn’t there anything you want to eat? My treat.”

  “Oh… As you are aware, though, I’m a ghost. If you lunched with me, Mister Araragi, you’d be looked at like parents who order food for their deceased daughter too.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  Hm.

  While that didn’t matter, if Hachikuji ate real food, how would that eaten food be treated in reality?

  Normal people couldn’t see her, but they could see her food… Would the food in her organs look like it’s floating in space?

  That couldn’t be it.

  It’s not like things look like they’re floating just because Hachikuji is holding them… Maybe it all gets patched over by the brain of whoever sees it happening.

  Of course, if anyone’s brain is patching things over, it could be mine, “recognizing” a human who died eleven years ago.

  But that’s just a hypothetical ghost story.

  “It’s my treat, but I’m a penniless student getting ready for his college exams. We’d only be able to go to a fast food place.”

  “Fast food…”

  “Not enough for you?”

  “It makes you want to fast? That would be more than enough.”

  “Give me a break.”

  Wrong sense of the English word.

  As a student studying for exams, I at least know that much.

  “Well, get on my bike. Let’s ride together.”

  “No way, Mister Araragi. Riding behind you…”

  And then.

  Just as Hachikuji started to give another one of her answers in the “I hate Mister Araragi session” that seemed to be all the rage with her.

  It already had its hooks in me, and I was on the edge of my seat waiting for her answer but wasn’t able to hear it to the end─because.

  That’s when we spotted something.

  It.

  003

  If you asked me what it was, it’s a mystery.

  A mystery.

  That’s the only answer I could give.

  But not because I…or Hachikuji was lacking in knowledge about aberrations. Well, of course it was partly that, too…but not the only reason.

  I say this because we─or at least I─couldn’t really tell if it was even an aberration.

  I couldn’t identify what it was.

  Since I couldn’t see it.

  While it does feel like a bit of a contradiction to say that I spotted something that I couldn’t see, in this instance it’d be the most suitable expression.

  Although I couldn’t see it, it wasn’t at all transparent─meanwhile, with the ghost girl known as Mayoi Hachikuji, whom regular people couldn’t witness as we discussed earlier (I’m not going to make a “given up on the ghost” joke here. It would be unfunny and inappropriate), it’s not necessarily that she “can’t be seen”─because not witnessing means rejecting even the recognition that it can’t be seen.

  Not noticing that you can’t see it.

  In other words, it’s not there.

  What can’t be recognized doesn’t exist. That logic stands in the confines of the human brain, at least.

  And in this case─I was able to recognize it, which I couldn’t see. I recognized that it couldn’t be seen─because after all.

  There was a Darkness there.

  A darkness─a blackness, if you want.

  Or just plain black.

  To repeat myself, it was the middle of the day─the middle of a midsummer day, at that, with sunlight pouring down on us from the sky.

  Weather that could make you start sweating just standing still─it was in an environment with simply excellent visibility that it appeared out of nowhere.

  That Darkness.

  “…”

  I could…try to interpret this phenomenon.

  Vision amounts to reflections and wavelengths of light, so if something doesn’t reflect it, the area is “displayed” as black─for example, coal looks so black because it has a high rate of light absorption, or better, black holes can’t ever be observed by the eye because they bend and suck everything into them, including light─it seems like there’s just a Darkness there.

  Only, we weren’t in space.

  There’s no way a black hole could have emerged. No way I’d be fine if a black hole did this close to me, for one thing─well, no.

  Actually, no.

  Even if it─even if this Darkness wasn’t a black hole, if it was just a lump of coal, there was no guarantee that I, or we, would be fine─szzt.

  It felt like the Darkness moved.

  Just barely.

  “…nkk!”

  It was instinct.

  Intuition.

  A bad feeling.

  If you insist, it was experience.

  I immediately straddled my bike─and Hachikuji wasn’t any slower to act, because despite her earlier firm refusal in the making to ride together with me, she leapt onto the cargo rack.

  “Step on it, please!”

  “I know!”

  Directed by Hachikuji for some reason, I began pedaling─as hard as I could, at top speed from the first down-stroke.

  I wanted to exploit my leg strength as a vampire, but unfortunately it wasn’t good for much in the middle of the day.

  True, subjected to a vampire’s full leg strength, no mere granny bike could hold itself together (probably the chain would blow off), so pedaling in a standing stance like a dead-serious human might have been just about right.

  I felt like ever since Kanbaru destroyed my mountain bike, I was really abusing this granny bike─yeah, it really deserved some maintenance work already.

  “Raaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!”

  Of course, that was only if we had any future to upkeep.

 
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