Nisenmonogatari Part 2 Page 4

Hmm. Judging from her reaction, I seemed to be on the wrong track.

  But if she wasn’t being bullied, what explanation was there? Didn’t Sherlock Holmes say that when you’ve eliminated the logically untenable possibilities, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?

  Unless there was some possibility that I was missing?

  Hrrm. Mr. Holmes’ articulation of the process of elimination was kinda loose.

  “Ahh, I got it! Cosplay!”

  “Since when is a girl wearing a skirt cosplay?” Karen objected. “It’s not like I never feel hurt, you know. That’s the kind of stuff that made me want to die back in grade school.”

  “Oh, yeah? So you were pretty delicate once upon a time,” I remarked as if it had nothing to do with me. I wasn’t showing an ounce of remorse, if I do say so myself. “Well, if you’re not being bullied and it’s not cosplay, what the hell?”

  “Oh, um, aren’t I cute?”

  With a husky moan, Karen struck an enticing pose with all the muscles in her body.

  It was far from sexy. If anything, it was a superb martial arts stance. I guess that wasn’t surprising since she’d rotated her hips while standing straight.

  “I-I don’t know about cute,” I stuttered.

  “Cute is the word,” warned Karen, still in her enticing pose.

  It was actually a fairly strained stance, and maintaining her balance couldn’t have been easy, but she was indeed athletic.

  By the way, while I’d rather not divulge a fact that touches on my dignity as an older brother, my sister is genuinely terrifying when she tries to intimidate me for real. According to legend, once, she even beat a lion at a staring contest at the zoo.

  Looking away as casually as I could, I said, “C-Cute, yes.”

  N-No, I wasn’t sucking up to my little sister on account of some unstated threat! (Ex)cuse us, is what I meant to say!

  I just misspoke, like Hachikuji!

  Sorry, a slip of the tongue!

  “……”

  Karen continued to intimidate me in the same pose. She was seriously scaring me.

  The pain from when she beat the crap out of me the other day during the bee incident had to be engraved in my marrow as my latest trauma.

  My body began trembling uncontrollably.

  “Cute! Cute! Cuuute,” I found myself repeating.

  Clearly, I was just misspeaking serially here, and what I meant was, Cut! Cut! Cut (your crap). I’m sure Hachikuji’s tongue would have slipped more elegantly, but I’m no Hachikuji. True, an elegant slip of the tongue is an odd metaphor.

  “……”

  We both fell silent. The awkwardness was palpable. Several seconds passed…

  “Eheheh!”

  …and, believe it or not, Karen hugged me.

  A middle-school girl hugging you might sound adorable, but the facts on the ground belied that image.

  That image is fake.

  Going back to the lion at the zoo, and expanding on it, I imagine you’ve seen clips on TV and elsewhere of wild carnivores hunting in Africa and other places, right?

  Karen’s movements were analogous.

  Swift and nimble. From her first step, she was already at top speed.

  In traffic accidents and such, when humans are in imminent danger, we often mistakenly stiffen up. Well, even if I hadn’t frozen, Karen’s attacks were impossible to dodge─maybe during spring break, but not this summer vacation, not me.

  Indeed, Karen was able to hug me head-on as if she were tackling me.

  About a year ago, I’d witnessed her crashing through a steel girder at school with the same maneuver. It was already pretty deteriorated, but still─the scene flashed before my eyes.

  Fortunately for me, I did not share in that steel girder’s fate. The impact, however, was enough to knock the wind out of my guts.

  My ribs, made of bone and not steel, creaked dangerously.

  Karen, who had wrapped her arms around my back with no apparent concern for my lungs, now proceeded to slide them up around my neck and to pull herself close.

  Total coverage. As in around-the-clock? No, twenty-four hours of this would be a little much. Actually, even one minute!

  If she bear-hugged me with all her strength, she might split me right in half. Neither Shinobu over spring break nor the cat monster over Golden Week had done such a crazy thing to me.

  If this wasn’t horror, then what was?

  “K-Karen?”

  “Thank you! I’m so happy to hear my brother say that! So happy! Yay!” Still hugging me, squeezing even tighter, Karen let out a jubilant cry.

  Yet another helping of horror…

  This was all-you-can-eat horror.

  “………nkk!”

  We had a serious situation here.

  My sister…was being affectionate.

  Well, maybe not a serious situation, but certainly an unfunny one. Honestly, she’d been weird from the beginning. Asking me if there was anything she could do for me, even if it was just to pass the time, was unlike Karen.

  Can I make you pass out to pass the time? would have been more like her (which is scary enough coming from your little sister).

  “Ahh, it’s so relaxing hugging my big brother like this. It must be because you’re so accepting. I bet this is what a Tempur-Pedic pillow feels like.”

  “Geez, stop, you’re freaking me out. Yuck, yuck, yuck, let me go. I’m sorry, you really are.” I thrashed around but couldn’t pry myself loose. Physically, I was no match for Karen, but I’m not sure it was even her arm strength. It almost felt like some sort of structural restraint. “Seriously, what kind of prank is this? What’s with your new character?”

  She really wasn’t being bullied? Then was it some kind of dare? In which case, I was the one getting mistreated here. What did I do to deserve to be picked on by a bunch of middle schoolers?

  “Hey, be happy,” Karen ordered. “Your cute little sister is bothering to act all cuddly.”

  “My cute little sister…”

  “You just said I’m cute. Real men don’t go back on their word.”

  “I haven’t got any for you right now!”

  Well, sure.

  Maybe it was just the novelty of it, but she actually didn’t look half bad in a skirt.

  “Just, tell me what you’re up to,” I said. “Not just what you’re doing, either. Explain in order, starting with what you think you are.”

  “Huh? Sure, I just thought…I’d turn over a new leaf and start pitching myself as the little sister who loves her brother and never disobeys him.”

  “Pitch all you want, I’m not buying it! Besides, you’re stepping on Kanbaru’s turf!”

  Obviously she wasn’t my little sister, but as my junior her position was similar.

  “Kanbaru,” Karen uttered─and suddenly let go of me.

  The sense of freedom reminded me of being un-cuffed (something that actually happened to me late last month, the simile is based on experience)─and Karen took three steps back to put some space between us.

  As though to avoid stepping on her master’s shadow, as the saying goes.

  Hm.

  What now? Karen had a weird look on her face.

  She’d been acting weird from the start, but this was straight-up weird (though “straight-up weird” is another odd turn of phrase).

  As glad as I was to be free, she was acting very quiet all of a sudden. Maybe I’d surprised her by suddenly mentioning an unfamiliar name in the way of quipping.

  “Umm, Karen. Don’t let the ‘baru’ mislead you, it’s got next to nothing to do with Bao the Visitor. Kanbaru is one grade under me at school, and…”

  I figured this was my chance to change the topic, and if I was lucky, maybe Karen wearing a skirt could be consigned to the dustbin of history, so I proceeded to try to explain who Kanbaru was, but that was easier said than done.

  My junior Kanbaru. A second-year student at Naoetsu High School, and a former ace basketba
ll player.

  In a sense, no one could be simpler to understand, but in a different sense, no one was as incomprehensible. How did I explain her?

  It was almost like trying to explain how a centipede walks. Or like being asked how falling in love works.

  If I just shared my plain, unadorned thoughts on her, it’d sound like I was badmouthing her. Her reputation would suffer, and I didn’t want that at all.

  My vocabulary sucked. No wonder I had so much trouble improving my composition scores.

  “Let’s see… Kanbaru is like an E5 series bullet train, one of those maglevs…or maybe a fighter jet…like the Phantom?”

  As I babbled searching for the right analogy, Karen interrupted─ and surprised me.

  “Of course, Suruga Kanbaru.”

  Huh?

  Wait, what? I’m pretty sure I hadn’t said her full name yet.

  “Karen?”

  With a determined air, she yelled, “Big brother! I have a favor to ashk you!”

  Suddenly raising her voice had made the end come off sounding babyish. The speed with which she followed up, however, cancelled out the trivial error.

  Too fast for the eye to see, it was like a flash step. Or a full-body Futae no Kiwami double limit break.

  Rapidly dropping to her knees, she planted her palms out in a forty-five-degree angle completely flush with the carpeted floor; bent her supple, lithe upper body forward as if it were an attachment designed for that purpose; and then smacked down her forehead, one of the hardest parts of the human body, as if in rebellion against Mother Earth.

  Put simply, she prostrated herself in a dogeza.

  Put simply or not, in fact.

  “I beg you, please introduce your worthless little sister to Kanbaru-sensei!”

  “………”

  Ah. Right.

  So that’s what it was.

  Karen’s suspicious, totally uncharacteristic behavior, so suspicious that I might have called the police, the hospital, or maybe even a prison hospital if she weren’t family, finally made sense.

  Suruga Kanbaru─as I said, she was a former basketball ace, but that profile was far too commonplace to truly describe her. She was a phenomenon that transcended ordinary phenomena, the biggest star in our school’s history.

  Kanbaru was so talented that she led our sports-poor prep school’s feeble basketball team all the way to the national finals. To say the least, how many girls could pull off a slam dunk?

  She had to leave the team partway through her second year for certain reasons but never ceased to be a star. Even now she was quite popular, especially among the younger students.

  Quite a few of her admirers were fanatical.

  I don’t even want to recall exactly when, but this one time, I got surrounded and mobbed by a throng of her fans, a terribly awkward and overwhelming experience. Fortunately, Hanekawa showed up with Kanbaru to break things up and I survived, but I’d feared for my life.

  First Senjogahara’s fan, Kanbaru, tried to kill me, and then Kanbaru’s fans made their move. I sure had some luck. Maybe next time Kanbaru’s fans’ fans would try to kill me.

  In any case, I was aware that her popularity, her power of attraction, exceeded the confines of Naoetsu High. Still, middle schoolers knew about her, too?

  She really was something else.

  Suruga Kanbaru.

  “Well, come to think of it,” I said, “since martial arts are a sport nowadays, you knowing about a national-level player who’s a local star isn’t weird at all.”

  Apparently it was the rule or custom or whatever at Karen’s dojo not to participate in tournaments (Or rather, they couldn’t. Their style was so focused on actual combat that they were forbidden from joining related clubs at school), but Karen being Karen, if she did enter into such competitions, then make no mistake─or mistake as you might─she’d get to the nationals.

  Maybe she felt close to Kanbaru in some way.

  Still, did my worthless sister just say “sensei”?

  I didn’t know about that.

  “Please, Koyomi─oopsy, my dear big brother!!”

  “‘Oopsy’…”

  “Daisy!”

  “Great timing─but!”

  In place of a verbal riposte, I stepped on Karen’s head.

  Yes, I’m the kind of older brother who grinds his younger sister’s head beneath his foot as she lies prostrate.

  Consider it payback for her scaring me earlier (not that I was scared!).

  “Ahh, it’s an honor to be stepped on by you, big brother,” Karen dared to say, resilient, face down and unresisting.

  Basically a jock, she aspired to fortitude of the mental variety as well, and if it was in the service of some goal, this degree of punishment and humiliation was, as expected, practically fun for her.

  Hmph. If I do say so about my own sister, she was M cool.

  “Actually,” I told her, “I’m pretty tired of seeing you prostrate yourself. Quit flattening yourself for every little thing, or soon that’s how you’ll be saying good morning. Do I look like an imperial parade? What sort of lord am I? Let me tell you something, little miss Karen, dogeza is a form of violence in this day and age.”

  It was strong-arm blackmail.

  Even if I was stepping on her head.

  “Of course!” my sister agreed. “Then I’ll lick your foot! Starting from the big toe and in descending order!”

  “And I’m saying I’ve had enough of that!”

  “Nrkk!”

  Karen lifted her face slightly from her position on the floor to look up at me. A fire seemed to smolder in her eyes as if to welcome any obstacle standing in her way. It was quite a wonderful expression.

  “Fine then!” she cried. “What about my virginity? You can take my virginity!”

  “I don’t want my little sister’s virginity!”

  I gave her a swift kick to her face.

  Reality admits of certain situations where violence against your little sister, still in middle school, is warranted.

  “Ghak!”

  Dealt such a blow, you couldn’t maintain a dogeza even if you were Karen. Yet if you were Karen, you instantly leapt backward on your knees to diffuse the impact.

  She even transitioned into a backflip, a so-called moonsault (I don’t know if it was to downplay her reflexes or what) in my hardly spacious room, brushing the ceiling but completing the remarkable maneuver.

  10.00! 10.00! 10.00! 10.00! 10.00!

  What an incredible athlete.

  She landed on my bed. The springs creaked, loudly.

  I’d be sleeping a little less comfortably from now on.

  What did she have to do that for?

  “Karen… I know you get carried away and it seems fine now, but in ten years’ time, when you’ve matured physically and mentally into an adult, you’re going to cringe when you remember how you prostrated yourself before me. Just so you know, I won’t ever forget that you did.”

  “Hmph. This is about now, not ten years later. How can there be a tomorrow unless you survive today?”

  “That’s a great line and all…”

  But it meant prostrating yourself?

  How pathetic. What kind of tomorrow awaited someone performing a dogeza today?

  “I’m still gonna ask you, though, just in case,” I said. “You’re not doing this kind of shit outside the house, are you? Like with your friends or classmates…or teachers at school?”

  “Of course not! Everyone looks up to me.”

  “……”

  I supposed that was true. She was one of the Fire Sisters of Tsuganoki Second Middle School, after all. Plus, Karen was the enforcer of the pair, so she tended to stand out more than Tsukihi. Karen occupied the most dangerous, most conspicuous position as the hotshot.

  “My rule is that I only bow down to my big brother!”

  “Don’t be singling me out.”

  It was a nuisance. Maybe she needed to go die once so she’d be cure
d of her stupidity. Or maybe she could just be stupid and go die once anyways.

  True, partly on account of her popularity, I did think at some point that she “resembled” Kanbaru. Due to their different circumstances, there were various minor dissimilarities, of course, but they definitely had a lot in common. Karen hearing rumors abut Kanbaru and idolizing her wasn’t unthinkable.