Nekomonogatari black, p.1
Nekomonogatari (Black), page 1
part #7 of Monogatari Series
001
It’s taken me long enough, but I’d like to think back to Golden Week, those days when I frolicked with Tsubasa Hanekawa to my heart’s content. They are harsh memories, they are astringent memories, but in a way they are bittersweet memories, too, and yet, if I could somehow forget them, I would─I would fly in the face of reality and make it all nothing more than fiction. Let me think back to those nine gleaming days.
Tsubasa Hanekawa. Seventeen years old. Female. High school senior. Class president. Model student. Braided hair with even bangs. Glasses. Serious, too serious. Virtuous. Very smart. Kind and fair to all. But it’s not like I think I can express a girl as exceptional as her to you by listing off these sorts of signifiers and character traits, not for a moment. Yes, there’s a certain something, about something about her, that can’t be expressed in any human language and that you can’t understand unless you’ve actually faced her, unless you’ve actually been in her presence. The reality of it is if you want to speak of who Tsubasa Hanekawa is, you would most likely need to do it in the language of the gods.
Or maybe the language of the devil.
So to be frank, and though I really couldn’t be any more sorry about it, I’ve given up from the start; I could go into every last minutia, from end to end, missing nothing, and I’m certain that I still wouldn’t be able to convey the truth of those nine nightmarish days, or the all-but-imperceptible imitation of the truth that those nine nightmarish days were. Having abandoned all hope of communication, I am the embodiment and avatar of resignation.
And anyway, it’s not as if I want at all to communicate to anyone the way I feel.
Only.
I simply─and plainly─want to mumble on and on to myself about my savior, Tsubasa Hanekawa, my friend, Tsubasa Hanekawa.
There’s probably no meaning to it.
There’s certainly─nothing at all to it.
No meaning, nothing at all for anyone, not even me.
It’s what you might call an empty shell of nothing.
That’s exactly why Hitagi Senjogahara or Suruga Kanbaru, whom I’d later meet─who charge headlong toward their goals, prepared to sacrifice whatever it takes, with such strength that at times they don’t hesitate to trample underfoot that which they hold dear─would see the nostalgic, revanchist act I’m about to attempt as utterly frivolous longing, worthy of a snicker, not even worthy of scorn, unproductive and backward-looking.
Those girls, both strong and weak, share a set of values that say people must live their lives facing forward, if not actively then positively, if not aggressively then ultimately.
They say it doesn’t have to be pretty.
Scrappy is fine, greedy is fine.
Those are their values─and they’re different.
I’m different.
Feeble and flimsy Koyomi Araragi, unable to hold a candle to them, is different.
A weak-willed coward who doesn’t just look left and right but back, too, before stepping in a pedestrian crossing, a mockery of a human─is different from those girls.
And.
Tsubasa Hanekawa and I are the same.
Lumped together.
Contrary to expectations, you might say.
Complementary to emotions, you might say.
However rude it may be to lump myself in with someone as exceptional and outstanding as her who is in a way beyond our ken, if there’s any concept that grows asymptotically close to becoming a moral learned over my Golden Week, that would have to be it. Using the word “moral” almost makes me sound like a fraud, but what else can I do, when it’s the unshakable truth.
I’ve resigned myself─there’s nothing else I can do.
The point in common between me and her.
The common denominator between Koyomi Araragi and Tsubasa Hanekawa.
What’s the same inside our hearts.
I understand it now─now that time has passed since Golden Week and second semester is just about to start, it hurts horribly but I understand it after all this time.
It is literally painfully obvious.
Why Tsubasa Hanekawa decided to call out to me.
Why Tsubasa Hanekawa allowed herself to encounter me.
Why Tsubasa Hanekawa saved me.
But this is something I’ve come to “understand now,” “after all this time.” In other words, it’s too late, it won’t come to anything. The only things I can take away from it are things that can never be taken back, undertakings that have already taken place.
Something just might have happened if only I’d noticed these kinds of circumstances, maybe not from the moment I met her but at least by Golden Week.
The two of us, feeble and flimsy.
We just might have been able to become something.
So that’s why these really are words mumbled to myself in an empty classroom after school, a detailed, standardized apology written from this dull seat.
Words of regret carved into a desk as graduation draws near.
I feel remorse about what happened, but I don’t feel regret─no, I’d never try to whitewash my situation with a line like that.
I feel remorse, and I feel regret.
I wish I could make it so that it never happened, and if I could do it over again, I would.
I’m just frustrated, so frustrated about that Golden Week. Why couldn’t I make it go any better? Why, why, why? I’m so frustrated that I’d want to die if I wasn’t immortal, so frustrated that it makes me want to cry, and even now I have dreams about it.
They are, without question, nightmares.
Tsubasa Hanekawa.
The girl with a pair of mismatched wings.
To go into the timing of this story, it took place around a month after I went through hell for two weeks, during the spring break between my second and third years of high school─though still plagued by lingering aftereffects, I had somehow resumed my everyday life after suffering, like a fool, the highly romantic experience of being attacked by a vampire, of all things, in present-day Japan. Mistaking me for some anachronistic juvenile delinquent, Tsubasa Hanekawa schemed her way into making me class vice president, and while I don’t remember whether I was still worried by that development or if I’d gotten over it by then─that was when it happened.
She was bewitched by a cat.
A cat.
A mammal belonging to Carnivora Felidae.
That’s why ever since Golden Week─I haven’t liked cats.
I’m scared of cats.
Yes─just as I’m scared of Tsubasa Hanekawa.
This preface has gotten a bit long, but there’s no need at all to fret─there’s more time after school than you might think.
Now then, I’d like to tell you about a dream I had last night.
002
The epilogue, or maybe, the punch line of this story.
The next day, I was roused from bed as usual by my little sisters Karen and Tsukihi. Whether it’s a weekday, the weekend, or a holiday, they’re like machines designed to wake me up early each morning, which is why it made no difference that it was the first day of Golden Week, April twenty-ninth. While I almost wanted to praise their diligence─rising and shining when they always goofed off and stayed up late couldn’t be easy─they probably weren’t interrupting my sleep out of concerned consideration for their brother’s daily rhythm but rather as a way of displaying power. It was a demonstration, a shot in a domestic territorial dispute.
Speaking of which, I haven’t spent much time yet describing what exactly my sisters do when they wake me up, but, well, it’s mostly because it isn’t anything worth describing.
In the anime version, my sisters will go on to approach me with a plethora of rousing methods─shoving me down the stairs, putting me in the camel clutch, hitting me with a muscle buster, and more─but those are, you could say, played up for the small screen. I’m sorry for shattering any perceptions, but sadly, no little sisters in the real world are so cute.
Well, anyway, I don’t know about other households, but at least in my family, Karen and Tsukihi just gently say, How long are you gonna sleep for? C’mon, wake up, and then─
“You fell back asleep? You’re dead.”
A crowbar came swinging down beside my pillow.
“Whooooah!”
I nearly leapt as I dodged it.
Actually, I didn’t dodge it all the way. It took a tuft of my hair with it.
The tip of the crowbar then pierced my pillow, hair and all.
A poof of feathers scattered into the air.
The sight would make you wonder if angels had descended from heaven, which is why I thought I may have died, but the 32nd notes I could feel my heart trilling from inside my chest hinted that I was still among the living.
I looked around.
There with the furious expression of a demon-god, clad in a yukata, was Tsukihi Araragi, my little sister in her second year of middle school, as she struggled to remove the crowbar that had penetrated not only my pillow but the bed underneath it.
The crowbar-like object.
No, just a plain old crowbar.
The most crowbar-like crowbar in the world.
“Tsu-Tsukihi?! What are you doing? Are you trying to kill me or something?!”
“You went back to sleep, why would I want you alive? Why would you sleep after Karen and I went to the trouble of waking you up? It doesn’t make sense. You can die you can die you can die.”
“You realize we’re only at the opening s
Think about consistency with the previous installment!
“I just wasn’t standing out compared to all the other characters, so I thought I’d try and act like a stalker,” she explained.
“You’re acting like a psycho, not a stalker!”
“But if you were able to dodge that, I guess that means you were only pretending to be sleeping.”
“No, I was sound asleep…”
It seems people are surprisingly capable of responding to danger even when they’re asleep.
They might say humans have reached an evolutionary dead-end, but no, there’s still a lot further we can go.
“You were worried about not standing out as a character? God, you sound like a middle schooler,” I scolded.
“That’s because I am a middle schooler.”
“Right.”
It’s not like my time in middle school qualifies me to make fun of anyone else’s, of course. Well, maybe my experience means I have a duty to warn others.
“Anyway, don’t overdo it,” I told her. “You’re the little sister who comes to wake me up in the morning. That’s enough.”
“That’s like, the definition of a background character.”
No thanks, she said.
Fair. No one would want to be a character defined by her older brother.
“I want to be a flashy character like Karen. Look at her, she’s the final evolution of a little sister.”
“I wouldn’t call her a final evolution. She’s more of the kind of character where your life is over if you end up like her. Listen, there’s still hope for you. You need to work hard to become a proper, respectable character.”
“A proper little-sister character.”
“Yup.”
No one present realized that striving to become a “little-sister character” was hardly proper.
“Specifically,” I said, “you should try to become like Marilla from Anne of Green Gables.”
“Marilla?!”
“Well now, that’s right,” I replied in my best Matthew impression.
I’d just woken up, okay?
“Man, Marilla really is the ideal little sister,” I opined. “I wish I could’ve had one like her ’cause she’s a tsundere among tsunderes. ‘I wanted a boy! A girl is of no use to us!’ and then fawning over Anne by the end.”
“Oh, so she’s a tsundere in the classic sense.”
“She’s one by current definitions, too. Her snippy comments to Anne after she’s done fawning are super-adorable, too.”
“Is that how my big brother reads Anne of Green Gables?”
“Yep. As I read it, my mental voice actress for Marilla from start to finish is Rie Kugimiya.”
“No actual names.”
And how old is Marilla anyway, Tsukihi asked.
What an idiot. She didn’t understand anything.
The real fun with little sisters starts after they turn fifty.
“When you think about it, Matthew got such a good deal,” I said. “Living all that time together with his little sister, plus he gets to raise a little non-blood-related girl with braids. He’s who every gloomy shut-in boy wishes he could be, even more so than Shinji.”
“Please don’t call Matthew from Anne of Green Gables a gloomy shut-in…”
“The scene where he goes to buy a Christmas present for Anne is such a tearjerker. It really strikes a chord. Yes…you end up buying inessential stuff,” I keenly recalled that masterpiece. “And that’s how you need to be, Tsukihi. Because then, one day, you and I can live together in our old age at Green Gables.”
“You know you’re almost proposing to me.”
“Hah, it’s no mere proposal. It’s a polonaise.”
“A courtship dance?!”
How am I supposed to read Anne of Green Gables now? groaned Tsukihi, clutching her head.
What am I ever going to do with you, I muttered, shrugging and getting off of my bed to begin taking off my clothes.
This of course isn’t to suggest that I was about to commit any sort of indecent act against my little sister, only that I was changing from my pajamas into my house clothes.
“Umm, so what’s up with Karen?” I asked.
“Excuse me?”
By the time I’d spoken, Tsukihi, her mission to keep me from going back to sleep apparently accomplished to her satisfaction, was already splayed out and lazing around on my bed.
She wasn’t just a far cry from Marilla, she had even given up on getting her crowbar out of my bed.
What was I supposed to do that night?
Maybe leaving my room and coming back would fix it, like a video game?
Either way, Tsukihi looked like a caterpillar the way she rolled back and forth without any concern for her yukata opening up.
That’s what I’d call her. Sisterpillar.
“You shouldn’t give your little sister kinky nicknames, Koyomi.”
“Stop reading the narration. And anyway, answer my question. I asked what happened to that flashy, tracksuit-wearing, taller-than-me female whose hip you always seem to be joined to. You’re not with that ponytail on legs?”
“Karen’s jogging right now.”
“Jogging? Jogging as in running but not quite? That’s rare, she doesn’t normally do that.”
“Today’s special. She said it’s her way of celebrating the beginning of Golden Week.”
“How is that a celebration?”
“She must be thinking of Olympic torch runners.”
“Oh. So she’s as stupid today as any other day.”
“I think she’s gotten Golden Week and the Olympics mixed up.”
“Oh. Because of the gold medals they give out during the Olympics? She’s as impressively stupid as ever.”
How heartwarming.
So that’s why Tsukihi had come alone the second time she came to wake me up.
They’d come together early in the morning (well, an hour ago) to rouse me from my idle slumber, but after realizing that I’d attempted to fake them out and go back to sleep, Tsukihi had come marching back in on her own for my reawakening (whatever that means).
Hence the crowbar.
You really couldn’t let her act on her own.
Between Karen and Tsukihi, the former, with her life’s calling to martial arts, is the more brutal of the two, but the latter seems to be the more dangerous. She doesn’t know the meaning of the word “restraint.”
