Two hours later.
I had left the former cram school where Oshino and the vampire now known as Shinobu lived and was at Senjogahara’s home.
The Senjogahara residence.
The Tamikura Apartments.
A two-story wooden building built thirty years ago, with a sheet metal communal mailbox out front. It did have a shower and a flush toilet, at least. A so-called one-room apartment measuring barely more than a hundred square feet, with a small sink. Twenty minutes walking to the closest bus stop (not train station, mind you). The rent, including the maintenance fee, neighborhood dues, and utility, estimated at thirty to forty thousand yen a month.
It was very different from what I’d heard from Hanekawa.
It must have shown on my face because Senjogahara explained, “My mother fell for religion, a sketchy one.”
Unprompted, like she was making an excuse.
Like she was trying to paper this over.
“She not only gave them everything we owned but took on a huge amount of debt. A believer and her money are soon parted.”
“Religion? You mean…”
She was into some money-grubbing cult.
And we all knew what that led to.
“My father took custody of me after my parents filed for an uncontested divorce at the end of last year, and now we live here together. Well, I say that, but I rarely see him because the debts are in his name and he’s still working himself to the bone to pay them off. I’m living alone for all intents and purposes and love the freedom.”
“……”
“But the school still has my old address on file, so you can’t fault Hanekawa for not knowing.”
Hey.
Were you allowed to do that?
“I’d rather not announce my whereabouts to people who might become my enemies one day.”
“Enemies…”
It sounded overblown, but perhaps such cautiousness wasn’t improbable in folks with secrets to keep.
“Senjogahara. When you say your mom fell for religion─could it have been for your sake?”
“What an unpleasant question.” Senjogahara laughed. “Who can tell? Beats me. Maybe that wasn’t it.”
It was─an unpleasant answer.
But perhaps the natural one to an unpleasant question.
My question really had been unpleasant, so much so that I look back and loathe myself for it. I shouldn’t have asked, and this was the moment when Senjogahara should have dispensed a lashing with her trusty acid tongue.
Having lived under the same roof, her family couldn’t not have noticed that their daughter no longer had any weight─especially her mother. This wasn’t school where you could just sit there and take the same classes. An incredible anomaly afflicting the body of their dear only daughter would have come to light right away. Once the doctors had all but thrown in the towel and resorted to an everyday routine of exams, no one could blame you for seeking solace.
Or maybe you weren’t free of blame.
I didn’t know.
What point was there in acting like I knew?
In any case.
In any case, I was─sitting on a cushion at a low table and staring with glazed eyes at a teacup that had been filled for me in Room 201, Tamikura Apartments, Senjogahara’s home.
This was her, so I’d expected to be told, “You wait outside,” but she’d invited me right in. She’d even made me tea. It was a bit of a shock.
“I’m going to break your every bone,” she said.
“What?”
“I’m sorry. Make yourself at home, I mean.”
“………”
“Well, maybe I was right the first time…”
“You nailed it your second try! You couldn’t have done better! That’s really impressive of you, Senjogahara, not everyone can correct their own mistakes like that!”
…But that was the extent of our conversation, so I was flummoxed. It wasn’t like I could utter some naive line about barging into the home of a girl I’d just gotten to know. All I could do was stare at my tea.
Senjogahara was taking a shower right then.
As a rite to cleanse herself, or something.
She was to wash her body with cold water and change into a clean set of clothes, new or old would do─according to Oshino.
Essentially, she had taken me along for this. Well, she almost had to because we’d gone from school to Oshino’s place on my bike, and he’d advised as much.
Having glanced around the spartan hundred-odd square feet that looked nothing like a young woman’s room, I leaned back on the small clothes drawer behind me─and thought back to what Oshino had said.
“The omoshi-kani. A Crab of Weight.”
After Senjogahara had conveyed her circumstances─not her life’s story exactly, but still, her situation from start to finish─Oshino nodded with an “I see,” looked up at the ceiling for a bit, and spoke those words as if they’d just come to him.
“A Crab of Weight?” echoed Senjogahara.
“It’s a piece of folklore from the mountainous areas of Kyushu. Depending on the locale, it might be called the weight crab, the heavy crab, the stone-weight crab, or even the omoishi-gami. That last instance is playing on kani, ‘crab,’ and kami, ‘god.’ The details vary, but what the stories have in common is people being deprived of weight. Encountering it─encountering it in the wrong way apparently makes your presence fade, too.”
“Your presence…”
Evanescent.
So─evanescent.
And─so much prettier now.
“Not just your presence,” Oshino elaborated. “In some nasty cases, your entire existence. They’ve got something in the Chubu region called the ‘stone-weight stone,’ but I think that’s something totally different. I mean, that’s a stone, and this is a crab.”
“A crab? Is it really a crab?”
“Don’t be silly, Araragi. They don’t catch too many in the mountains of Miyazaki and Oita. We’re talking about a legend.” Oshino sounded thoroughly appalled. “Sometimes being absent better lends itself to talk. Don’t delusions and backbiting tend to get people going?”
“Are crabs Japanese to begin with?”
“Araragi, are you thinking of crawfish? From America? Are you not familiar with Japanese folktales? The Crab and the Monkey. I believe there’s a famous crab aberration in Russia, and a good number of them in China, too, but Japan can hold its own.”
“Oh, yeah. The Crab and the Monkey. I guess, now that you mention it. But Miyazaki and─why something from those parts?”
“Don’t be asking me when you were attacked by a vampire in a backwater in Japan. It’s not as if the location means anything, really. Given the right situation─it arises there, that’s all.”
Of course, geography and climate were important factors, Oshino supplemented.
“In this case, it doesn’t even have to be a crab. Some say it’s a rabbit or a beautiful woman─not to bring up little Shinobu.”
“Huh, it’s like the face of the Moon.”
And hold on. He just called her “little Shinobu.”
I felt a pang of sympathy for her, despite myself.
She was a legendary vampire, and yet…
How poignant.
“But since the young lady says she came across a crab, we must be dealing with a crab. That’s standard, at the end of the day.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Senjogahara asked Oshino unshrinkingly. “What it’s called is all the same to me, but─”
“I wouldn’t say so. Names are important. As I just told Araragi, there aren’t any crabs in the mountains of Kyushu. It might be different up north, but they’d be rare down south.”
“You can probably find freshwater crabs, though,” I noted.
“Maybe. But that’s not the real issue here.”
“Then what is?” demanded Senjogahara.
“It’s that it may have originally been a god, not a crab. That omoshi-kani derives from omoishi-gami─but this is my personal theory. Most people think it’s a crab first and the god bit is an afterthought. True, the straightforward view would be that they emerged simultaneously at the latest.”
“‘Most people’? ‘Straightforward view’? I don’t know of any such monster,” Senjogahara objected.
“You wouldn’t not know. After all,” Oshino said, “you’ve encountered it.”
“……”
“And─it’s still right there.”
“Are you saying you─see something?”
“I don’t. Not a thing,” Oshino replied with an all too cheerful and lighthearted laugh that seemed, indeed, to bother Senjogahara.
As it did me.
Anyone would think he was mocking her.
“It’s quite irresponsible of you to admit that you don’t,” Senjogahara said.
“Is that so? Spirits and such are basically invisible to the human eye. No one can see them or in any way touch them. That’s the norm.”
“That is─the norm.”
“They say that ghosts don’t have legs or that vampires don’t show in mirrors, but that’s not the point. Basically, things of their kind aren’t identifiable in the first place. But I have a question for you, missy. Do things that no one can see or in any way touch really exist in this world?”
“You’re asking me? You said yourself that it’s right there.”
“Why yes, I did. But isn’t something that no one can see or in any way touch as good as nonexistent, scientifically speaking? Its being there and not being there are exactly the same.”