You call it the truth, but it’s still facing the wrong way around, I almost wanted to say in a salty mood. While I’d made a four-yen offering to Miss Hachikuji, I couldn’t take that attitude with Miss Serpent, who’d made a cameo appearance free of charge.
In hindsight, my donation to Miss Hachikuji was so meager I’d be better off not having paid anything. I suddenly felt like apologizing─sorry for my callous quips, even if I kept them to myself.
“Do you still not get it, Big Brother Koyomi? Listen here, I’m just trying to tell you that the same goes for this world. Viewed head-on, it might seem like left and right are flipped, but that doesn’t mean it’s reversed─it’s not about deciding which one is correct, both of them are, okay?”
“What?” Both─were correct? The truth?
“This world might look like an inconsistent mess from where you stand, but just like your world, that all depends on if you lewd in the right way.”
“Lewd in the right way…” I took her seriously, but wait, my world wasn’t that lewd.
“Pardon me, view it in the right way.”
“How do you make a mistake like that? How do you confuse those two phrases? They’re practically opposites.”
“Opposites, eh─hsshh hsshh.”
Miss Serpent echoed my vacuous quip as if it were profound─hm?
“All right, fine, let me recap,” she continued. “All the nice people you know who you’ve met in this world, whether your sisters or your friends or your juniors or your childhood acquaintances─along with me and Miss Mayoi. It’s not like our left and right have been flipped around. You’ve started to figure that out by now, haven’t you?”
“…”
“Yes. It’s not that we’re flipped around─we’re out here as our honest selves, in our own way. We might be reflections, but we’re not illusions─hsshh hsshh! Judging by the way you’ve been looking at me, I’m nothing like the me you know, to the point where you can’t believe that we’re the same people─but I’m sorry to say, this is also who I am.”
I’m Nadeko Sengoku, Miss Serpent said.
Nadeko Sengoku said, in other words.
Even my dull self was beginning to see her point─but something about it wasn’t sinking in. Was it some visceral reaction?
The logic that the reflection in the mirror is identical, is the same person, made sense for Tsubasa Hanekawa and Black Hanekawa, but I couldn’t bring myself to accept it for anyone else.
Take the first person I met. If Karen got shorter, didn’t her entire identity crumble away?
“People who’re tall don’t always wish it was that way─just as some people develop a complex over being short, others can about being tall. Your cute little sister only just graduated middle school, right? Do you think she’s grown up enough on the inside─to catch up to her height?”
“On the inside…”
Well, when you put it that way, yes, her body had done all the growing but the person inside of it had yet to fill it out. She was still a child─it seemed to me, at least.
“…”
And?
If you adopted that approach with Tsukihi─Ononoki─Hachikuji─Kanbaru─Hanekawa─Oikura─Sengoku─the jumbled way they’d been flipped around finally started to line up along a common theme. But what did it mean?
“Hsshh hsshh. It’s starting to come together now, so why don’t we jump back a bit. You said that mirrors flip around left and right because when you raise your right arm, your left arm moves─but that example doesn’t apply to a snake with no limbs. What would you say is flipped around in the case of a snake? How would you─how do you explain left and right being ‘flipped around’ to me?”
“I’d, um, use the shape of your scales, or the way they’re lined up…”
“Don’t picture literally explaining it to a snake. What are you, stupid? I’m asking how you’d explain left and right being flipped around to someone who lacks those concepts.”
“Well…”
It was like a variation on the Ozma Problem. It might seem easy, but it’s harder than you think. For example, moving your body to the right would make your counterpart move left─but the key is to explain left and right being reversed without using the words.
“The Ozma Problem reminds me of the Wizard of Oz,” Miss Hachikuji chimed in with a comment that I could safely ignore (not quipping even silently at her expense now just made me seem cold). But as I continued to agonize over the question, I arrived at a very simple answer.
“That’s it. You could just show them reflected letters.”
“Hsshh hsshh. Letters?”
“Yeah. Well, there are a lot of symmetrical letters depending on the way you write them, so maybe use full words? Put that in a mirror and it’ll be reflected with left and right switched around, which should let you explain a mirror’s properties, right?”
Koyomi Araragi would be reflected as . Miss Serpent would be reflected as ─the “mirrored letters” that made me give up at the bookstore.
Seeing them, it was immediately obvious that you weren’t looking at a simple piece of glass, and that reality isn’t being shown to you as it is.
“Yes.”
That’s it, Miss Serpent said.
Her facial expression was less of a Right! You’re smarter than I thought, Big Brother Koyomi! and more of a So you finally managed to put together the answer I wanted─look at all the work you made me do. Well, then maybe you should’ve just given it to me up front in an itemized list.
Maybe gods had some kind of rule where they couldn’t deliver messages too directly from on high, but I’d heard enough about mirrors; I was even reminded of that abandoned cram school and Oshino force-feeding me his extensive knowledge on aberrations. For her to look disappointed on top of it all was too much to handle.
Speaking of which, what became of that cram school in this world? It didn’t exist in mine anymore. The designs of buildings and other sights around town were flipped around, but that was all I’d noticed…
“Okay, Big Brother Koyomi. Time for the next step.”
“You weren’t done yet?”
“Don’t you worry, this is the last of it─we’ll ask Miss Mayoi for her opinion after this.”
“Huh?” Mayoi Hachikuji seemed honestly surprised to hear Miss Serpent mention her─she must’ve forgotten her own earlier statement.
I was right, it was just an excuse and she didn’t have an opinion…
“If, out of the blue, someone showed you the words , not in a mirror but on a piece of paper─what would you do?” asked Miss Serpent.
“…So I’m playing the snake now? Do I also need to pretend that I have the brain of a reptile?”
“No, even yours should be up to it.”
What a mean thing to say─well, of course Miss Serpent would be partial to reptiles, she was a snake god.
Umm.
“Well, I’d probably just think of them as mirrored letters.”
“But you don’t know what a mirror is. Nor do you know what mirrored letters are.”
“Okay, then I wouldn’t think of them as mirrored letters, but that just means I don’t know how to read. I’d still think of them as flipped─”
Hm? No, that wasn’t it. I’d normally only think of mirrored letters as “flipped around” if I were in front of a mirror. Try to remember, what did I do when I struggled to read those history books?
Right.
I tried to read the pages from the opposite side, through the paper─an attempt that failed, but that meant if I saw mirrored letters on a piece of paper…
I’d probably turn the page to look at it from the inside out.
Yes. Mirrors didn’t turn left and right around─
“They turn people─inside out.”
Now I understood.
For the first time since coming to this world, I finally got it─this was no mirrored land. Well, it was a totally correct understanding, but─the girls I’d seen hadn’t been flipped around.
They were turned─inside out.
What was hidden inside of them was now on the outside.
Ah… That’s why Tsukihi was the only one who hadn’t changed, aside from her clothes─actually, even the clothes were a regular mistake by her standards, but in any case, that’s the kind of person she is.
Someone with only one face─Tsukihi Araragi had no inner self that could appear, even in a mirror.
Yes.
Here, on the other side of that mirror, was an inner world.