Beneath the reserve was a childishness.
Beneath the introversion was aggression.
Beneath the cuteness was audacity, all there.
A Nadeko Sengoku who could explode, who could burst at any moment resided in Nadeko Sengoku─that’s how it was.
I went back over my adventures through this world I saw as strange to find that it wasn’t so at all. I’d simply been seeing these girls turned inside out.
This world allowed inconsistency and contradiction─not because it was a land of mirrors, but because the girls appeared as the characters they were in their own hearts and minds.
Freedom of thought.
Is that what you’d call it? It did center this world, which had felt so unstable and uncertain to me. It even changed the way I saw the sights, which simply seemed mirrored until then.
By the by, regarding what Miss Hachikuji told me about the etymology of “mirror” in Japanese, kagami, and how it’s derived from “snake eyes,” kaga-mi─there are of course many competing theories, one apparently being that it comes from “seeing shadows,” or kage-mi. A device to see people’s shadows.
Wherever there is light, there are shadows.
Whenever you see a surface, something exists underneath─everyone has another side to them.
Miss Serpent explained it to me in manga terms─out of nowhere, but I assumed it was for my own ease of understanding.
“I’ve heard you pick up certain bad habits when you’re drawing faces looking left or right, depending on which hand you draw with─so when you draw a face looking in your weak direction, you check it later in a mirror, or even draw a face looking the other way on the back side and trace it over on the front. Yes, obverse and reverse are also about strengths and weaknesses─the same essence expressed in completely different manners.”
The manga metaphor was easy for me to understand, but it was from an artist’s perspective for some reason…
Hm. Okay, there were many types of reversals, and lazily, I’d harbored a major misunderstanding until now. Miss Serpent had been worth my time, and she’d just worked a miracle─still, hearing her interpretation made me wonder, So what?
Being in another world, in a place I saw as a foreign land, and not having the first clue as to how to return plagued me just the same as before.
This expert on mirrors had enlightened me with the knowledge that mirrors pierce a person’s truth from the inside out, but there was no Which is why you need to do this! along with it.
Even if they weren’t the girls I knew, they were still one side of them, so I’d resolved not to treat them with disdain─but I’d gained no answer or solution to the question of how to get back to my original world and why this had happened.
No, strictly speaking, she made a fairly sharp point about the why, even if it wasn’t a full hypothesis─she in this case being not Miss Serpent, but Miss Hachikuji.
Lo and behold, she hadn’t been bluffing about giving her opinion at the end─she did have one doubt, unrelated to Miss Serpent’s take. A question she’d found herself with after we’d parted ways earlier that day.
“Well, putting aside this place being inside a mirror, or a mirrored land, or another world, or another dimension, whatever─there are people you know here, right? Like your family and friends, your juniors and childhood acquaintances?”
“Yup… In that sense, I haven’t been tossed into a completely unfamiliar realm, but your point?”
“What about you? Where are you, Araragi?”
Me?
“You haven’t met you, Araragi─isn’t that strange? Everyone knows you, me and Miss Serpent included─we each have a relationship with you. Some of us, like Suruga, might try to attack you, but that’s still a kind of relationship. But doesn’t that mean you’ve existed in this world long before you ever came here?”
“…”
“In that case, where did that Araragi go? Your personality and behavior seem familiar to us…but you’re not this world’s Koyomi Araragi, are you? Shouldn’t another Araragi aside from you─shouldn’t your inner self be in this world?”
There we go. The idea, or maybe clue that slipped away from me when I was talking to Oikura…
The normal Koyomi Araragi.
Traveling through time with Shinobu, we’d talked about there being two patterns: “you” existing in the time traveled to, and “you” being absent. In this case, though, there was only one possibility.
If the girls here knew me, it didn’t make sense for me not to exist─even if I wasn’t here now, I had to be before now.
When I looked in the mirror this morning.
That mirror image that didn’t line up with my movements.
Those eyes that seemed to glare at me─
“Could Araragi have gone to the other world, switching places with you, Araragi? And now he’s confused by ‘a nonsensical world where everything is consistent’… Heh, I think they’d be having a tougher time over there than we’re having here.”
“…That still makes things tough for us, too. We’d have to sync up perfectly with the other side when both of us return to our original worlds.”
Oh─actually, if the me who wasn’t me was in a world with Shinobu, things could get settled faster. We might be able to communicate with that world without using the Kanbarus’ wooden bath.
No.
Even if that were true─even if the me from this world had gotten sucked into the other world to take my place, it still wouldn’t go that well.
How would we pull off a perfectly synchronized two-man play? There was no guarantee that we thought the same way just because we were two sides of the same coin, the same person.
Twins can share the same genes but have different fingerprints. Why would the timing of our actions line up─this was the bigger issue.
Because.
Because thinking this through─judging by the examples of Black Hanekawa and the Rainy Devil, even if Koyomi Araragi existed in this world.
The flip side of Koyomi Araragi─was my nemesis.
It would have to be Ogi Oshino.