Nekomonogatari (Black): Cat Tale by Nisioisin

Author:Nisioisin. [Nisioisin.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Fiction, Action & Adventure, Fantasy, Contemporary, Paranormal
ISBN: 9781945054488
Google: RLdftAEACAAJ
Amazon: 1945054484
Publisher: Vertical
Published: 2017-11-28T05:00:00+00:00

006

This is going to sound horrible, but I really hadn’t placed that much importance on that.

After all—if I was with Hanekawa, it was practically a daily occurrence for me to do something like minister to a dead cat on the street.

I’d done that kind of thing tons of times.

Just like the way she had saved me during spring break.

Hanekawa—buried the cat, that was all.

Like it was the obvious thing to do.

Asking, “Will you help me, Araragi?”

In the same way she’d always ask, with the same smile, as if she’d forgotten all about any gauze that might’ve been on her face.

She held in her arms the cat’s dead body, run over so many times that I couldn’t tell what color its fur was. It could have once been so white it shined, but now it was something else, maybe blood red, maybe dirt black.

Like she loved it.

Like she cherished it.

She held it.

There are enough people who love cats that “as though loving a cat” is an expression in Japanese—and I don’t hate them, either—but even if it hadn’t been run over, I doubt many people would be able to cradle a dead cat in their arms.

When I considered that.

When I thought that.

I felt—agitated again.

I wanted to say something.

But I couldn’t in the end.

“A Sawarineko. An Afflicting Cat.”

I don’t know, would you call it fate? My plan had been to give the girl vampire my blood, hand the donuts to Oshino, then go right back home so that I could rest my lazy bones, but that wasn’t happening.

I ended up getting stuck helping Oshino with his job.

No, I probably shouldn’t phrase it in a way that makes me sound like some kind of victim—I had to heed a request from someone I owed five million yen, especially if it had something to do with Hanekawa.

In fact, helping him wasn’t enough.

I practically wanted to take the lead.

“A mammal belonging to Carnivora Felidae,” said—Oshino.

A cat.

“Afflicting Cats are one of the aberrations I’ve been collecting stories about here in this town—that is actually what I was out until just now looking for. I guess this is what you’d call a coincidence—but it’s not a very welcome one if it is. Borrowing from an old friend of mine, I can’t help but sense some kind of malice.”

“Wait—hold on, Oshino.” His words left me a bit confused—or rather, I barely understood a thing at all, and I could only reflexively and thoughtlessly argue about the surface details. “Maybe I didn’t do a good job explaining? The cat Hanekawa and I buried wasn’t any aberration. It was a real, living—formerly living—cat. An actual one.

Not a nonexistent one, but one that exists. It looked like it had been run over by a car—like you described, it didn’t have a tail, and now that I think about it, its fur was a silverish white—but it wasn’t any aberration or yokai, but an honest-to-goodness—

“Right. It wasn’t.”

I would agree with you. Normally, Oshino said.

He didn’t get riled up and shut down my objection—he was being just as frivolous as ever.

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