FUDANSHI SUPREME

What does prove necessary is what comes with every story in this series - the epilogue, the punchline, the twist. What all these short stories have in common is a concern with perspective and how easily meanings can be shifted, recontextualised, re-interpreted. It’s perhaps an understandable focus for Nisioisin looking back at the series’ beginnings, and trying to create, in retrospect, a road that leads to its ending. 

Koyomi Stone is an apt starting point that places our protagonist back in an empty classroom we might remember from the beginning of Bakemonogatari, talking to Hanekawa Tsubasa. But as Koyomi looks back on his old art project, I look back on Tsubasa, from before any of her stories have been told. Koyomi says he takes school for granted, that even after losing his humanity as a vampire he can’t take “the grace of everyday life” to heart. This is in sharp contrast to Tsubasa, who has been intimately familiar with the school’s history and premises since she entered - including the forgotten stone. As a conclusion, Koyomi ponders whether the stone might not have become a real oddity because of his carelessness encouraging its worship, his refusal to examine his own life and past. In the stone’s case it’s a bit of a stretch, but if we’re talking about things that Koyomi takes for granted, that he neglects to examine the origin of, that may blossom into a dangerous oddity in the future, I think of none other than Hanekawa Tsubasa. 

If to Tsubasa life is a road one can become so accustomed to you forget it’s even there, Senjougahara Hitagi thinks of it as a sidewalk where you can easily stray onto the street. Koyomi Flower is placed right after she rids herself of the crab in Bakemonogatari, and Hitagi still seems so fragile that she could jump out onto the road at any moment. Like Tsubasa, she investigated the school thoroughly, but unlike Tsubasa, she was on the lookout for threats. As Oshino mentions, flowers in offering to the dead can serve as an invitation to disaster as much as a warning, but what’s left unsaid is that the flowers on the school rooftops were both. In investigating them, Hitagi put both herself and Koyomi in danger, crossing into an out-of-bounds area as carelessly as she steps between the sidewalk and the street. I find myself coming back to that metaphor again and again. Like Mayoi’s reference to the “backstage”, it paints the world of oddities as just a step away from reality - and here, as there, resulting in a change of mindset, leading to a dysfunctional attitude where Hitagi steps closer to danger in her efforts to avoid it.

On the topic of Hachikuji Mayoi, she appears as the third member of our lineup, and her advice to Koyomi about roads is that they’re made for walking on. It should be considered advice, I think. Koyomi is looking to others for an example of how he should live his life from here on out, and perhaps Mayoi’s contribution is timely, with this story being set after the ending of Bakemonogatari proper. You may have resolved one problem, Koyomi, but keep walking. It isn’t over yet. One does get the sense of a slightly undeveloped perspective here, such a fixation on the line between human malice and the mysterious work of an oddity that he doesn’t realise the phenomena he’s observing is entirely natural. It’s a story about sand, which somehow feels appropriate for the shared premise of the first three stories here - repaying debts to Oshino Meme. Like money, sand is infinitely exchangeable. It can take any shape you like. But that’s Kaiki’s philosophy, not Oshino’s. One gets the sense that Oshino doesn’t care for the debts apart from as a kind of aftercare. To stop people from feeling so grateful to him. To give them a reason to put their life back together. As a reason to remain in contact for just a little longer. Of course, the man himself is now absent again, but nonetheless Mayoi spends the most time talking about money out of anyone. A strange hobby for a girl who’s no longer alive. What would she even buy? To her, as well, I think money serves as a link tying herself to others. A reason to keep on walking. 

For Kanbaru Suruga, roads aren’t for walking, but for running. She has a hard time slowing down, as if afraid the past will catch up with her, and a hard time changing direction, as if she’s not on a road at all, but a track. Like a basketball court, the places you can go and what you need to do to succeed are already laid out for you, and I guess the story this time is about a similar phenomenon. If you can really see your future lover’s face on the surface of the bath, that would certainly make life easier. Hitagi is more skeptical. You’re just misinterpreting your own reflection, looking into the past rather than the future. She considers her view to be cruel and unromantic, but I don’t hate the idea of choosing your own destined lover. It suits her to say that your feelings for someone can retroactively engrave their face in your heart. Koyomi, at least, is quite taken with the idea, imagining Suruga seeing her lost parents. Suruga, for her part - deflects. She only sees her own breasts, she says. It’s the kind of exaggerated comment she’d only make with Koyomi, and I can’t help but see it as avoiding a real answer. As she says in the beginning, even if you can’t leave the track, even if you can’t slow down, you could always start running backwards, away from the path laid out for you. Is what Suruga sees in the water - what she wants to see - her past or her future? It’s still too soon in the chronology to tell. We’re only up to July. 

In August we’re reunited with Nadeko Sengoku, who unlike the others offers no advice on roads to Koyomi. He’s forced to guess at her feelings himself, always a dangerous game. From his perspective, Nadeko isn’t looking at a road at all. She goes through life looking only at her feet. Later, Kaiki talks about how those in poor circumstances are the easiest to deceive, since they don’t have the luxury of considering their options. Nadeko is one of those people who simply doesn’t have the wherewithal to consider her future. I sympathise with her. It’s a crushing prospect at the best of times. The problem is that when you only look right in front of you, you’re liable to run into things. A snake, perhaps. Or a conman. And when she does, she has no choice but to tell herself that there was no other way, that it can’t be helped, that everything has already happened and will keep happening forever and it most definitely isn’t your fault. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I mentioned Kaiki because he’s come to deliver the lesson of this story. He doesn’t read the winds, he says. He can’t generate rumours or predict what will get big. What he can do, though, is notice a vacuum. A void. An absence, left in the wake of a greater presence. That’s what serves as a piece of advice for Koyomi. Or a warning. Pay attention to the road ahead of you. Something bad is coming. 

By the time of Karen’s story, set chronologically after Mayoi Jiangshi and Shinobu Time, Koyomi has become familiar with the Darkness. Koyomi asks Karen what would happen if her road came to a stop, if she encountered something that would prevent her from continuing. She declares that she’s already decided wherever she comes to a stop is the end of the road. There is no Darkness for her, Koyomi remarks. It might only exist for those who have already slipped through the cracks of society, like those we’ve already spoken of. Like Koyomi, who once wished to be a tree instead of a human. Perhaps it’s interesting that this story is also about a tree. But then again, all the Araragis have that character in their name, and if I had to pick one, the titular tree most resembles Tsukihi. The other members of the dojo are creeped out by it, like it's an impostor. Karen and Koyomi’s efforts to defend it involve fabricating for it a legitimate lineage - making it a ‘member of the family’, so to speak, by saying that it sprouted from the same tree that built the dojo. Koyomi ends by wondering if their lie might not eventually turn into the truth and lead the tree to become an oddity that watches over the training students. In effect, that would be inheriting Karen’s will of justice that caused her to protect the tree in the first place. 

Speaking of Tsukihi, though, her story is also resolved by Koyomi propagating a lie. Her engagement with the “road” theme is airy and hard to pin down. Like with Nadeko he doesn’t ask her directly but instead speculates, describing her like a bird that would rather take to the sky than walk. This habit of going one’s own way makes a reappearance when describing her fellow tea club members, who remain convinced that a ghost is haunting them, despite Tsukihi’s best efforts. Even though they have evidence the ghost doesn’t exist, they would rather go with the flow of the rumour. But Koyomi notices that Tsukihi herself is the same - despite knowing for a fact she’s right, she still has some unease about the resolution. The flow she was trying to go with was one of a detective story rather than a ghost one. It seems to me that both Tsukihi and the other members are just falling in line with the story they prefer to inhabit. In the end, Koyomi provides her with a story about the club members’ behaviour that proves satisfactory: they were doing it for Tsukihi’s sake. Unlike in Karen’s story, we aren’t particularly concerned with whether it could be true, but rather whether Tsukihi believes it. Koyomi tends to think his sisters are stupid, but Tsukihi’s overly affected response to his lie clues us in that her behaviour might be more deliberate than he realises. The story that she prefers to inhabit is one where she’s quick to anger but easy to mollify. What we’re really left to ponder is if it’s a lie, or whether acting that way by choice makes it more true?

On the topic of characters that Koyomi can’t quite read, Oshino Ougi’s opinions on roads are left vague in quite a roundabout manner. It’s a shame, given her strong association with signs and traffic lights. What she instead quizzes Koyomi on is road construction - whether a road built for no purpose other than building it really counts as a road, even if nobody walks down it. I’m of course tempted to draw the line between this and the main topic of the story: how the ancient builders of Kitashirahebi Shrine managed to get it up to the top of the mountain in the first place. However, the twist turns out to be that they never built a road in the first place, constructing the shrine out of materials found there on the mountaintop. The more immaterial road we must consider is instead the continuing faith that allows them to frame this as a ‘relocation’ instead of a mere rebuilding. Oddities abide, Koyomi thinks. Even if nobody walks down their path. Such is the case for the Serpent God, whose faith is resurrected by Nadeko a thousand years after its passing. It looms all the more heavily over this story for the fact that she hasn’t done it yet. If it wasn’t already, it becomes quite clear that Ougi is the void preceding disaster which Kaiki warned us about earlier. If you watch the anime in novel order, her opening theme appears here, incongruously, for the first time. Much like Ougi herself, it’s slotted in without explanation or introduction. As though she’s always been there, and you just forgot. 

Shinobu’s story takes place during the December where Koyomi awaits his graduation from life itself at Nadeko’s hands, and fittingly the road she speaks of is a dark road, illuminated only by the night sky. For a brief moment we are returned chronologically to the earliest point Koyomimonogatari ever touches on: Kiss-Shot and Koyomi’s rooftop conversation during Kizu. In her full undead glory, she decries the incursion of streetlights into her domain - but stares longingly up at the moon. Shinobu is a creature that embraced darkness, but now it seems like she’s making an active effort to embrace light. I’m quite a fan of how this story begins, with her questioning Hitagi’s motives in making donuts for Koyomi. Surely, she asks, it would be cheaper and more effective to buy them at the store? (As a habitual user of matter creation abilities, Shinobu’s perspective on the value of labour is quite idiosyncratic.) Perhaps, she worries, Hitagi’s expression of love for Koyomi conceals poison within it, just like Nadeko’s did. Her solution is to complicate this simple procedure, forcing Koyomi into negotiations over the donuts, and even successfully concealing one from him despite it ending up in his stomach regardless. Tsubasa says that this was a lesson in love, and coming from Shinobu I can only interpret it as a warning. Love isn’t uncomplicated. You can’t assume your intentions completely align with someone just because you like each other. They might put poison in your food, yes, but the perhaps more plausible scenario presented here is that they might show you kindness in a way you can’t anticipate.

Yotsugi Seed features such an act. It doesn’t touch on its titular object much at all, which is perhaps fitting in a story where Yotsugi and Koyomi spend their time looking for something that doesn’t exist. “What’s the hardest thing to find?” Tsubasa asks at the end. Here, at least the answer is a seed. For example, when Yotsugi is asked about roads at the beginning, she offers that her ideal method of travel might be digging under the ground. To keep away from others, she says. She can only truly be herself when she’s alone. Yotsugi is a seed, still developing into her own person. On the other hand, Koyomi’s recent troubles with Nadeko are also referred to as a seed, and one he sowed himself at that. When Yotsugi suggests it might be the work of someone else, he flatly denies it. You can’t tell what's going on with seeds until they sprout, after all. A fitting role for Nadeko, who Koyomi completely forgot about until recently. But Nadeko isn’t the only seed Koyomi is ignorant of, here. Yotsugi’s own actions only sprout after the Nadeko situation is dealt with, when Tsubasa reveals Koyomi was being dragged around town to avoid Kaiki. In fact, throughout this short story collection, he has been the beneficiary of countless such acts of subtle consideration. They might be the hardest thing to find of all - Tsubasa says - because of how easy they are to take for granted. 

If we’re speaking of acts of subtle consideration, though - if we’re speaking of the hardest thing to find, if we’re speaking of the void that presages disaster, our penultimate story is Koyomi Nothing. In fact, if we’re speaking of roads it’s no wonder Kagenui Yozuru took so long to come up, considering she doesn’t walk on them at all, to the point that Koyomi can only imagine her answer to his question. Of course, what he wants to ask her isn’t really about roads, it’s about Yotsugi. What’s the deal with Kagenui and Yozuru’s relationship? I said earlier that it’s striking how little actually needs to happen in an installment of this series, and one where the question established at the start is left so aggressively unanswered is certainly pushing the limit. We do still get a little twist, the revelation that Kagenui’s offer of trial by combat was just a polite way to let Koyomi down - another of those subtle acts of kindness. This revelation is provided by Karen, which is in itself enough proof that we’ve reached a critical specialist shortage. It seems Tsubasa wasn’t even available to call, this time. The story ends with a ‘to be continued’. It’s the only story in the collection to do so.

In the absence of a proper denouement, I’m left to ponder what we’ve been building up to all this time, now we’ve reached the Final Season’s ‘present’. The first three stories show a somewhat immature Koyomi who thinks of oddities as problems to be solved. The next two feature him as more of an analyst, accepting the phenomena before him and questioning how they work. In the episodes with his sisters, he takes advantage of oddities, spreading ghost stories to solve problems. Despite, or perhaps because, of the lack of actual oddities in these arcs, you could see it as a reflection of his arc throughout the series - becoming closer to and accepting the supernatural. As the stories approach Second Season chronologically, then, it only makes sense they would change focus from his understanding of oddities to his understanding of people. With his failure to understand Nadeko in the background, he is prevented from understanding Ougi, misunderstands Shinobu, and can’t understand Yotsugi. 

Ah, but those are all oddities! you might point out. That, I think, is the point. It’s not as if the back half of Koyomimonogatari’s focus characters are entirely composed of oddities. One even snuck into the front half. It’s long been established that Koyomi doesn’t care about the difference. That’s what has him in so much trouble right now! None of these stories really feature supernatural events, but they all feature characters that have touched the supernatural, who slipped from the sidewalk onto the street, who have to tread carefully because they still see the Darkness welling up from the cracks. None more so than Araragi Koyomi, who despite all the advice he’s been given about roads still doesn’t fully understand how to live alongside the supernatural. In the end, the person whose understanding he asks for is Kagenui Yozuru, and before he comes to understand her, she disappears.

Gaen Izuko is someone he doesn’t even want to understand. If we’re to turn to the subject of roads one last time, one gets the sense that she wouldn’t have any particular thoughts about them at all, no more than any other object. She’s a fundamentally unsentimental person, in Koyomi’s view. She wouldn’t just appear before him at the shrine atop the mountain for no reason. In contrast, what does that make him, a person who’s been climbing up there every day for a month? It creates an odd sort of continuity with his previously repeated attempts to see Nadeko. We never really get Koyomi’s view on roads in this book, I’m realising, but it seems like he’s the type to keep walking down them even if he doesn’t appear to be going anywhere. 

That absence of clear progress and seemingly endless progression of mundane events that has been present throughout the whole collection is evoked particularly sharply in the final story as Koyomi notes he hasn’t encountered a single oddity the entire month. His final mission is simply going to his exam, but now it’s interrupted by arguably the only actual supernatural event in Koyomimonogatari.

Koyomi Dead might be the easiest arc title to read in the series: there’s Koyomi, and now he’s Dead. All the same, I’m inclined to think of it a bit like Koyomi Vamp - just as his affliction back then was vampirism, so too here he’s wrestling with his residual undeath. Kizumonogatari confronted him with the immense power his actions had to affect others in the form of Kiss-Shot, and now in the same vein Gaen is particularly concerned with limiting his ability to act. We begin to see those subtle acts of consideration from the last few stories as attempts at containing him, preventing him from getting involved with the supernatural at all.

Taking the arc titles at their word, Koyomi isn’t just the viewpoint character but also the subject of every oddity tale in this calendar. He’s the one that placed the stone, not Tsubasa. He’s the one that climbs up a school building to see the flowers, not Hitagi. He’s the one that plays in the sandpit at night, takes the subject of Suruga’s bathwater too seriously, even gets extorted by Kaiki when he tries and fails to read the wind. His sisters’ stories consist mostly of events relayed to him by someone else, but he’s someone who can’t leave well enough alone. In trying to trick Tsukihi he ends up tricked by her, because when someone tells him a story he can’t help but get involved.

Ougi drags him up a mountain, Shinobu tampers with his donuts, and any seeds that sprout with Yotsugi are those he sowed himself. Kagenui’s disappearance doesn’t just implicate herself, it leaves Koyomi with nothing, too, because he was relying on her for answers and closure. 

Koyomi Dead, then, is Gaen’s attempt to forcibly give him that closure. It’s an anticlimactic climax, one that dissipates all the foreboding built up throughout the collection in an instant, because she knows that leaving Koyomi and Ougi to their own devices might create the kind of ending she doesn’t want to see at all. 

I mentioned how little is actually needed to create a Monogatari arc, and this one, book-ended as it is by the protagonist’s death, seems to deliberately shrink in on itself. Gaen’s practicality condenses events to the point where no other characters are needed, and no real twist in the narrative occurs. It simply narrows to a point and then ends, like a full stop.

But the thing about full stops is that you can always start a new sentence afterwards. 

Thanks for reading. 

Now to be perfectly honest with you for a moment I no longer have any intention of writing these within a reasonable timeframe. HOWEVER I hope the fact that this was released at all makes it clear my commitment to finish these at least up till Zoku Owari has never changed regardless of how long it takes (did I ever say that was the stopping point? I’m reluctant to touch Off and Monster in a formal capacity before the anime is finished but I’ll likely post abt the novels in some form as I continue past that)