Conversations with the Horizon
Entry 001 — One Song, Three A.M., and a New Paper I Never Intended to Write
by Cecilia Аэлита Laurant 🌹⛩️
Monogatari — Fragments on Woven Memory
At first, I assumed Monogatari was exactly what its title suggested: a song about story.
A perfectly reasonable assumption. Safe. Ordinary. Entirely free of philosophical consequences. After all, if a song is literally called Story, surely it intends to tell one. Or so I thought.
That, as it turned out, was my first mistake.
The song does not begin with compelling characters. It does not begin with Halloween, nor with dawn. It does not even begin with the suspiciously symbolic rabbit reflected upon the surface of a lake. Instead, it quietly places two sentences before the listener—as though leaving an unattended cursed artifact on the table and politely pretending nothing unusual has happened.
This story is not a work of fiction. However, that doesn't mean everything is real.
...I see. So this is the game we're playing.
Even then, I had the uncomfortable feeling that these words would become significantly more dangerous later. They did. Long after the music had ended, they refused to leave.
A Question Too Unkind to Be a Simple Choice
The more I returned to Monogatari, the less I felt that it was asking us to choose between reality and fiction.
If that had been the question, the song would actually have been rather considerate. People who stay awake until three in the morning deserve at least the illusion of closure. Instead, Monogatari offers something considerably more troublesome.
What does a story allow us to perceive?
What do we actually receive through stories?
Why do certain experiences only seem capable of reaching another person once they have been reshaped into narrative?
And if story is not merely fiction... then what exactly is it doing?
That was the point where the word story stopped behaving. It was no longer simply a plot, nor merely a sequence of events arranged for human convenience, nor something that exists only because someone decided to write it.
Instead, story slowly began to resemble something else.
Perhaps it is the form human experience takes when it refuses to disappear after a single moment. It is how memory becomes shareable. How loneliness acquires a name. How grief becomes sound. How history becomes something we no longer merely know—but somehow feel. And how an ordinary life, one that might otherwise vanish unnoticed, leaves behind the faintest trace of its existence.
At this point, I should probably note for the record that I did attempt to stop thinking. The record, unfortunately, refuses to support my claim. Because somewhere along the way, another possibility emerged.
Maybe Monogatari is not asking what stories are made of. Maybe it is asking why human beings need stories at all.
Not "Creating," but "Weaving"
Human beings are, perhaps, not nearly as efficient as we like to imagine. We do not preserve the world exactly as it happened. At least, I certainly do not. My confidence in this conclusion is supported by the frustrating fact that I occasionally struggle to remember what I had for lunch yesterday.
Life is not stored as raw data. It survives as fragments.
A sentence someone once said.
A song heard at exactly the wrong moment.
A place that no longer exists except in memory.
A face almost forgotten.
A feeling that somehow outlived the event that created it.
When those fragments become too scattered to hold directly, humans begin to do something fascinating. We do not simply create.
We weave.
That is why the word 紡ぐ (tsumugu - to weave) refuses to leave my mind.
Stories are not born from emptiness. They are woven from memory, emotion, fear, hope, imagination, and those small fragments of reality we cannot fully explain, yet cannot bear to lose. Perhaps that is what a story really is. Not an invention, but an arrangement. A careful weaving of what remains.
The Melody That Returns Through Another Door
At some point, the question quietly changed. No longer, “Is this fiction or reality?” but rather, “How does human experience become story?” and perhaps more importantly, “Through what kind of doorway does that story reach another person?”
Stories never travel alone. They require a form. Sometimes that form is music, language, mythology, or history. Sometimes it is a stage, a voice, a ritual, a letter, or a single sentence hidden in the corner of a booklet.
And sometimes... it is a melody that quietly returns years later and asks, “Do you remember me?”
Which, honestly, feels like an extraordinarily rude thing for a melody to do. It has absolutely no business showing up years later looking emotionally significant.
And yet, I lose that argument every single time.
Each medium is a different doorway, but whatever passes through those doors always seems strangely familiar. Human memory. Human loneliness. Human hope. It is our attempt to understand why we are here, why we suffer, why we remember, and why something as fragile as music can suddenly make a long-vanished moment feel astonishingly present.
That is why Monogatari no longer feels to me like a song that begins a story. It feels like a song that begins asking about storytelling itself.
It does not say, “Here is a story.” Instead, it quietly asks: How do stories begin inside human beings?
And once that question entered my head... it behaved exactly the way dangerous questions always do. It started opening doors.
Naturally, I followed. Not a particularly wise decision, but excellent research material.
This story is not a work of fiction. However, that doesn't mean everything is real. — Sound Horizon, around the 20th commemorative work. "Together with you!" (The Story of Halloween and the Dawn)
