Monogatari Series - Volume 14 - Chapter 1.01

Chapter Body- Yotsugi Doll

001

Yotsugi Ononoki is a doll. To put it another way, she’s not human. Not a person, not a living being, not a part of the natural world─that’s Yotsugi Ononoki, a tsukumogami possession employed as a shikigami familiar.

Though to all appearances she’s just an adorable tween.

This expressionless child, who delights all and sundry with her eccentricities, is in truth an aberration, an apparition, a monster, one of the endless varieties of ghosts ’n goblins with which nature abounds.

For which reason.

She’s hopelessly incompatible with human society.

“Nay, truth to tell, my lord, ’tis not so─not that lass,” came Shinobu’s response. From within my shadow. “For she springs originally from a human corpse, and is a doll─a creation patterned after humankind. An imitation of a person.”

Then.

Then does that mean she’s trying to be, or become, human? But when I voiced this question, Shinobu informed me that I was still off the mark.

To be patterned.

Proves you aren’t trying to be it.

It’s only a means for mingling with human society─for making her compatible─and not a means for assimilation.

“However skillful thou mayst become in a foreign tongue, however much dost study it and speak it like ’twere thine own, ’tis only ever for the sake of communicating with the people of a foreign land, and thou mayst not wish to become their countryman─’tis much the same. She was made in the image of humankind, but not for the sake of being human or becoming human. ’Twas for being with humans.”

Not to be, nor to become.

To be with.

That foreign language analogy really did the job─well, bringing other countries into the mix makes it all terribly global, but framing it in terms of other cultures does put us back in the realm of everyday conversation for me, or for anyone, I bet.

In order to forge a positive relationship with someone from another culture, you’ve got to see through the eyes of that culture─when in Rome, as they say.

“Come, my lord. Hast thou never considered why aberrations, why monstrous beings of legend, wear the aspects of human beings or of animals─to wit, why the form of the unreal is founded in reality?”

I never had.

I mean, can’t we just say that our imagination has its limits? We can’t picture, can’t visualize, things that aren’t, so we fashion them by spicing up things that are.

Take Shinobu Oshino’s base form, Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade, for instance─though a vampire, a beautiful demon, she was ultimately modeled on a human being.

When she sprouted wings, they were a bat’s.

When she bared her fangs, they were a wolf’s.

Though she embodied the unreal and surreal as a vampire, substantially she was an assemblage of realistic elements─no more than an idealization.

A beauty that no painting can capture isn’t going to be captured in a painting.

A beauty that our eyes can’t behold isn’t going to be beheld by our eyes.

To resort to another linguistic analogy, people can only relate reality using the words available to them─however inexpressible the reality, however inexhaustible the dream, in the end we have to rely on our voices and our pens.

Expressing with words.

Exhausting them.

But we can’t just say that, I suppose. Aberrations, whose appearances are modeled on, and dictated by, the limits of our imagination aren’t going to take it lying down. Sure, they’re unstable, they change their appearance depending on the observer and transform depending on their surroundings, but I bet they desire a fixed form.

So I couldn’t say anything─certainly not to the aberration right there in front of me, Shinobu, a former vampire who now looked like an eight-year-old blonde of all things.

Having read my thoughts, and for that reason not touching on the matter, she said, “All in all, ’tis because people exist, because they are, that aberrations are too. Which meanest not the latter are dependent upon the former─’tis simply that if none observe, none are observed either.”

I had to wonder.

I assumed she was talking about the so-called Observer Effect, but this sounded different─it was something else, not some theory, but more emotional and sentimental, so to speak.

“Every presence, every act, requireth a witness lest it be devoid of meaning. Untold, any tale of heroes or of aberrations may as well have ne’er been.” Shinobu seemed to be reflecting on her own experiences. “I have been called a legendary vampire─but if those legends did not exist, ’twould be as if I were no vampire at all. An aberration that goes unheralded is not worthy of the name.”

Weird tales─must be weird in the telling, she remarked.

“Though ’tis less mine own thinking or values than that execrable Aloha shirt’s, ultimately an aberration is a deep attachment.”

Deep attachment─feeling.

Like empathizing with a doll? You could say that’s how tsukumogami, or more generally the spirit of not being wasteful, the mottainai obake, is born.

They say the belief that gods reside in everything, that there are eight million of them, is native to Japan, but empathizing with something that isn’t human, be it living or inanimate, isn’t unique to one culture.

Which is why tales of aberrations are told throughout the world.

Told─by humans.

It was a pretty convincing argument, or rather, an argument I had no choice but to be convinced by, as someone who’s spoken of so many aberrations.

And told their tales.

Of a vampire.

Of a cat.

Of a crab.

Of a snail.

Of a monkey.

Of a snake.

Of a bee.

Of a phoenix.

As someone who has, I had no choice but to be convinced.

And now I’m about to speak again, of a doll this time, but I have the sneaking feeling that I’ve been telling too many tales.

Urban legend, word on the street, or secondhand gossip, it’s all just idle chatter if you speak of it too much. It ceases to be eerie, or alarming─when I think back to the beginning of second term and the bizarre “Darkness,” or to the matter of Nadeko Sengoku’s godly serpent-god from around New Year’s, I have to ask how long this is going to continue, and feel a little exhausted. Since my tricks are starting not to work on these aberrations that keep coming out of the woodwork, I’m kind of sinking into despair─though that feeling is a luxury.

Forever, is how long.

Our world doesn’t afford that luxury, I ought to have known by now─but it’s a little too late for ought’s.

Every tale comes to an end.

My, my, I guess the crazy times weren’t quite over yet─even that refrain has its limits.

Because the story I’m about to tell you about a doll is also the story of how I “learned that”─learned it, whether I liked it or not.

So this is the beginning of the end.

The tale of how I, the human being called Koyomi Araragi─began to end.