Monogatari Series - Volume 18 - Chapter 1.01

Chapter Four- Shinobu Mail

001

If only it wasn’t for Ogi Oshino. I can’t help but think that when I try to summarize the back half of my senior year─I mean, I seriously want to think so. There’s no need to go on and on about how the antics of this girl, who transferred into Naoetsu High as a freshman during second term, ravaged and savaged my adolescence. All that needs to be said is─if only it wasn’t for Ogi Oshino.

I do realize, fully, that this is a selfish, shameful, and lameful act of blame-shifting─I say it knowing that. If only it wasn’t for Ogi Oshino? What a foolish and foolhardy argument, I ought to feel like killing myself the moment I think of it, no need for you to point that out, I’m well aware. To begin with, even if she never existed, it’s hard to imagine the back half of my senior year being all that different, though it couldn’t have been identical. There was something untenable about my style from the start─clearly, one day, I would hit my limit. Experts of all kinds had pointed this out to me plenty of times, after all. My indecisive self was going to have to pay the painful, scathing price for riding the fence to the end, for pretending to overlook it all, for not seeing anything through or resolutely stepping out on my own. My karma being visited upon me was inevitable, not anything supernatural but rather the perfectly natural fact of the way of the world.

Ogi Oshino isn’t to blame.

Koyomi Araragi is.

But then, if it wasn’t for me, if only I didn’t exist, would this, that, and everything have proceeded in a good, correct manner? I don’t think you could say that at all either. Good and correct, what would that be in the first place? What does that even mean? If only it wasn’t for Koyomi Araragi─if you were to ask me if anything would be different were the wish granted, I’d have to shake my head no. Even if I wasn’t around, someone else would have saved Hitagi Senjogahara─and, no doubt, guided Mayoi Hachikuji─saved Suruga Kanbaru, Nadeko Sengoku, Tsubasa Hanekawa, all of them, and possibly in a far defter way than I ever did. Sure, I played a part in their fate, but nothing at all said it had to be me─we’re talking about girls as strong, as tough, as determined as them. The truth is that their lives didn’t require me.

When they happened to cross paths─it was with me, that’s all.

Just like encountering a yokai on the street at night, or to be particular, the way I encountered, during spring break, a golden-haired, golden-eyed vampire with her limbs torn off as I was walking down a street. So it’s nothing. Even before I became a vampire, I was already something of a cryptid.

When I think about it now, rather than me playing a part in their fate, it seems much more like I got them mixed up in my own irascible fate.

If only it wasn’t for Koyomi Araragi.

In fact, maybe that’s what those girls think─I think I’ve twisted so many people’s fates that I couldn’t blame them if they did.

No.

It wasn’t their fates─but tales that I twisted.

And now I was having to deal with the repercussions─you could say like an eraser being flung away by a curved and bent ruler trying to straighten itself out. An eraser flying so far, who knows where it’ll land─an eraser that flies out of the classroom window and falls into a flower bed, never to be found again as it crumbles away.

That must make Ogi Oshino the ruler.

Straight and precise.

An intransigent rule of a ruler.

I was wondering why she’d appeared before me, what for─but it must’ve been to draw a line, like a ruler.

She’d come to draw the line.

To give me a clear standard, that here and beyond was no good, that up to here was okay, not allowing a margin of error of even a fraction of an inch. Mayoi Hachikuji and Nadeko Sengoku were on the other side of the line, while Tsubasa Hanekawa and Sodachi Oikura were on this side of the line. As simple as that.

A borderline?

No, a goal line.

There was no room for straddling the line or judgment calls. That was like calling for war.

“Well, it wouldn’t be logical─you know, as in l-Ogi-cal?”

And so.

Now that the presence of Ogi Oshino, who brazenly interrupts even my prologue, the only place where I can show off this time around, has been re-introduced… Sadly the tale that I’m presenting for the sake of the end of the end of the end doesn’t begin on the grounds of Kita-Shirahebi Shrine, where I met Mayoi Hachikuji again. Before we can begin the endgame and be all at the end-all, there’s just one more tale left that I must reveal to you. My dear readers, don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.

I wish you had, frankly, and even more that I have─then I’d be able to close out my tale, furtively, meekly hiding that it ever happened.

“Way too tall of an order, Araragi-senpai─did you really think you could hide something from me? I wish you wouldn’t be so reckless. I’m the nemesis of lies and deception. A predator who preys on procrastination and postponement. Even you must know what happened to Deishu Kaiki, that superlative con man, right? So please, start talking unless you want to end up like him. About what happened then─the story you’ve so obstinately covered up for all this time,” Ogi Oshino says, pressing herself against me. Psychologically.

Judging by the looks of her, she already knows everything about what happened then, but if I were to ask her, she’d feign ignorance for sure.

“I don’t know anything─you’re the one who knows, Araragi-senpai.”

She’d be right.

I do know─I know so very well.

Of course, that’s why I wanted to hide it.

But that’s why I have to tell it.

This is going to be a long one, I tell her.

“Fine with me. That’s why, in between the first and last parts of this title, I crammed in─sorry, prepared a middle part for you,” Ogi says nonsensically.

I won’t ask her what that’s supposed to mean─I could find the same question shot straight back at me.

After all, I’m about to talk about something that makes even less sense, an incident that happened more than two months before she transferred into my school.

Right after summer break ended and second term started.

The tale begins with Koyomi Araragi’s experience of being almost fully “human” for the first time in half a year, after having his link to a vampire severed. Going neither to school nor his home and instead spending what seems like more time than he knows what to do with hiding out in a classroom of the ruined cram school where the expert Mèmè Oshino once made his roost─that’s where the tale begins. Or that’s from where it ends.

And his life.

His long-running life, too─comes at last to an end.