Monogatari Series - Volume 19 - Chapter Aft

Afterword

So, people talk about mistakes you can’t live down, but when you really think about it, what sort of fail can you live down? If you lose something or suffer a defeat, it’s not as if some later accomplishment cancels it out─still, while a fail might never go away no matter how much regret or remorse you feel, it certainly seems possible to forget about it. In other words, a mistake you can live down implies a win big enough that lets you forget that earlier mistake, doesn’t it? In success stories where a miserable past serves as a springboard, misery is by no means fueling happiness, but rather, perhaps, accumulating enough of a future lets the past be forgotten; conversely, you can accumulate enough misery to ruin a happy present, so actually I don’t see much of a causal relationship between happiness and misery. Like, they aren’t antonyms or anything. This is getting complicated, so to lay it out─or just to split hairs about success and failure, happiness and misery, as I see fit─it’s not all a matter of mindset but instead simply a question of memory. That’s to say, the most powerful ability we have as humans might be forgetting. Of course, as Koyomi Araragi, Hitagi Senjogahara, and Tsubasa Hanekawa proved over the course of a year in this story, or ten years in my reckoning, I think the ability shouldn’t be spammed.

And so, this has been End Tale part three, the de facto final installment of the Final Season of the MONOGATARI series. Looking back, “Hitagi Crab” was published in the Shosetsu Gendai supplement Mephisto’s September 2005 issue─supposedly as a self-contained short story, but it’s 2014 now and I’m still writing, so more than incredible, it’s a plain shock. I imagine some folks have been reading along for ten years, while others read them all just yesterday, but it’s thanks to all of you that I’ve been able to pen the Monster, Wound, Fake, Cat Black/White, Dandy, Flower, Decoy, Demon, Love, Possession, Calendar, and End Tales to finish the series. After this, we’ll cutely publish End Tale (Cont.), an encore final installment of the Final Season, and wrap it up for real. Yes, cutely. And so, this has been OWARIMONOGATARI Part 03, “Chapter Five: Mayoi Hell,” “Chapter Six: Hitagi Rendezvous,” and “Chapter Seven: Ogi Dark.”

The cover depicts Senjogahara with braids inside a planetarium.* It’s fantastic. My thanks go out to VOFAN. Whatever I may forget, I’d never forget my gratitude as I continue to work my hardest.

Thank you very much for reading.

* Editor’s Note: The art that has been included as an insert for this translation. In the previous paragraph, references to the original “seventeen volume” partitioning were omitted to reflect the larger count of the North American release─which also kicked off with Wound rather than Monster and rolled out over half the time.

NISIOISIN