Monogatari Series - Volume 20 - Chapter Aft

Afterword

Taking my life until now and thinking about the proportion of things I’ve done and things I haven’t done, the latter is overwhelmingly larger, which makes total sense, because when you’re doing something, you’re ultimately not doing everything else. Furthermore, working at something means slacking off on everything else. When I read about great historical figures, the absurd amount of effort geniuses spend for their goals often leaves me speechless, but on second thought, weren’t they neglecting quite a large portion of the rest of their lives? Could it be that we can’t do everything in the end, that we always have to give up on something? Choosing one form of happiness means sacrificing other forms─and the antonym of fortune is not misfortune, but other fortunes? Not infrequently, when you think “I did it!” you’ve lost much of whatever else is important to you, and as you keep on doing that, things proceed to a point where there’s no turning back, or something like that. Still, it’s unrealistic to do just a little bit of lots of things, or at least it wouldn’t be very fruitful. Of course, they also say that mastery in one thing leads to all things, and what you learn by plumbing the depths of one field can in fact apply to others, so doing something is certainly better than doing nothing at all. But in that case, since the difference between doing and being able to is quite salient, it’d be pretty rough if what you did equaled what you couldn’t. Just accumulating more regret and remorse the more you do something is depressing, but I also feel that thinking “if only I’d done it so” actually leads to more than you’d expect.

And so, here’s a bonus installment of the MONOGATARI series. One last stubborn book. The actual final volume was the one before this, End Tale Part 03, so I wanted to go back to the roots of what it means to read a novel, which is to say I aimed for a book that you can read or just as well not. In that spirit, it’s filled to the brim with unignorable contradictions. A worldview that doesn’t require thinking about how to pay off foreshadowing is nice in its own way. It’d be a problem if I always did that, though. Anyway, this has been End Tale (Cont.), “Final Chapter: Koyomi Reverse,” or not knowing when to quit. Oh, speaking of which, it’s a little late, but I changed the subtitle from “Koyomi Book” because that obviously deserved to be a Calendar Tale subtitle instead.

We see a happy Miss Sodachi Oikura on the cover here. So cute! I was asking for a lot when I pushed for the choice, but VOFAN did an incredible job. Thank you. I’d also like to give my deepest thanks to all of you who’ve read all of the installments of the MONOGATARI series. Even this one, which you could just as well not─I couldn’t be happier.

Great work, everyone!

NISIOISIN