Monogatari Series - Volume 22 - Chapter Aft

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Afterword

After I started writing a series, the question I’ve gotten the most tired of being asked and having to answer would be the oft-asked, “How far in advance did you think of these things?” If I answer “I didn’t particularly think of anything in advance”, then it would just sound hostile and disappoint the asker, but if I answer “Everything was calculated well in advance and everything is going according to plan”, that also sounded rather unpleasant. Saying, “Things were thought of in advance to some degree, but a lot of it was set up to reasonably fit the situation and trends at the time, and I managed to put it together in some way or another, despite adding new things or going back to old things on the fly” would be the most accurate answer, and you might wonder, what part of this ambiguous answer could possibly be accurate? But really, that’s about it. In short, it’s a problem that involves “to some degree” or “to some extent”, so if you ask whether something is 1 or 0 with no in-between—well, no matter how much an author plans things out, I highly doubt that there’s anyone that can make things go perfectly as planned over a course of a series. When you actually start writing, it may end up turning out completely different from what you imagined in your head, and it’s something you won’t know until you try, so it’s not necessarily the right thing to do to insist on sticking to the plan, either. It is important to carry out your original intention, of course, but “if you do it once and it’s bad, you should do it again” is also a possibility. What’s important is not to “think of things in advance”, but to “keep thinking of things until the very end”, is ultimately what I’ve repeatedly ended up believing and not believing.

Anyway, taking this from a different perspective, then what about the Monogatari Series? When the two volumes of “Bakemonogatari” were published in 2006, I can’t definitively speak for whether or not I had any ideas of the contents of the book you’re reading, since I can’t remember very clearly, but it’s likely that I hadn’t written a single word of this book. Far from “Bakemonogatari”, even when I wrote the previous work, “Nademonogatari”, I believe I hadn’t written a single word of this book. Well, I’m sure there was at least a single word. But if you take that to mean that I hadn’t thought of anything about it at all, then I don’t think that’s quite right, either. I had probably thought about it, thought about it, thought about it, and thought about it some more, and with over ten years passing, I can surmise that some of what I thought about stayed alive in some form or another in this book. I can believe that the things I thought about didn’t go to waste. For example, even if there was an idea I didn’t use, that train of thought had still taken form, which could then have acted as another path for me. And so, you have this book that was one hundred percent written as a hobby, the once-again completed Monogatari Series, the twenty-second volume detailing Araragi Koyomi at twenty-three years of age, the final book of the Off Season, “Musubimonogatari”.

I am grateful to VOFAN-san for the illustration of Senjougahara Hitagi in a white kimono on the cover. Thank you very much. She is also 23 years old now. As a bit of an overlap with the cover of “Bakemonogatari”, she’s carrying a stapler in her hand. Ten years ago, I would never have predicted that Senjougahara-san would grace the cover of a book like this. Now then, what shall I think of next?

NISIOISIN

Translator’s Afterword

If you’ve reached this point while under the impression that you’ve just finished reading the novel, “Musubimonogatari”, by Nisio Isin, then you’d be wrong. At worst, this is just some well-written fanfiction. Or perhaps even poorly-written, depending on your tastes. Anyway, the point I’m trying to get at is that a translated work is never simply just “translated”—the work inevitably has to be interpreted and transformed by the translator, and the output that is produced will inevitably contain the translator’s presumptions and biases, whether they’re biases regarding the work itself, biases regarding the English language, or something else entirely. It’s almost like a warped version of the Ship of Theseus. Well, in short, just take my translation (and by extension, all translations) with a grain of salt. I just felt like writing a smart-sounding paragraph to sound clever and philosophical like Nisio did above.

Overall, I took a much more cavalier (that is, lazy) approach to this novel, focusing more on readability in English than preserving every minute detail of the text as presented in Japanese. Hopefully I succeeded, and the text does flow well enough for an amateur translation. I figure it’s worth noting that in a Japanese-to-English translation, you’d think the hard part would be being fluent in Japanese, but honestly I felt like this was a bigger challenge to my knowledge of the English language more than anything. I also went with an approach of not using translator’s notes, since I always felt like they interrupted reading (especially with something like footnotes, which do not work on web pages because of how far you have to scroll down the page).14 Fortunately for this novel, there wasn’t really a whole lot worth explaining, aside from the few puns that I just slipped in in-line Japanese readings for. Although, if a certain tongue-tied snail had appeared, that would have been its own struggle entirely.

There are so many more things about the translation that I could address, but it’s probably better to stop myself now. In a way, I both pity and envy official translators who don’t necessarily get a space like this to ramble on about their own opinions. Ideally, a translation should be able to stand on its own without its translator hovering around it like a helicopter parent, but on the other hand, it can be useful to have a space where I can take responsibility for my own influences that I’ve introduced into this translation. Regardless, on behalf of the original author, thanks for reading “Musubimonogatari”, and please continue to support the Monogatari Series in the future.

Polaris

Updated January 24, 2024

Notes

[←1]

駿河問い surugadoi “Japanese bondage torture”. Compare 駿河 Suruga.

[←2]

Weasels are イタチ itachi in Japanese.

[←3]

雑木林 zoukibayashi “thicket”, 臓器林 zouki bayashi “forest of organs”.

[←4]

禁呪 kinju “forbidden spell”, compared to 金 kin “gold” and 樹 ju “tree”.

[←5]