Monogatari Series - Volume 29 - Chapter 1.01

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Nadeko Around

001

Let us review the history of Sengoku Nadeko. After all, this will be the end, so allow me to masquerade as an honors student for a bit.1 At this point, there are no more surprising backstories to uncover, and in the first place, Nadeko had never really been a main character in the Monogatari series. If I were to be careful with my words, I would describe her as a supporting role, only there to make the lead role shine even brighter. Of course, the phrase “supporting role” is being very unreasonably careful with my words. It’s the most inoffensive choice of words. If I weren’t being careful at all, I would say she was a minor character, or even a background character. Those were terms devoid of any affection, but sadly, it was true. It would be a huge lie to say that she was a co-star.

If you would forgive that sadness and allow me to lay out a few more details, the character introduced right before Nadeko was Kanbaru Suruga, who was a pervert, an athlete, and a superstar. And, after writing such an extraordinary oddball, there was an unavoidable situation that made it necessary to write the tale of a creative girl that was completely upright, not at all complex, and purely a victim, completely detached from any doom and gloom—a tale that did not evoke any cognitive dissonance. The following could also be considered Hachikuji Mayoi’s stance towards Senjougahara Hitagi, but as I’m sure you all know, Hachikuji-chan had been clearly written to be a perpetrator from the moment she was introduced, which meant that, from the start, she was dyed in complexity and thorny in all directions. Biting in all directions. And, in comparison, Nadeko was a perfectly weak character, with no other characteristics of her own beyond “docile”. Now that we’re in the Reiwa era,2 if you were to go back and reread “Nadeko Snake”, you might start to wonder if anything beyond the character’s name had been decided up until the paragraph right before her appearance, because the character felt that much like a rush job. There was really nothing thorny about her, except maybe her name. If I had to say it, she wasn’t thorny, but someone who would taper down into nothingness. Someone who’d be scolded for only running on the path that had been laid down for her.

Ultimately, unlike the other heroines, who “were victims but also perpetrators”, Nadeko had not been given any depth beyond being a victim, so perhaps not her characterization, but the depth of her human nature, so to speak, had been shallow—and afterwards, in the sequels and the short stories, there had been a cycle of trial and error and minor changes, but it was undeniable that there was an air of being unable to decide, “This is it!” for her character.

She was practically a lost cause that could have easily departed from center stage without anything feeling amiss, but what changed the course of her gradual fade-out was, without leaving it up for debate, none other than the animated series. At this point, it’s a story from over a decade ago, and it can be pretty difficult to speak about the zeitgeist of that era with a sense of reality, but, as though the impossible had been made possible, there had been a serious, tremendous, and astounding breakthrough. To perform some analysis on this front… Because the original work hadn’t dug very deep into the character, there were more aspects of her that the anime could freely play around with—for her status as a weak character to become a strong point, you really never knew what could end up becoming a blessing. In any case, it was then that I truly felt the power of Japanimation, the pride of Japan.

In actuality, this saved Nadeko’s life.

Thus, Nadeko was not forced to retire and was not released to become a free agent. Rather, she ended up being forced to undergo a deep dive. Thanks to everyone’s support, the administration has finally taken action. “Ended up being forced” made it sound like it hadn’t exactly been desirable for her to undergo that deep dive, and in fact, this was a particularly controversial, and even divisive, factor—one of the reasons why Nadeko was called “a heroine with wild swings in popularity”.

Of course, whenever something is described as having “wild swings” or “ups and downs”, it is usually because it’s on the decline, as you may have already guessed.

Just as there are no humans that are purely perpetrators, there are no humans that are purely victims—using that framework as the basis of Monogatari, the subject of Nadeko’s deep dive was, naturally, about the side of her as a perpetrator, which had not yet been told. And there, an unimaginable darkness had been hiding.

The darkness in her heart.

To skip to the conclusion, Nadeko went from a shy middle school girl to a god worshiped on top of a mountain, but even with the star power of the renowned lead roles, it had become impossible to pull her down from her lofty summit. The idea of a character moving on her own had gone much too far.

She’d really done it now.

That blunder was a fatal wound.

Thus, it ended up as a terrifying story in which the services of a con man had to be relied on. Fighting poison with poison. After digging so deep that it could have leveled a mountain, a new, “I want to be a mangaka” side of her was excavated from underground, and Nadeko was somehow able to descend from her summit. However, she did not come out of it unscathed.

It was not that easy to recover from a fatal wound.

Moreover, just because she’d returned to being human, it didn’t mean her problems had been resolved at all, so Nadeko stopped going to school—in realistic terms, or in societal terms, it would be from that point on that things would be really tough for her. And yet, because of her origins as a supporting character, there was no way to proactively tell the story of Nadeko’s shut-in days in the Final Season that came afterwards. Once again, she was in a crisis of fading out.

As though she was being shelved, or as though she was remaining unsolved.

And so, using Araragi Koyomi’s graduation to draw the main axis of Monogatari to a close, there were opportunities to tell the story of what happened to Nadeko afterwards, bit by bit, across Off Season and Monster Season.

Incidentally, to describe how she’d escaped from her fade-out crisis… Originally, the one planned to be Araragi Koyomi’s successor as the second narrator was his younger little sister, Araragi Tsukihi, who would become a disciple of Gaen Izuko—traces of that can still be seen with how Ononoki-chan so consistently played the part of an assistant—but Tsukihi’s personality was so terrible that the ball was placed in Nadeko’s court, instead. I figured I’d reveal those hidden circumstances, for reference.

Once again attesting to the fact that Nadeko owed everything to Tsukihi.

Now, I’ve kept you waiting.

Finally, even Nadeko’s story is about to reach its climax.

At last.3

Perhaps you could say that it was fate all along, but as you may have been able to tell from the change in subtitle from what Shinomonogatari had been originally, it would not be an exaggeration to say that, with Araragi Koyomi’s graduation from university in the first volume, his story has reached a full conclusion. So those of you who have gone out of their way to reach for the second volume truly have exquisite taste. And rest assured, for with a splendid full-length novel in your hands, there is no way that Sengoku Nadeko, who has, with the conclusion of the anime, gone from wild swings to a complete flatliner—that is, there is no way I will do anything to disappoint those of you that are continuing to follow me.