Monogatari Series - Volume 29 - Chapter 1.11

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Even if I didn’t have any manuscript paper, and even if I didn’t have any ink, as long as I had a single stick, I would be able to draw as many drawings as I wanted on this sandy beach! That was what I’d finally realized, but at this point, I was still in the middle of making my bad failure.

I hope you’ve been enjoying this.

Tremble, tremble.

The vast canvas of this beach was something I’d had access to from the very beginning, but I’d been satisfied with only lining up a large SOS with rocks—during the chatter with Ononoki-chan and Kaiki-san back in the plane, we’d even gone and talked about the country of Chile, so why hadn’t I been able to think of the Nazca Lines? There was something wrong with me, if I couldn’t catch onto such obvious foreshadowing.

…The Nazca Lines were in Chile, right? Peru… Argentina… No, according to my geographical intellect, it had to be Chile!93

False impressions could be pretty frightening, but either way, I’d been extremely cautious so as to not even leave footprints that would mess up the SOS—however, for those three letters that weren’t discovered for two weeks, it probably wasn’t so important to take such good care of it (I’d also written out my faint recollection of Morse code with rocks, but I’ll spare the details).

Speaking of what was important, now that I knew that a school of fish was hiding in the boulders at the bottom of the ocean, it did come to mind that my biggest priority was to unravel my safety rope and reconfigure it into a casting net, but my reasoning capabilities had been overwhelmed by the power of emotion.

Regardless, I wanted to draw. I wanted to draw manga.

I wanted to try out the ideas I’d thought of.

Apparently, in some places, it was illegal to even draw in the sand, but for now, I’ll plead the defense of necessity. With a butterfly stroke that almost made it seem like I’d been a competitive swimmer in the past, I headed back to the beach—to look for a good branch near the edge of the forest.

Although, by the time I was choosing a branch, I ended up not being very choosy.

Even though I’d been on the verge of running out of energy, my excitement flared up in an unbelievable manner. I finally understood the feelings of a couple eager to draw a lovers’ umbrella94 in the sand of a beach, although I was alone.

Of course, what I wanted to draw was not a lovers’ umbrella, but an actual work of art. It was a bit different from drawing on paper, but for now, I could start with a 4-koma manga.95

The leading part would be Ononoki-chan.

At one time, I’d been constantly drawing Ononoki-chan posing like various sculptures or paintings, so it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Ononoki-chan was my main.96

I could easily draw a rough sketch of her freehand—a sand picture couldn’t even be considered a rough draft, but regardless, I began drawing for the first time in two weeks.

(1) Ononoki-chan drifts ashore.

(2) She immediately escapes through her inherent movement abilities.

(3) However, no matter how many times she tries to escape, she keeps landing on the uninhabited island.

(4) “This isn’t an uninhabited island, but an unlimited supply-land!”97

—Hm?

It wasn’t very funny, right?

I couldn’t hear any roaring laughter in response to this live performance… Of course, it was because this was an uninhabited island, but the audience in my heart should have broken out in a standing ovation.

How strange. Over the past few weeks, I should’ve stocked up a whole bunch of world-changing ideas… Maybe it wasn’t good to end a manga using wordplay as the punchline?

In terms of how dynamic the drawings were, I did feel like I expressed the jumping of “Unlimited Rulebook” pretty well in just two panels… Perhaps I’d gotten too cheeky as a mangaka-to-be, and now I was in a slump.

But this wasn’t a slump, it was just scrap.98

While I thought about what went wrong, either high tide was approaching or Mother Ocean herself was telling me it was subpar, for the waves negated my drawing, like wave-dissipating concrete blocks—well, saying “like wave-dissipating concrete blocks” was far from a wordplay punchline, it just didn’t make sense.

It wasn’t negation, but cancellation.

I’d drawn out my 4-koma in the wet part of the sand close to the shoreline so that it would stand out, so I‘d expected it would vanish eventually, but I realized that perhaps the worst part of it was the fact that I was treating it as just a practice piece.

It wasn’t just subpar, it was submerged.99

Incidentally, up until this point was my “bad failure”—for me, compared to not being able to harvest any kelp or letting that school of fish get away, there was no worse failure than “having my manga be unfunny”.

My pride, at the very least, was all grown up.

If I were to argue that “I wasn’t aiming to be a 4-koma artist in the first place”, I wouldn’t be able to achieve anything—I couldn’t deny that my spirits had been dampened somewhat, but my insatiable desires knew no bounds.

I want to draw manga, I want to draw manga, I want to draw manga!

And especially, a masterpiece that’ll be left behind for posterity!

Especially if I was going to end up dying here on this uninhabited island.

This egoistic desire was, however, entirely feasible, as long as I gave up on the “masterpiece” part—after all, it wasn’t as if the Nazca Lines were drawn on sand.

I had to remember that I had become a “user of stone”—so, instead of this beach, I could just use a boulder as my canvas.

Not anything ephemeral, but an eternal work of art that could last for a thousand, two thousand years, like the cave paintings found in France—I wanted people in the future to come to the misconception that, in the past, a mangaka had been cast away here.

I was reminded of when Tsukihi-chan used chalk to scribble on the asphalt when I was a kid—the fact that my childhood memories were all entangled with Tsukihi-chan made me feel a bit bittersweet, but whether it was making kamakura or scribbling on roads, since these trifling experiences were useful for survival life, having friends really was important, wasn’t it.

I figured opinions would be divided on if drawing manga was an important step in survival, but people couldn’t live without some form of pleasure. Life was all about entertainment. The fact that I was thinking about what I wanted to draw next made it clear that I was alive and well—my sand 4-koma may have ended in tragic failure, but my dampened motivation swelled once again.

Of course, I’d learn from my previous mistakes.

I wasn’t going to blame my tools (though my tools absolutely deserved some of the blame—drawing with a pen and drawing with a stick required completely different techniques).

Looking back on it now, I’d just been spinning my wheels from thoughtless motivation, and I’d fixated too hard on Ononoki-chan’s character-design—I’d drawn that corpse doll’s former design.

Her older costume.

Unlike her current outfit of a tight dress with an open back, Ononoki-chan used to wear a dress that was extremely worthwhile to draw, with plenty of drapes and folds on a puffy skirt that was covered with lace, clearly sewn in a three-dimensional state—both outfits suited her well, but while her former look may have been fine for drawing practice, her ornamentation might have been a bit too elaborate for a character in a 4-koma manga.

Simplification was a key technique in manga, after all—even the cave paintings that I aimed for and the Nazca Lines that I aspired for could be considered extreme simplifications.

I didn’t need something like a wordplay punchline. Even hieroglyphs would be fine.

Especially in a weekly serialization, it would be important to fixate on a design that was easy to draw. Yes, so my goal was eventually to be serialized weekly, what of it? But in that respect, the tight dress that Tsukihi-chan had made Ononoki-chan wear was much easier to draw.

Clothing that was smooth was easier to draw, you see.

You may have wondered why, in paintings and sculptures, people were always drawn in the nude, irrespective of gender. But if you look at it not in the artistic sense, but in terms of technique, you can reach the technique-based theory of, “Because naked people are simpler to draw”.

With me having spent my lifestyle on this uninhabited island entirely in the nude, whether or not this could be adapted into an anime was a separate matter, but the feel of cloth really was hard to express in two dimensions.

By this point, an anime adaptation was probably impossible, but similarly, a school swimsuit or bloomers or anything that was easy to exercise in was also relatively easy to draw—if the characters in a manga appear lightly dressed, it may not necessarily be just for the sake of fanservice.

To go even further, manga characters were often young because it wasn’t so straightforward to represent the texture of skin, or, in other words, to draw wrinkles—well, there was a real thrill in getting to draw a complex, three-dimensional draping dress, and if I had the time and energy (and, of course, once I had the drawing ability to match that energy), it was certainly a challenge I wanted to take on. But alas, there was a limit to what I could achieve with a branch as my drawing tool.

Supposedly there were as many as a hundred thousand strands of hair on a person’s head, but no artist was going to draw all hundred thousand strands, one by one, right? How closely did one need to reproduce each individual fiber in clothing? Thus, my thoughts switched over to dressing Ononoki-chan in bloomers—I wasn’t really one to talk, but as a tween girl, Ononoki-chan’s upper body definitely took on a form with some three-dimensionality to it—

".........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................”

No.

No, no.

No, no, no, no.

It wasn’t that I’d turned pale with the realization that I’d nearly left a drawing of a half-naked tween girl for posterity—though that was also important—but at this moment, I finally, belatedly, realized the “good failure” that I’d been continuing to commit for the two weeks since I arrived on this uninhabited island, the “good failure” that I’d been braving like an adventure. The “good failure”, or perhaps, the “worst failure”.

Huh? Ability user of “stone”?

That wasn’t it!

I was an ability user of “drawings”!