Monogatari Series - Volume 3 - Chapter Aft

Afterword

While there’s no telling how many people have found themselves concerned about how to draw the line between their hobbies and their work, I believe the problem is such a difficult one because we start from the assumption that hobbies and work have the same absolute value. Hobbies. And work. I will admit, they are both major issues in one’s life. When I think about it closely, though, it seems somehow unnatural that we treat the two as mutually exclusive. Or rather, some deep-rooted ethical notion that hobbies and work should never be one and the same seems to exist prior to the premise. It’s said that you shouldn’t make your hobby your work, but we can’t survive without working. Meanwhile, life feels empty without hobbies. In that case, we in fact ought to encourage people to make their hobby their work, or their work their hobby, from an efficiency standpoint. So then why is it said that you shouldn’t make your hobby your work? Probably thanks to a contradiction such as follows: seeing work, which we perform in order to live, in terms of enjoyment is inappropriate, while hobbies, which we have in order to live better, are meant to be enjoyed. But it’s not as if making your hobby your work means that it stops being a hobby, and it’s also not as if something ceases to count as work because you’re doing it as a hobby. Your hobby is not your work, and your work is not your hobby. It is your hobby, and it is also your work. There may be nothing cooler than someone who can stand tall as a living example of this idea.

So, at the risk of being misunderstood, I’d like to say that BAKEMONOGATARI was written entirely as a hobby. There isn’t a speck of anything work-related about it. It started as a novel I wrote as a diversion to fill a hole in my schedule, and I honestly wonder whether I should really be releasing it like this. Because I wrote it as nothing more than a hobby, I’m terribly ashamed that the author’s favorite characters could be ranked far too easily, but I had so much fun writing scenes of any of the characters talking that, for the first time in a while, I was reminded of the days when I was just starting to write novels. As before, VOFAN was kind enough to adorn these pages with his work. I am of course reluctant to part ways with it, given that it was a hobby, but this brings an end to the five stories in these volumes. This has been BAKEMONOGATARI, consisting of “Hitagi Crab,” “Mayoi Snail,” “Suruga Monkey,” “Nadeko Snake,” and “Tsubasa Cat.”

Thank you very much for humoring my hobby.

NISIOISIN