Monogatari Series - Volume 4 - Chapter Aft

Afterword

Some people like to tell fortunes or judge personalities based on blood types, saying, for example, that type Os are natural leaders while type As are highly strung, that type Bs are free spirits while type ABs march to their own drum, but then, you should probably want your leaders to be a little on the highly strung side, and really, “free spirit” is just another way to say “marches to his own drum,” and if you substituted “self-centered” for “free spirit,” what’s the difference between a self-centered person and a very fussy highly strung person, not to mention that if you think it’s good for leaders to have strong, unshakeable wills, they’d need to march to their own drum, and once you start thinking about it that way, you have no choice but to point out that, hey, wait a second, they all mean the same thing. Of course, the same could be said of all fortune telling, none more so than zodiac astrology, but they only split blood type fortunes into four types, and that simplicity paradoxically seems to be lending the whole affair its credibility. If you’ve ever subjected yourself to it, I bet when you gave your blood type you were told, “Ah, I knew it,” but that’s the trick, and it’s not hard to imagine being told “Ah, I knew it” no matter what type you say you are. Also, I bet the simplest way to guess people’s blood type, in Japan at least, is to ignore everything about their personality and to declare, “You’re a type A, aren’t you?” That’s because A is the most common blood type among Japanese people. I guess a little further in the future, we might have things like DNA fortunes or genetic fortunes, but to be honest, I don’t think they’ll be any better than the blood type fortunes we have today.

This book consists of “Koyomi Vamp,” the story of Koyomi Araragi, the narrator of my previous work Bakemonogatari. Though I called it my previous work, I don’t mind at all if you read this one first. In fact, chronologically speaking, this one comes first, so I dare say the Kizumonogatari-first order is just as legit as the opposite order. It’s the tale of Koyomi Araragi and the vampire Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade. It’s also the tale of Koyomi Araragi meeting Tsubasa Hanekawa for the first time. If Bakemonogatari is the novel I wrote entirely to entertain myself, then Kizumonogatari is a novel I wrote entirely-and-a-fifth to entertain myself. In fact, these stories should have been sealed off forever, never to be espied, their author fully satisfied the moment he put down his pen, but by some mistake, they were turned into books, beautifully adorned with the illustrator VOFAN’s impressive skills, and published for the world to see. When I confront myself with this fact, I don’t feel the need to thank various people as much as the need to do some very serious reflection on my own professionalism. Then again, the occasional book like this doesn’t seem like it could hurt, so I would appreciate your magnanimity.

Of course, if you do find the Monogatari series, which I have written so exhaustively I feel there’s nothing left I could possibly add, to be even the least bit entertaining, then there is no greater joy for me. Fueled by that joy, I’ll get back to actual work starting tomorrow.

NISIOISIN

Palindromic NISIOISIN made his debut as a novelist when he was twenty. A famously prolific author, he is known to publish more than a book per month at times. With his inexorable rise, he has become the leading light of a younger generation of writers who began their careers in the twenty-first century.

Titles by him previously published in English include the first two books of the Zaregoto mystery cycle and the novelizations xxxHOLiC: AnotherHOLiC and Death Note: Another Note - The Los Angeles BB Murder Cases. The MONOGATARI series, widely considered his masterpiece to date, makes its first appearance in English with this volume.

Illustrator VOFAN, lauded as the “magician of light and shadow,” hails from Taiwan.