Monogatari Series - Volume 5 - Chapter Aft

Afterword

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, but people are not one-sided but rather multi-dimensional creatures, which is of course what makes them so very complex and wide-ranging, and a person seen through my eyes and through another person’s eyes is practically a different individual, which gives me headaches. You could take it further and say that the you that you understand to be yourself and the you that others understood as you are not the same person, either. And there’s no single image of how others see you, but instead a you made up of image upon image, and each of those persons must be different from the next. Which is synonymous with saying they are like strangers, so it’s hard not to sympathize with young people who ask “Who am I?!” and set out on journeys of self-discovery. It would be easy to say they’re mistaken, but obviously no two eyes see the same, and it’s impossible to flat-out reject the phenomenon. The fact that one man’s fakery is another’s real deal and one man’s real deal another’s fakery is prevalent in our cosmos, and maybe bothering to discuss such a universal is the real mistake. First and foremost, humans are creatures that act differently depending on who they’re dealing with, so being judged differently depending on who you’re dealing with seems like the most natural thing in the world, meaning, perhaps, that the person most capable of assessing you is you yourself. But wouldn’t that amount to saying that to know yourself is to know your place?

And so I bring you the first half of BAKEMONOGATARI’s sequel: NISEMONOGATARI─finally introducing the long-awaited Araragi sisters, who have been making a splash in certain corners since the original BAKEMONOGATARI and its prequel, KIZUMONOGATARI. To share some of the inside story, this novel was never intended for publication, and after writing it, I didn’t tell anyone about it for some time. I’d planned to leave this work buried in obscurity, never even printing it out─in other words, to keep it all to myself, which is to say I wrote it two hundred percent as a hobby. Working on a novel in complete freedom, absent any pesky restrictions or fetters, is highly enjoyable. Some might ask what kind of attitude that is for a professional writer to have, but the amateur spirit (in the best sense of the word) is something that I, personally, never wish to lose. And thus “Chapter Six: Karen Bee,” NISEMONOGATARI: Part 01.

The artist, VOFAN, really did it this time. His illustration of Karen Araragi is truly phenomenal, and as the author I cannot begin to express my gratitude. For indulging my wish to write fiction brimming with so much silly banter, dear readers, you likewise have my gratitude.

May we meet again in the latter half of NISEMONOGATARI, over another follow-up story, Tsukihi Araragi’s─that is, if I decide to make it public.

NISIOISIN