Monogatari Series - Volume 9 - Chapter Aft

Afterword

I think everyone has “that experience,” one so traumatic that they would rather die than go through it again─probably more than one─but the funny thing is that those abominable, traumatic experiences are what make us who we are. In other words, it wouldn’t make our lives run more smoothly if we went back to the past and removed those traumatic experiences. Just the opposite, in fact. A life without trauma is insipid, with more horrible experiences in the present progressive tense than in the past tense. Though that would be traumatic itself, so in the end I suppose it would amount to the same thing. But for some reason I feel like it’s better to undergo the trauma when you’re a child. Maybe “trauma” is a bit much, but isn’t some level of stress, at least, indispensable to living a healthy life? That said, we all want to live with as few unpleasant memories as possible, but, but, even if we don’t intentionally try to experience trauma or take on stress, the world doesn’t turn at our convenience, so in avoiding one thing, we run up against another. Why is that, I wonder? When one says that the present is an aggregation of the past, and the future is linked to the present, it makes it sound like the past and the future are both extremely valuable things, but the past isn’t much to speak of, and living for the future is a difficult proposition. So what of the present? Well, it’s stuck between the rock and the hard place of past and future, or, I guess you could say it maintains the image of a kind of middle manager, bound to the past while sucking up to the future. For that very reason, we barely manage to power through under the illusion that all of our current troubles are shaping our future selves, but can you really call that a life? I have no idea.

Will this book become the second episode of Season Two of MONOGATARI? Again, I have no idea. But, the content is pretty different from what I had announced at some point previously, I think, and for that I apologize. I had actually wanted to change the subtitle to “Mayoi Zombie,” but it ended up being too late. I’ll divulge here that this book is the result of repeated trial and error in an attempt to see if I could somehow actually write a novel featuring only little girls in addition to our young friend Araragi. Schedule-wise, it was grueling, let me tell you. I’ll be delighted if that trauma helps to shape my future self, but doing the impossible once just turns it into plain old possible, so I’m in serious trouble. A trauma to look forward to? And so this has been KABUKIMONOGATARI Chapter Idle, “Mayoi Jiangshi,” a novel written a hundred percent under the gun.

The front cover represents Mayoi’s first appearance in color.* Thank you very much, VOFAN. To all my readers, thank you so much for taking the time to read this book. And incidentally, the last scene of the book continues directly into the next one, HANAMONOGATARI, without a break. For the author or for the characters.

* Editor’s Note: The art that has been included as an insert for this translation. Likewise, the illustration behind the frontispiece in BAKEMONOGATARI Part One, which did not feature Hachikuji, was used for the original first volume.

NISIOISIN