Monogatari Series Volume 1 - Bakemonogatari Part 1

“To put your feet on. I don’t know their official name, but…you put it on your
back wheel, and you can stand on it. You just have to hold onto the shoulders of
whoever’s riding. We can play rock-paper-scissors to figure out who’s in front.
That snail isn’t here anymore, so we can just go home like normal. Not that I
remember the complicated route we followed to get here, anyway… Okay,
Senjogahara, let’s─”

“Wait, Araragi.”
Senjogahara still stood there.
She stood still and grabbed my wrist.
Hitagi Senjogahara, who had denied herself physical contact for so
long─naturally, it was the first time she’d ever touched me like that.
Touching.
Seeing.
It meant that we’re here.
To each other.
“Do you think you could say it out loud for me?”
“Out loud?”
“I don’t like silent partnerships.”
“Ah─got it.”
I gave it some thought.
It seemed unrefined to reply in kind with English, not to this woman who
wanted nothing but extremes. Then again, I had only a surface knowledge of
other languages, which in any case wouldn’t be any more original.

Which left─
“I hope it catches on.”
“Excuse me?”
“My heart smelts for you, Senjogahara.”
So by the by, and all in all.
Hanekawa’s single-minded delusion had come true to a tee.
She really did know everything after all.

009

The epilogue, or maybe, the punch line of this story.
The next day, I was roused from bed as usual by my little sisters Karen and
Tsukihi. The fact that they were doing this seemed to indicate that my apology,
essentially a statement of unconditional surrender, had worked, safely
dissipating their anger. That, or maybe it was my promise that while I couldn’t
do anything for Mother’s Day this year, I would under no circumstances leave
the confines of our home next year. Either way, it was Monday. Nothing
eventful about it, as supreme a weekday as you could get. I had a light breakfast
and headed to school. Not on my mountain bike, but on my granny bike. When I
thought that today was the day Senjogahara would return to school, my legs
felt lighter as they turned the pedals. But as I was on my way down a slope not
too far from home, I nearly collided with a girl waddling around the street and
hastily hit the brakes.
Bangs so short her eyebrows were showing, her hair in pigtails.
The girl who stood there carried a large backpack.
“Ah…Mister Aarragi.”
“You switched two letters around.”
“I’m sorry. A slip of the tongue.”
“What’re you doing here?”
“Oh, well, I’m…”
The kind of confused expression you might see on a ninja whose attempt at

stealth had failed crossed her face before she showed an embarrassed smile.
“Well, actually! Thanks to you, Mister Araragi, I’ve gone from being a residual

ghost to a wandering one! A posthumous promotion if you will!”

“Uh huh…”
I was completely taken aback.
As frivolous and flippant as Mèmè Oshino was, he was technically an expert in
his field, and I was sure that even he would feel faint at the slapdash,
perfunctory, and fantabulous logic of it.
Still, while I had no shortage of things to tell her, I was also in the position of
having to worry at every waking moment about my attendance record, which
meant I had to get to school on time. I kept our conversation to a couple of
exchanges, said “Later,” and hopped back on my bike seat.

That’s when she told me.
“Um, Mister Araragi? I think I’m going to be wandering around this area for a
while, so─”
This, from that girl.
“If you see me, please do speak to me.”

So, yeah.
I guess it’s quite a wonderful story.

Afterword

I felt like writing a regular afterword for once, so I’d like to take this chance to
give something resembling commentary on the two tales included in this book. I
will be going into details, so if any of you are reading this afterword before the
main text, I’m sorry, but I suggest that you stop and come back after you’ve
read the whole thing. Okay, what I felt like writing was just that stock
introduction, and I won’t actually be giving any commentary, but when you
think about it, authors giving something like commentary on their own stories is
no simple affair. People can’t express their thoughts a hundred percent, and
what does get expressed isn’t going to make it across a hundred percent; in
practice, you’re at sixty percent for each if things go well, which would mean
the audience of a work gets only thirty-six percent of what the author is
thinking. The other sixty-four percent is made up of misunderstandings, so you
often can’t agree with more than half of what’s being said when you read an
author’s own commentary. Like, hold on, that’s what he was thinking? It’s the
so-called difficulty of communicating, but it’s also an absolute fact that those
misunderstandings spice things up in a good way. For example, when I suggest a
book I love to people, I try to give an immersive account of a scene that moved
me, but sometimes, upon rereading the book, I find out that the scene isn’t
there. At the end of the day, humans are unreliable creatures, so when we feel
something, more than half of it is a misunderstanding, but maybe you shouldn’t
interpret it in a pessimistic way and instead look at it as the author or the story
having the power to make you misunderstand. If you are a reader, I’m sure
you’ve experienced looking back at a book that had an impact on you and

realizing that it actually wasn’t that big of a deal after all; and recommending a
book that moved you in your teens to current teens, promising them that they’ll
love it, and not getting a great reaction, is something we all get a taste of. That’s
thanks to audience misunderstanding, or mental images if you want to put a
better spin on it, and maybe instead of feeling let down, you ought to be giving
thanks for the dreams the work allowed you to see. To add to that, there are
those cases where whatever scene that wasn’t there upon rereading crops up in
a different book, but that’s just my own sucky memory, for which no author or
story is to be held responsible.

This book contains two tales that revolve around aberrations─would be a
false statement. All I wanted to do was write a fun novel crammed full of stupid
exchanges, and these tales are what happened when I did exactly that. Upon
collecting them, we asked VOFAN to provide illustrations. If I may provide just a
snippet of commentary, this all started from the syllogism that “Tsundere
sounds kind of similar to gerende, a term derived from German that we use in
Japan to mean ‘skiing slope’” → “You can’t talk about German and slopes
without thinking of the word pflugbogen, a snowplough turn on skis” → “You
can write bogen in Japanese using the characters for ‘wildly inappropriate
remark,’ can’t you.” And so that was Hitagi Crab and Mayoi Snail,
BAKEMONOGATARI Part One. You’ll find even stupider exchanges in the next
part, so please look forward to it.

A hundred percent of my gratitude to all of you out there who aren’t me.

NISIOISIN

Note: BAKEMONOGATARI was initially serialized in the literary magazine
Mephisto and later collected into two volumes in Japan, while this English
edition is in three parts. In the original, this afterword refers to “three” rather
than “two” tales and, in the penultimate paragraph, names the third chapter
along with the first two.