Monogatari Series Volume 12 - Koimonogatari

When I summoned her to the shopping district, it gave her an idea where I
was staying. All that was left was for her to call and tell the concierge in an
adorable, childish voice, “I have something for a guest of yours, a Mister Kaiki,”
like it was the most natural thing in the world─there were any number of hotels
in the area, including the one where Hanekawa was staying, and no harm done
if I wasn’t there. I would never find out, at any rate.

And the show she put on of deducing how the letter had been slipped into the
room must have been intended to eliminate her from the list of possible
suspects.

No wonder she was pissed when I told her I’d torn up the letter; she’d written
it.

So why did she give me the contradictory order to “withdraw,” when she had
commissioned me for the job?

Because she knew me all too well.

Hitagi Senjogahara knew perfectly well that if someone told me to withdraw,
I’d become more stubborn about finishing the job─in fact, if Ononoki had taken
the opposite approach, if Gaen-senpai’s warning had been “not to withdraw,” I
might have then and there.

Which is why Senjogahara contacted me to do something, and the opposite as
well.

A stupid, childish ploy.

Not that I hadn’t gone along for the ride even as I’d known.

I turned off my cell phone, then immediately smashed it─okay, the phone
itself was pretty pricey, so it was just the SIM card that I smashed.

And thus the cord tying me to Senjogahara was cut. She could probably find

out my new number if she tried, of course, she’d done it before, but from here
on out there’d be no reason for her to contact me. None at all.

I deleted Senjogahara’s number, and only hers, from the empty cell phone,
then headed to the station. I had to retrieve the suitcase I’d left in a coin locker
there.

That was evidence─not quite Sengoku’s closet, but it had to be properly
disposed of.

“Be that as it may…”

As I trudged along the snowy February street, I wondered─forget
Senjogahara, how much of this was actually premeditated by Gaen-senpai?

Because Senjogahara wasn’t the only one who knew me well enough to know
that if I were told to withdraw, I would do the opposite. Was the three million
yen actually just an attempt to fund my endeavor?

Had I been dancing to Gaen-senpai’s tune all along? Well, nothing to be
gained by pondering such things. Dancing to her tune was a small price to pay
to be free of my ties to her.

But had she really disowned me?

She might appear before me the very next day, as if nothing had happened…
But I’d cross that bridge when I came to it. If she brought an offer of money to
be made, I wouldn’t refuse to play my old role as her junior.

Nevertheless, I thought.

Gaen-senpai’s unsentimental and practical attitude was one thing─and
Kagenui’s lack of involvement was only to be expected, but where the hell was
Oshino in all this?

He was every inch the vagabond.

A rootless vagabond like me, though even more dissolute, which made getting
a grasp on his whereabouts harder than grasping a cloud─and yet.

That chump who loved to look cool in front of kids─did he really skip out
when so many of his former charges had their backs against the wall? Did he
really leave them hanging like that?

With Araragi and Senjogahara and the former Kissshot and Hanekawa and─a
bunch of other people in such dire straits, wouldn’t he come riding in on his
white horse, like never before?

I’d gotten dragged into the mess because he hadn’t shown up─but by all
rights, saving Sengoku, saving Araragi and the others, should have been Mèmè
Oshino’s job, not mine.

Where was he now, and what the hell was he doing?

It bugged me.

Well, it didn’t, but looking into it might prove profitable─maybe I should
search for my fellow vagabond. It had been a long time since we’d had a drink
together, and it was an appealing prospect.

Just as I came to that decision, I saw stars.

I toppled forward onto the snowy road, clueless as to why. I was quivering like
jelly. Did my body finally reach its physical limit after being crushed by the
snakes? But the snow before my eyes was dyed crimson, and I gathered that I’d
been struck hard on the back of the head.

I could hear ragged breathing coming from behind me. “Huff, huff, huff,
huff─”

Forcing myself to turn my bloodstained head, I beheld a lone middle-school-
age kid standing there holding an iron pipe. The pipe was also stained with
blood, so apparently that’s what I’d been struck with. It was a terribly long pipe,
and the centrifugal force must have been something.

“M-Miss Ogi was right. You really came back, you con man…” muttered the
middle schooler, staring at me with eyes devoid of even a glimmer of sanity.
“Th-Thanks to you, thanks to you, thanks to you─”

“…”

At first I didn’t recognize the kid, but as I gazed at that face and those
bloodshot eyes, it came to me. I couldn’t recall a name, but… Right, it was one
of the many middle schoolers I’d hoodwinked last time I was in town. One of
the faces I’d drawn in my notebook on the plane ride from Okinawa.

And behind the kid there loomed a snake.

Not strictly behind, more like─around. A giant snake, coiled around,
enwrapping, the kid’s body.

It wasn’t some vague phantom, but clearly visible.

What the hell?

Did the kid get counter-cursed or something?

Was this kid─the one who’d started everything by putting that “charm” on
Sengoku?

And by the way… After solving the mystery of the letter, I’d lumped it in as
Senjogahara’s doing─but the identity of my “tail” was, strictly speaking, still
unknown.

If it wasn’t Senjogahara, then I assumed it was Gaen-senpai’s watchdog… Yet

if everything was proceeding according to plan for her, why would she put me
under surveillance?

So had this kid been the one tailing me?

No, I turned it over in my blood-soaked head and judged that it must’ve been
someone else. This kid didn’t possess the requisite “sanity” to tail someone─

Wait, had I heard a name a second ago?

Ogi?

Who─is that?

The name rang a bell, like I’d heard it somewhere before, but that was as far
as I got.

“Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”

The crazed middle schooler shrieked with rage and brandished the iron pipe
at my prone figure. And with the next hatred-, spite-, and curse-filled blow, I
slipped away into unconsciousness.

They say that even in hell, money talks. As someone with no savings to speak
of, I thanked my lucky stars that I’d picked up some change there before the
end.

Afterword

I think this marks something like my fiftieth novel, and it strikes me that the
number of “liars” appearing in those books is proportionally very high. The real
question is, how many “honest people” have I actually written about? I imagine
this imbalance reflects the author’s firm, utterly unshakable worldview that “all
tales are lies!” And if the package is a “lie,” won’t everyone inside it inevitably
be a “liar” as well? But that begs the question of the world outside the tale, the
reality we all inhabit. It’s not exactly overflowing with “veracity,” is it? Even if
people don’t mean to “lie,” aren’t aware of “lying,” they still “lie” “unwillingly”
all too often. And conversely, sometimes people refuse to accept the “truth” as
“true,” interpreting it instead as a “lie” and ending up believing in its
“falsehood”… Even though someone relates something “true,” the listener
takes it as “false” and so the “truth” spreads as a “lie,” coming to exist as such.
In that case, doesn’t the “truth” become directly equivalent to a “lie,” without
any need to turn it inside out or upside down? Here I am spilling all this ink, but
actually, maybe it’s just that the author is a liar so all his characters are too, end
of story. Then again, would a book featuring just honest people even be
interesting?

And so this has been a book featuring just liars. During the writing process, I
myself got thoroughly mixed up about what was true and what was false, what
was honest and what was not. In any event, this is the final volume of the
Monogatari Series Second Season. We had narrators switching places,
innovatively for me, and as an author I was filled with trepidation when
different viewpoints cast the same people and events in an entirely different

light: Hey, buddy, this is totally different from what you wrote before! It’s
surprises like these that keep me writing novels. At any rate, this book
completes the publication of every installment of the Monogatari Series
announced thus far. The schedule was insane, but I was able to pull it off thanks
to assistance from many quarters. I’ll never make such incautious promises in
the future again, beware. Oops, I swear. There we go, a novel written one
hundred percent in bad taste, this was KOIMONOGATARI “Chapter Romance:
Hitagi End.”

Senjogahara once again graces the cover of this book, which as it turns out
marks a triumphant return five years in the making. Crazy, right? VOFAN has
been kind enough to depict Senjogahara amid the snow for us.* I’ve caused all
kinds of trouble schedule-wise for the editors at Kodansha BOX, but this is the
last time, so please find it in your hearts to forgive me. And I want to offer my
deepest gratitude to all the readers who have accompanied me on the fly-by-
night journey through this Second Season.

Thank you so much.

There’s a preview of the Final Season after the colophon,† so stick around for
that.

* This, as well as the time frame, is in reference to the original edition’s cover
art, which has been included as a color insert.

† The copyright page is inserted at the end in Japanese books. The ads that
follow in this edition are not for the Final Season, but rest assured that the
series will continue to appear in translation.

NISIOISIN