by Nisioisin
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.
