by Nisioisin
Calling out both their names like that for the first time in ages, I threw open the door to their room without so much as knocking─and froze.
They were most definitely home.
But behind the pair (who were in the middle of changing out of their uniforms) and propped up on their bunk bed, sat a doll.
An expressionless doll in a frilly skirt.
By which I mean Ononoki.
“Gwa!”
Pratfalling halfway ass over tit, I pushed my way past my shrieking sisters and dashed to where Ononoki was sitting.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“Your sisters won me from the UFO Catcher.” I’d asked my question in a hushed voice, and she responded the same way. “Tsukihi is way better at it than you, kind monster sir. It only took her three coins to win me.”
“Who cares, that’s not the point…”
“The point of this whole thing was to create a rift between you and me, monstieur…so it’s Ms. Gaen and Big Sis’s judgment that we should defy that plan. They said that until this town is stabilized, I should stick even closer to you than before.”
So I’m going to be imposing on your hospitality for a while, Ononoki declared calmly─she calmly, placidly, expressionlessly informed me that she’d be staying in my sisters’ room from now on.
“W-Wait a second, you can’t be serious!”
“What do you think you’re doing, big brother? Quit talking to the doll that I won with my skill and my money.”
“Yeah, big brother. For crying out loud, when are you gonna grow up?”
“…”
I shook Ononoki’s shoulder as my little sisters showered me with abuse, but she was already back to putting on her doll act.
True, it wasn’t exactly an act.
I swear I heard a voice from my shadow say, Thou hast to be kidding me─and so.
My, my…
I guess the crazy days weren’t quite over yet.
Afterword
They say that “he who laughs last, laughs best,” but to me that just seems to mean “never laugh, because you won’t be last.” And they say that “fortune favors a home filled with laughter,” but the road home can be paved with misfortune for those who laugh before they get there. They also say, “demons laugh when we plan for the future,” but those demons aren’t necessarily the ones laughing last, and they themselves are often laughed at for their own lack of foresight. “He who laughs at a penny will someday cry over one”? Seems like that just amounts to “he who laughs first cries in the end.” What the hell is my point, you ask? It’s that whether we’re talking about an individual life or the entire world, ultimately we don’t know how things are going to shake out. Stability, unending peace and quiet, unending hell, these things are all pretty untenable, as it turns out. Then again, there’s no guarantee that the duration of “unending” won’t be longer than a human life. We don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow, and we don’t know what’s not going to happen tomorrow. Yesterday’s pleasure causes today’s hell, and today’s hell produces tomorrow’s heaven. That just keeps on happening, doesn’t it? When is last, anyway? “All’s well that ends well,” that’s like saying the result is all that matters. The proverb is hardly funny.
And so here we are, the fourteenth volume in the Monogatari series. This particular tale starred the expressionless and unlaughing Miss Yotsugi. Fourteen volumes. Feels kind of excessive, but in the beginning, of course, I hadn’t planned for the series to run so long. That is, I hadn’t even planned for it to be a series at all. It really snuck up on me! Well, you might wonder, How could he not realize what was happening, but I honestly didn’t. I still feel like everything’s exactly the same as it was when I wrote the first short story, Hitagi Crab, but that’s ridiculous of course. Generally speaking, consistency and a lack of change are two different things, and I’d like to learn to recognize the difference. I want writing a fourteenth installment to offer its own excitement, just as writing the first one. And of course, I hope there’ll be a certain excitement in bringing the series to an end. With that in mind, then, it’s time for Koyomi Araragi to pay the piper, and this has been a novel one hundred percent endward bound, TSUKIMONOGATARI “Chapter Body: Yotsugi Doll.”
She appeared first in the anime, but the cover of this novel is the first time Yotsugi Ononoki has been visually rendered for the books. Thank you very much, Mr. VOFAN. The only books left to go now are End Tale and End Tale (Cont.), so please stay with me for the Final Season, kicked off by this installment and featuring the tale’s concluding trilogy.*
* The next installment turned out to be the unmentioned KOYOMIMONOGATARI, which Vertical will be publishing in two volumes due to its length. In the above, the original’s mention of a “thirteenth” installment has been emended to “fourteenth” since the translated edition split BAKEMONOGATARI into three rather than two parts.
NISIOISIN
