by Nisioisin
“Your help is pretty expensive.”
“It’s not expensive. I’m properly compensated,” Oshino said before pointing to a corner of the classroom with his unlit cigarette. “All right, why don’t we get round number one started?”
In the corner of the classroom─
There sat a blond girl.
She held her knees in her arms.
A petite girl─who looked to be about eight.
Not twenty-seven.
Not seventeen, not twelve, not even ten─
A blond eight-year-old girl.
And.
She glared at me─with threatening eyes.
“…Really.”
I didn’t know what to call her.
This girl with no shadow, no trace, no game, not even a name.
A husk of a vampire.
The dregs of a beautiful demon.
And─
An unforgettable being, for me.
“Really… I’m sorry.”
I approached her.
I sat next to where she sat and hugged her.
“If you ever want to kill me, go ahead.”
She said nothing.
She wasn’t going to say anything to me anymore.
As if to sulk even harder, she struggled a little─but soon she calmed down and went for my neck, still not saying a word, and chomped down.
I felt a prick of pain.
Along with an intoxicating feeling.
“I don’t think this is right, either,” Oshino said airily behind me. “I guess you could call it human egotism? The disgust you felt over vampires eating humans is really no different from a cute little kitty eating a mouse turning people off. And now, in a way, you’ve chosen to keep a vampire as a pet─having filed down its fangs, plucked out its claws, crushed its throat, and castrated it. You, who were made a pet, turned around and made your master your pet. That’s all there is to this story. It’s certainly no heart-warmer.”
“……”
“A human who tried to sacrifice his life for a vampire, and a vampire who tried to sacrifice hers for a human. Sounds like blood begetting blood─but I guess blood is thicker than water. I don’t intend on inserting myself into this situation, since this is just work for me─but if you ever begin to hate yourself over this, Araragi, just let me know and I’ll do something about it.”
“I’m never going to start hating anything about this,” I answered as the girl sucked my blood. “I’m doing this because I want to.”
“Then do as you want.”
Even as Oshino’s uncaring repartee came from behind me, I embraced the girl’s petite body, which seemed so fragile that mere human arms might crush it if I held it too tight.
Having wounded each other, the two of us licked each other’s wounds.
Damaged goods both, we sought out each other.
“If you want to die tomorrow, I’m ready for my life to end tomorrow─if you care to live for today, then so will I,” I vowed out loud.
Thus begins the tale of the wounded ones.
A tale of blood that splattered red and dried up black.
The tale of our never-to-heal, precious wound.
I will tell it to no one.
Afterword
Some people like to tell fortunes or judge personalities based on blood types, saying, for example, that type Os are natural leaders while type As are highly strung, that type Bs are free spirits while type ABs march to their own drum, but then, you should probably want your leaders to be a little on the highly strung side, and really, “free spirit” is just another way to say “marches to his own drum,” and if you substituted “self-centered” for “free spirit,” what’s the difference between a self-centered person and a very fussy highly strung person, not to mention that if you think it’s good for leaders to have strong, unshakeable wills, they’d need to march to their own drum, and once you start thinking about it that way, you have no choice but to point out that, hey, wait a second, they all mean the same thing. Of course, the same could be said of all fortune telling, none more so than zodiac astrology, but they only split blood type fortunes into four types, and that simplicity paradoxically seems to be lending the whole affair its credibility. If you’ve ever subjected yourself to it, I bet when you gave your blood type you were told, “Ah, I knew it,” but that’s the trick, and it’s not hard to imagine being told “Ah, I knew it” no matter what type you say you are. Also, I bet the simplest way to guess people’s blood type, in Japan at least, is to ignore everything about their personality and to declare, “You’re a type A, aren’t you?” That’s because A is the most common blood type among Japanese people. I guess a little further in the future, we might have things like DNA fortunes or genetic fortunes, but to be honest, I don’t think they’ll be any better than the blood type fortunes we have today.
This book consists of “Koyomi Vamp,” the story of Koyomi Araragi, the narrator of my previous work Bakemonogatari. Though I called it my previous work, I don’t mind at all if you read this one first. In fact, chronologically speaking, this one comes first, so I dare say the Kizumonogatari-first order is just as legit as the opposite order. It’s the tale of Koyomi Araragi and the vampire Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade. It’s also the tale of Koyomi Araragi meeting Tsubasa Hanekawa for the first time. If Bakemonogatari is the novel I wrote entirely to entertain myself, then Kizumonogatari is a novel I wrote entirely-and-a-fifth to entertain myself. In fact, these stories should have been sealed off forever, never to be espied, their author fully satisfied the moment he put down his pen, but by some mistake, they were turned into books, beautifully adorned with the illustrator VOFAN’s impressive skills, and published for the world to see. When I confront myself with this fact, I don’t feel the need to thank various people as much as the need to do some very serious reflection on my own professionalism. Then again, the occasional book like this doesn’t seem like it could hurt, so I would appreciate your magnanimity.
Of course, if you do find the Monogatari series, which I have written so exhaustively I feel there’s nothing left I could possibly add, to be even the least bit entertaining, then there is no greater joy for me. Fueled by that joy, I’ll get back to actual work starting tomorrow.
NISIOISIN
Palindromic NISIOISIN made his debut as a novelist when he was twenty. A famously prolific author, he is known to publish more than a book per month at times. With his inexorable rise, he has become the leading light of a younger generation of writers who began their careers in the twenty-first century.
Titles by him previously published in English include the first two books of the Zaregoto mystery cycle and the novelizations xxxHOLiC: AnotherHOLiC and Death Note: Another Note - The Los Angeles BB Murder Cases. The MONOGATARI series, widely considered his masterpiece to date, makes its first appearance in English with this volume.
Illustrator VOFAN, lauded as the “magician of light and shadow,” hails from Taiwan.
