The whole reason I came over here was to read a particularly long post about Monogatari since I try to read any and all reviews/recaps/theories about it. I often complain that I’ve read everything and yet I’ve never really published my long 100+ page Google Doc full of reviews and theories. This is the Musubimonogatari section. It’s a bloated, barely-proofread and broken-due-to-me-pasting-it-in-here mess. But hey, it’s definitely me.
Edit: Here’s the Doc btw.
This one is almost purely just me recapping it all in my own voice. Very little actual analysis or theorycrafting. Soz.
Zenka Suou was a swimmer who got into a traffic accident at 15. Upon her body flying off the road, she landed in a river and happened upon a mermaid. She ate its flesh and she herself became one. Mermaids are really immortal, but they’re also the most delicious oddity. Unfortunately, Suou developed a bad aftereffect from this. Any time any water at all touches her, that part of her body becomes a fish. This led to her attempting suicide on many occasions but her immortality was just too much. After 10 years though, she’s come around to it all and now thinks it’s better to keep living. Suou tells this to Koyomi the first time they ever met. That is to say, she told him when he got the trial job working as Assistant Inspector at the Naoetsu Police Department, Rumors Squad at the age of 23.
Yes. This is a timeskip story. It’s been 4 years since we last chronologically saw Koyomi Araragi as he was in college. After he finished that, he took his civil service exam on a whim and became a cop. Suou and him are investigating a river that borders his old high school. Suou asks him why he became a cop to which he gives a halfhearted answer that his parents were cops and they he wanted to catch Kaiki. Right now, he’s actually been assigned to the Rumors Squad on a four month trial period. Gaen has been setting up this squad for longer than we’ve known her and she selected Koyomi for it long ago too. What the Rumors Squad (yes, it’s an actual branch of the national police force) does is try and stop rumors turning into oddities. The squad is currently made up of a handful of women, Suou says this is probably just because women tend to believe in the occult more. Each member* (*more on this later) is afflicted with an oddity. Koyomi wants to put his all into his work, we get the feeling that he still doesn’t believe that he’s made it.
The job today is investigating the rumors about an invisible hand drowning 5 children in this river. Not drowning to death, but one of the kids is comatose. The two officers wonder if there’s a kappa or something. Koyomi asks Suou why she became a cop. She says she likes being able to choose what she wants to be and allow others to do that. Makes sense because of her adverse reaction to liquid. Koyomi slips into a bathing suit and begins to investigate the river himself. Suou doesn’t do it despite being a mermaid since there’s still trauma about it. They don’t find anything and so he decides to call out Shinobu. Suou leaves since mermaid is really delicious and she doesn’t really trust Koyomi’s vampire just yet. Shinobu agrees with her fears, even though she obviously wouldn’t do it. She also says Hachikuji has been doing good at keeping oddity levels low. But she does clarify that there’s been 4 incidents and 1 accident out of the 5 kids who drowned.
Since Koyomi will only be in town for 4 months, he’s decided to stay at his old home. After that first year of college, he had left the town entirely to stay there and so this was the first time in 4 years that he’s been home. But nowadays, the only resident is Karen. Their parents had been called away by the national government and Tsukihi had gone to college, dropped out, and then went overseas for another college. Karen hadn’t gone to college and just joined the police force straight out of high school. So, the two eldest children have become police. The two have a nice meal together and discuss Koyomi’s new job. We’re shown that Koyomi has outgrown his perverted nature and is pretty chill and normal with his sister nowadays. Good for him. Karen says that she hears a lot of rumors about the Rumor Squad, but shows that she still doesn’t know about oddities. She does know the river though, apparently her squad went camping but there were no incidents. Karen also reveals that Suruga has nearly finished school and intends to be a physician.
He ends up encountering her the next day as him and Suou check up on the children. After visiting the 4 awake children and getting no leads, they visit the hospital where the 5th is. Suruga is working the reception desk as an intern and she strikes up a conversation with Koyomi while Suou checks the child. Suruga says she’s impressed by him becoming a police detective-like person. Apparently Ougi told her, so that guy’s still kicking. Koyomi asks what happened to basketball. Suruga says she just did everything she could with that but she still does it for fun on the weekends with friends. She got inspired by Rouka’s sports injury to help out people before they do something drastic. A really cool and dazzling response that overshadows Koyomi’s answer to why he became a cop. Koyomi knows that if he hadn’t been scouted, Gaen would’ve scouted Suruga for the force. But Kaiki had managed to sever that string of fate and save her, a reluctant bit of praise for him. Suruga assures him that she’s still struggling and sometimes wants to quit, so it’s fine to feel bad about your career sometimes. Koyomi then brings up Tsubasa Hanekawa. There’s an energy there, one not too good. They both get stiff, apparently she’s good. At least, she’s not dead. In the topic of the comatose kid, Suruga says that she doesn’t think it looks too good for them. They’re getting worse. Koyomi says he’ll try and make sure Town Hall doesn’t lock up river access. And then even hints at not knowing an old friend works there just yet.
Suou and Koyomi end up back at the river. This time, Suou will be getting in to use her mermaid flesh as bait. Koyomi then talks to us about him and Hitagi. They’re currently still together, though they broke up twice in college. Right now, they’re on two different continents. He’s back here and she’s working in America at a rival company to her father. Suou advises staying close to Koyomi, at 26 she’s had to break up with 6 people, police detectives are a dangerous career for relationships. Koyomi asks about the kid. Nothing we hadn’t heard, they’re getting worse. He notes how only kids are being targeted. Suou agrees that it’s a good avenue to approach from. She begins to disrobe into her bathing suit. She jokes about her trauma, her failed attempts at suicide due to her greater-than-vampire immortality and having to stop tears from hitting her flesh at self harm getting healed. She’s pretty fucked up, but joking about it seems to calm her.
Anyway, they tie a rope around her to drag her back if anything goes wrong. And she wades into the water. Apparently the fish she transforms into is based on a multitude of factors in the water and her mood. Today she turns into a piranha-like mermaid with large teeth and jagged fins. This is actually pretty good all things considered, it’s not a mollusk or deep-sea fish so that’s not as gross. Koyomi watches her swim around, but nothing’s biting. He thinks that if anything happened and he was dragged in, Shinobu would save them. Shinobu clarifies that she most definitely will not save Suou. Especially when she’s in trouble. This implies that she is, and when Koyomi tries to drag her in, the rope won’t budge. Suou, despite being a mermaid, appears to be drowning. But when Koyomi tries to jump in and save her, the water rejects him. He can’t break the surface. And he can’t see the hands gripping her. He then realizes that the river itself is the oddity. It’s restricting air, but Suou’s immortality won’t let her die. She starts to mouth something to Koyomi as he bashes against the river’s surface. And all the sudden, he begins to sink. Of course, one of the iconic powers of the mermaid is to sink ships with their songs. She’s using that on Koyomi, and once he enters, he can see the hands. The hands of the child reaching out.
What had happened was this. The one child who drowned but wasn’t an incident was the comatose child. They slipped on accident and drowned, but their spirit remained in the river reaching out for help. The kids they dragged in were done so to help, but had accidentally been drowned in the process. They didn’t trust adults and so none of them saw the hands, but since Suou had gone to check on them earlier that day, they allowed her to help, but had begun to drown her too. Koyomi was able to grab them and release their spirit back into the body and revive the kid. Suou dries herself off on the riverbank so that she can return to humanity. And that ends our first story.
Nozomi Kizashima died when she was a kid. Her heart fully stopped and she officially died. That is, she was dead until her grandparents revived her as a golem using mud. Unlike Yotsugi, who entirely lacks a soul, Kizashima still has hers inside her body. Unfortunately, her grandparents who needed to manually reshape her every once in a while, died some years later which meant that Kizashima’s body is stuck as a middle schooler. While it’s not certain how long her soul will stay inside, we can consider her another addition to the immortal party. She currently is an inspector at the Naoetsu Police Department’s Rumor Squad and is 29 years old.
The rumor this time, a couple weeks into Koyomi’s stay in his hometown, is an issue related to Naoetsu High. As girls have been walking home from school, they’ve noticed that their shirts have been cleanly cut on the back. And this has been happening frequently enough to have the police investigate. Koyomi thinks about high school. He doesn’t think too highly of that time. And he thinks that the him of that time would probably think the him of 5 years later was dissatisfactory. Kizashima asks him what’s up as they head over to the road. She seems pretty gung ho on him being the chief of the Rumors Squad one day. But Koyomi appears to not want to stay in his hometown at all. Strongly feels that even.
Kizashima talks about Naoetsu High, the two were paired up specifically because they both were former students in it. Apparently there have been plenty of oddity-afflicted kids to go here besides the ones we know + Kizashima. Unlike Koyomi and his gaggle of dorks, her school life was pretty whatever, no real oddity or school issues. Back to the Squad, Kizashima and the Chief are the last two members of the original squad. The rest were sent to make Rumor Squads in other regions. There’s another bit about Hanekawa when talking about people working overseas. Apparently her overseas work far surpasses Gaen’s. He also talks about her kinda distantly, something is up here. Kizashima downs some water from a flask she carries, as a mud doll she’s gotta stay moist in the hotter months. She puts forward that the phantom slasher could have been a kamaitachi, which is a youkai that’s 3 weasels with scythe hands which trip and cut you. After some prattling about ruining simple ghost stories and harvesting organs, Koyomi brings up how odd it is that none of the girls notice the slashes as they walk. Kizashima says the girls were all walking home alone so there weren’t any witnesses. Koyomi brings up how the Kokorowatari only cuts oddities which leads his partner to ask about his vampire. Koyomi then tells us that Shinobu doesn’t like how Kizashima talks to her master and so he will be abstaining on calling her out.
They spend all morning walking along that road. They finally decide to make an appointment to talk with the kids that day and so get right to it. Koyomi talks about how he wanted to visit Hachikuji but hadn’t gotten to it yet. Unfortunately for the newly-adult Koyomi, kids are strange to talk to so he leaves it mostly to the young-looking Kizashima. They didn’t get any amazing leads, but before he leaves, Koyomi says he has to visit someone first and that she should go on ahead. He needs to visit a girl wrapped in mystery.
Ougi Oshino has, at some point, grown much more powerful. She (yes “she”, at some point she de-transitioned) calls the nonexistent Class 1-3 her home. She’s also exactly the same age as before. After Suruga graduated, Ougi settled down into this classroom. Apparently she had become a school ghost story, one who makes lost students even more lost. And according to Gaen, Ougi Oshino had far surpassed her previous power to the point that no specialist can touch her. Koyomi says he didn’t want to come back home because he felt guilty at making such a beast, and he also felt bad about abandoning what was basically himself/his child. Ougi is sitting at the teacher’s desk reading a manga by one “Sengoku Nadeshiko”. A pen name for an artist who’s 3rd work since debut apparently isn’t selling too well. Ougi assures Koyomi that she hasn’t messed with her at all, Nadeko’s doing her own darkness. She even moved far-far away from this town once she graduated middle school. Koyomi says he remembers hearing something about Gaen inducting her to work with Yotsugi, this is true. Gaen’s apparently using Nadeko in a similar way to Koyomi. Having oddity-based workers in mundane jobs like a policeman or mangaka. Koyomi gets to the root of the visit, he wants to ask about the phantom slasher. Ougi says even her own victims have reported slashes on their clothes. Koyomi thinks about how him, Suruga and Nadeko all escaped Ougi’s clutches and hopes the new victims will do the same one day. He also makes sure Ougi isn’t the phantom slasher, to which she responds in the negative. Ougi gets a little peculiar. She hints at how she’s long surpassed even her ties to Koyomi or Oshino, she’s not really his niece or Koyomi’s other half anymore, but she is honor bound to serve him still, she’s his mirror after all. Either way, her hint is that the slasher only hits those leaving school, never going to school.
Kizashima and Koyomi discuss that over lunch. While he went to visit Ougi, she went to the staff room to ask about the incidents. Koyomi breaks in to ask about her whole age situation. She says that she’s stuck like this for the far future until someone can reverse-engineer the forbidden spell her grandparents had used before their death. Back to the staff room information. Turns out Naoetsu High was more concerned with covering up this blemish rather than finding the source and solving it. Unfortunate, but that’s private schools for you. Now it’s time to do a classic stake-out! Watch as the kids go home on that road and catch the culprit in the act. Kizashima says the trees are too obvious, the culprit will only come out when they’re alone with a student. So the two officers will use their death-given abilities. Koyomi can walk far away and use his enhanced vampire sight to watch through one of the multiple concave mirrors added for safety. Unfortunately since he got more un-vampired he appears in mirrors again, but it’ll be fine. Kizashima will use her mud golem powers to become… mud. She pours the flask over herself and becomes one with the mud on the walkway. Her soul is very well bound so there’s no worry of her losing any of it, but she’s just plain old mud now. Koyomi worries about her wanting to go so far, to be trampled by the ones she wishes to protect seems cruel. Again, Hanekawa comes to mind. Apparently one of his biggest regrets was not stopping Hanekawa when he could. Once she went through Neko Shiro she just started to divert and now even seeing someone who behaves or reminds him of her causes a great hollowness and fear to overtake him. Jesus man, what the hell did Hanekawa do???
As Koyomi watches, fearing that Kizashima will somehow get harmed by the shoes of the kids, Shinobu speaks up. Apparently this act of self-sacrifice makes her readjust her opinion of her. They get nothing and so Koyomi runs over to reassemble his senior officer’s body. They wonder how the slasher did it, with nobody seeing them. This causes Koyomi to wonder how exactly the students even noticed. I mean, how did they know the slash happened on this road? And then he notices the mirrors which face each other along the path. Ougi’s secret hint, that she was his mirror. The students noticed their uniform was ripped when they saw themselves in the mirrors. But the real scene of the crime was Naoetsu High. Simply put, it’s not an oddity but instead bullying. Ougi has said she was meddling with them, which means they’re the kinda kids who are loners and lost in life, prime bullying targets. If they just notify staff, the problem will go away hopefully. Kizashima apologizes to Koyomi, she lets her positive memories of High School cloud her logical judgement. Koyomi reassures her that even if there were some bad parts as well, her past (and, not said outright, his own) was still shining and important.
Mitome Saisaki is part of a long line of werewolves. Her wolfish-ness is especially potent and allows her to transform whenever she sees any moon-like imagery. But since she’s experienced, she can fully control her transformation even if she was on the moon. She’s relatively normal otherwise if you ignore the above-average bodily strength. She used to be on the regular police team and even lead one of them until Gaen brought her over to the Rumors Squad. Koyomi at first thinks this was because Gaen wanted some real muscle, but he realizes it’s just that she wants a loyal dog. And now, that dog is chasing a cat.
Mitome (she makes Koyomi call her by her first name) stops Koyomi to ask about their newest police escortee. TSUBASA HANEKAWA is coming home to Japan, despite how much the government tried to stop her. Her goal, to erase her past. We finally get to learn about TSUBASA HANEKAWA (it’s in all caps in the story, as a way to say she’s no longer a person but moreso a figure) 4 years after her last appearance. And it’s certifiably her alright. After graduation, Hanekawa immediately went off to work for various charities and the military. I believe it’s also said that she worked with other vampire specialists using her thorn that she got from Dramaturgy. Hanekawa was a nation-wide name and tons of people started on a charity streak just like her. This point was very nice, but what came next caused her to lose the respect of Japan, and then the entire world. You see, at some point Hanekawa started negotiating peace in wars. This is a trait she’s trying to emulate from Oshino, but while he wanted to lay low and just handle oddities, Hanekawa did it with entire nations. She started to destroy national borders and entire nations in an attempt to unite the entire world. After a couple years of infrequent postcards from her, Koyomi had stopped hearing from her at all. All of her friends had stopped hearing from her, likely due to her not wanting to involve them in this extremely terroristic passion. Heck, nobody had even seen pictures of her in ages, she was a silent and invisible toxin that threatened to break down any nation she entered. Koyomi himself doesn’t really get why she’s doing this. The government thought about evacuating all members of her past just in case she visits them and some nation airstrikes her. But instead they just told all her old friends and family to stay away. All that said, he didn’t think he’d be anywhere close to meeting her again when she comes. Mitome asks if he has any gifts or anything from Hanekawa, so that she can sniff them to get her scent if anyone kidnaps her. Koyomi withholds that he kept her panties from Kizu and cut braids from one of the side stories. And upon asking if there’s any chance of Hanekawa visiting him, he says there’s zero.
After investigating an incident involving charms distributed to middle schoolers, and learning there was no con-man behind it, Koyomi gets some bad news as he heads home. Tsukihi has arrived back home from the States. SHe dropped out a second time and intends to go to a dancing school to be a dancer at a casino. Another bit of annoying news is that Tsukihi met up with Hitagi some days ago, while Koyomi himself hasn’t been able to in a while. Tsukihi’s just here for the night and will roll out to do some small jobs to pay for college. She’s going to stay with Nadeko while she does japanese tutoring. Karen lines up their four plates for dinner. Hey, wait, 4 plates? And here’s a 4th and worse bit of bad news, Hanekawa walks down from her nap with messy hair.
She looks very very tired. She’s wearing some of Karen’s pajamas and her hair’s all frizzy, longer than it ever was back in high school. She looks nothing like a symbol of international peace. Apparently Tsukihi had caught a flight back with Hanekawa when she came home. Hanekawa assures Koyomi that she escaped her room and will reenter it without being noticed. It seems that Koyomi is the most concerned that they’re just casually eating with a national treasure. He says that it’s kinda mean to Mitome and the other escorts that Hanekawa is just escaping and hanging out at some random house. Hanekawa shows that she even knows all about Gaen’s squad and all the people inside it. She adds, “Whenever I come to know something, the number of things I don’t know increases.” to her usual catchphrase about knowing everything. As the two sisters share a bath, Koyomi washes the dishes with Hanekawa. She says they look like a married couple, a very evil joke. Especially since it appears there’s some tension between Hitagi and him. Koyomi reaffirms that he’s a government official now so he can’t visit easily. This is him prodding at the anti-govenment Hanekawa. She responds very loosely, a worse outcome than he could imagine. They mention her old rival, Ougi when bringing up sneaking into a locked room. Hanekawa brings up a ton of old names, not really to actually restore her past that she’s trying to erase, but more as a formality. Koyomi presses against her erasing it all, saying that it’s something she’s not ready for. To that, Hanekawa stops him and says that he’s wrong. She came here to Japan just for him. She says she constantly thinks about him over anyone else. She used to love him of course, and she even says she wouldn’t mind dating him now. She of course regrets saying that immediately. She gives him two reasons that might be why she came to see him. 1. She got tired of her mission, she just wanted to help people and it got out of hand. 2. She came here to scout and recruit Koyomi to be her right hand man, she respects his opinions and companionship, she has no friends and works all alone. She wants someone to stop her or encourage her, pretty much what he said to her at the end of Tsubasa Tiger. She says one or neither of these reasons are true. Even she doesn’t know. Koyomi can’t bring himself to open that Schrödinger’s Box. He instead gives his answers to both, 1. Then quit if your work hurts you like that, even though he knows she’d never accept peace of mind over peace of the world, 2. He respectfully declines, he’s on the Rumors Squad and so he’s dedicated to this town, her town, and not the world. Hanekawa says that the second answer is smoke and mirrors, he’s thinking of the old Hanekawa he once knew instead of the new one. She asks him if he figured out how she did the escape room trick, instead he gives her a bit of bad news. He says that he loved her back in high school too. A thing he didn’t need to say and that leaves him with an eternal regret at saying it out loud.
After the sisters came back, the four had a pajama party and Hanekawa walked off into the night. Koyomi reveals the secret part of the escape room trick to Mitome as he retells the events. It’s simple, that woman wasn’t Tsubasa Hanekawa. Not just the one he did know grown up and changed with age, he means that’s just not her at all. Mitome confirms that Hanekawa just sat in her apartment signing off the documents to erase her past all night. Koyomi talks about this saying, that every person has two others who look like them in the world somewhere, Hanekawa moved all over the world so she must have met one of them. Mitome says he should know her, and Koyomi says he does, no matter what he would know Hanekawa. But he only knows the old Hanekawa like that, this is a Hanekawa who has travelled far beyond those borders. Koyomi says that option 1 or 2 for seeing him were both wrong. It was option 3. Destroy the mementos of her past life. When he went to check, the underwear and braids were absent from his room. She didn’t burn them there because the Araragis would smell the fire, so she wore the pantsu and wore the braids as extensions, thats why her hair was so long. Mitome says that maybe the body double was the one in the hotel room and that the real one had come, but Koyomi says there’s 0 chance of that. Hell, there’s 2 body doubles, it’s possible that Tsubasa Hanekawa never set foot inside that hotel or the Araragi residence. Maybe not even Japan. It was sad that he didn’t get to meet the real deal but instead a copycat. But he was happy, happy that he sent even a double. Because that meant that Tsubasa was over him entirely, not even caring to see him.
This one is definitely the saddest to me. I hope you noticed that I've only referred to most of the characters we knew from 4 years ago with their first name. But for Tsubasa I only used her last name. It’s definitely sad to me to know that she would cut off all her friends like this, but it’s freeing. She surpassed all these people, she has been freed from anything that held her back. It’s possible that what the copycat said was 100% true about being sad and lonely, but it’s true that Koyomi wouldn’t follow her. From what i’ve read of minor spoilers, this is it for her. She might appear again and I just don’t know, but that’s it, that’s how it ends for her. An idea instead of a person, far from the normal girl she was at the start.
Tsuzura Kouga is a normal woman. She is explicitly a human, just a human. She’s a dang good communicator and leader, but her true gift to this squad is her normalcy. Kouga has no specialization with oddities at all, heck she’s not specialized in non-oddity matters either. She can’t even see or touch oddities, obviously that’s hyperbole by Koyomi’s narration since she can obviously talk to her squad, but you get the picture. She is simply an unbiased government official who can interact with the world of the odd and come out unscathed. A one-in-a-lifetime person that Gaen scouted out.
So anyway, after 4 months of training in his hometown, Koyomi Araragi and Hitagi Senjougahara have broken up for a third time.
During his time in the force, he’d taken Suou’s advice about staying well in a relationship to heart and so he kept contact with Hitagi. But, the real issue was the future. Hitagi’s business overseas is doing well and she wants him to come and join her as she rises the ranks, but Koyomi seems to be much happier working the police force in his own country. They hadn't fought in a while, though had done so often in college together, and so it got messy and so now they’ve broken up. Before this happened, Chief Kouga had her one on one talk with him about what to do once his training period ran out. She gave him all the room to decide his future, he could stay with them or go somewhere else or even abandon the police force entirely. She personally thinks it would be nice for him to take over her role one day, but she’s not pushy.
As Koyomi is at town hall to wrap up some paperwork, he runs into a certain cantankerous friend. Hey remember way back in Zenka Mermaid where he said he’d meet an old friend in town hall? Well that old friend is the 23 year old Sodachi Oikura! In the intervening years since we last saw her, she has gotten a job as an accountant for town hall. She has also become “friends” with Koyomi but still talks to him with pure venom. They apparently went to college together and studied for the exam to pass. Koyomi failed due to his waning interest in mathematics (way too relatable… poor me and my math major…) but she did good. She apparently cut ties with him -a thing she’s done more times than he could count- last on October 13th, 2 years prior but is willing to hear what’s ailing him. Some context, when Koyomi met up with Sodachi in college, it was Hanekawa’s doing. She had convinced Sodachi to go to college and had subtly pushed her to the one Koyomi went to. Since Sodachi had no place to stay, she ended up staying with the Araragis. Issue is, he didn’t tell his girlfriend this and so she rightfully got pretty pissed. Thus, the first breakup. Luckily, Sodachi patched it up for them and ran off to her own apartment. Then they broke up AGAIN and Sodachi was so pissed at them that she didn’t talk to them again until she met with Koyomi today at town hall.
They go to lunch and she's mean and bitter as always, but Koyomi is mean and bitter in his own way. He would’ve thought she would be dead in the streets by now, to which she responds with snappy refutations that she’s making efforts to be an adult and functional human. She wants to live life and just be happy, no need to raise kids who end up unhappy like her. Koyomi sighs and says he wishes he had been in love with such an easy to understand woman like her, she obviously gets pissed at this. They talk about Hanekawa a bit, she was friends with Sodachi too, but she didn’t visit her last month. Sodachi has actually bought a house and intends to renovate it, specifically her old childhood home which has still been slowly decaying. She says that she's the opposite of Hanekawa, she’s reclaiming her past to keep living, a noble goal. She talks about how she’s still single but wants to raise a family in that old house, a happier one. To this she turns it back on Koyomi, how’s his relationship? After trying to avoid it, he spills the beans. She laughs in his face and calls him stupid. She takes real joy in watching them both squirm but some genuine concern for her two friends leaks out through all the laughing and wishing for things to go even worse. She says that while Hitagi seems to have her path decided but his is still a little open. Problem is that since he’s a national employee, he’s still limited to Japan. So the only way is for someone to completely move over to either country and leave behind a good chunk of what they’ve worked towards. She says full-on that if he can’t make a decision then they should fully cut it off, break up and live fulfilling lives. She says that he already made her spend her best years of her teenagehood on him, don’t lead her along for her twenties too. She then gives him her address and details, friendship RESTORED! She says she just wants a followup report when it’s all done. Then she says a funny line:
[OIKURA]: “Maybe… if both of us are still single when we hit our thirties…”
[OIKURA]: “Let’s strangle each other to death.”
What a lovely proposal. If that meant I’d get to quarrel with her all the way to my thirties.
And with that, he heads to Kita-Shirahebi Shrine. He finally got the confidence to visit it and say hello to his old friend. The real fear this entire time is related to Chief Kouga, what if when he gets there he can’t see her? What if his adolescence is truly all gone? And when he gets there and walks up to the shrine, he can’t. The shine where he had so many memories was the same and yet distinctly different to him. It was well-maintained unlike when he first visited in Nadeko Snake and it was quiet now in the darkness. He solemnly throws 5 yen into the offering box and a young girl's voice rings out in the crisp winter air.
Shinobu asks him if he’s ready to die. Koyomi picks up on what she means, suicide is the leading cause of deaths in vampires. He brushes her off saying he’s only 23 but she notes how often he spends talking of the past. Talking of the changes in the present. Talking about what is no more. Would it not have been better to die 5 years ago when they met? Avoid all of this? Shinobu knows that feeling very well, so it makes sense why she’d say it, but he can clearly tell that she’s just fucking with him. He says that he liked his high school days a lot, but in the grand scheme of things… he’s a hell of a lot happier now. Back then he nearly hadn’t graduated and was living each day as a moody teenager with no friends. Shinobu says she thinks that old Koyomi would be proud of the new one but Koyomi says he thinks that he’d probably have punched his older self. He’s a career man who just does normal things and lives a normal-ish life. But what really burns him is the act of losing that past self. Sure, all the way to Ougi Dark his journey was to cut off that adolescence, and even then he decided to let it live on. But now? Now it really feels like it’s dead, Ougi has moved on and so has every aspect of his past life, except for Shinobu. She then says that’s much like how he was when he first became a vampire or when she was offered the position of god. The want to go back, to retread those old paths. She offers to use the time travel again to send them both back to live high school again. He understands that she’s offering him darkness, so often in the past did he listen to her dark deals for easy outs and all that brought him was pain. He says he has no reason to go back, that boy from then and the man now are one in the same, he lived high school once and he’ll keep it that way. Leave that eternal highschooler shtick to Ougi. Growing up can be fun, or at least Gaen and Oshino proved that it can be interesting. He can’t see Hachikuji and that’s okay. He bets he never even lost his way and was just hesitating and asking a god for help to avoid confronting that. Of course she wouldn’t show up! He's not actually facing a crisis at all! Shinobu says that’s very cool sounding and noble, but she wants to add that Hachikuji isn’t here at all. She can’t see her either because she’s probably out walking. Lol. Koyomi decides that the next time he comes to see Hachikuji will be when him and Hitagi get married right here at this shrine one day. He asks Shinobu to help him with something not for work, but for fun.
Koyomi asks to meet with Chief Kouga on his final day of the training period. He hands her a large bundle of papers and she seems confused. He explains that this is a map of all oddities he could find, or rather, the places where oddities have the ability to appear. Kouga asks if it’s a parting gift to the Rumor Squad and he won’t be coming back. He says that it’s more so a bribe or gratuity. He wants her to write a letter of recommendation, she says she already was gonna. He can get one for any region or level of policework. He says no, he wants to continue his training. Not here, but overseas. He was stressing over having to quit his job to be with Hitagi, but like… he didn’t need to. He was him, he didn’t have to change or leave everything he liked behind, he can just move somewhere else. Heck, he promises to come back one day and be Chief Araragi too if he learns enough. Kouga surmises that he wants her to talk about this to Big Boss Gaen. Koyomi says Gaen probably doesn’t want to rely on the FBI or MI5 and other specialist bounty hunters like Dramaturgy. He may not be the best, but he has Shinobu to interpret English and oddities. Kouga warns him that things could get dicey, he could get stressed and break up with his girlfriend. Nail hit right on the poor boy’s head. He says he regrets not living his life to the fullest, holding himself back from making steps forward. He appreciates Kouga’s advice to allow himself to take it slow, to do what he wants at his own pace. But he’s ready to take it further. Kouga says okay, sure, she’ll go with that. But she’s getting him back here in this Squad one day. She won’t let him quit. She likes the work, some flaws in this map but whatever. She can’t see oddities, but she sure has a real eye for people.
And now for the epilogue; or rather, the punch line for this recap. Koyomi gets home from his last day. He’d exhausted from spending all night making that map with Shinobu. He notices 2 pairs of shoes in the entry, I guess Tsukihi is back again. He walks in to interrogate her when he sees a woman who is definitely not Tsukihi Araragi. Wearing colored sunglasses and sitting criss-cross on the couch is his ex-girlfriend. She says “Yo.” and he falls to his knees. She used the spare key to break into the house of two police officers. Hitagi had gone straight there from the airport, not even to her parent’s house. She beats him to the punch and apologizes, says there was a lot of stress piled up. He’s overwhelmed, he didn’t expect her to act first. Koyomi says he has to tell her something, obviously about his plan to train overseas. She says she wants to say something before he says. She begged and begged and managed to get them to allow her to start a new branch in Japan. She can live together with him in Japan. Koyomi is struck by the sheer absurdity of this, Hitagi asks why he’s not saying anything. Is he mad at her? Koyomi walks over and lifts her sunglasses, her eyes are red from near-endless crying. And then, he says in parallel to that very special moment from Bakemonogatari:
Her red eyes turned wide, and smiling while crying, bashfully responded with “Koyomi, tore.”
The words of our union were not words that had caught on, but words from our memories alone.
Haha. This series truly is a comedy. I’m actually tearing up as I type this. It’s such an awesome fucking ending. Dude. YES.
This is a very sad book that burns me to my core. I too am a friendless Math Major. But this book is also one of my favorites I think. I’ve gone through the Homestuck Epilogues, I can handle this. I write this immediately after finishing writing the end to Tsuzura Human’s summary. I have to say, I have really grown on this book. It used to be a solid 8/10 but I really think it’s risen to a nice 8.7. That ending is really good, I'll have to link to that video in the Bake section to show exactly why “tore.” is so important. I also like the use of Koyomi as the final narrator of the Off Season. It sets up this trend in all 7 of the earlier stories of having Koyomi Araragi as a vague concept that others revolve around. Even Princess Beauty and Bon Appetit hint at him as a prince or savior. So when we start Musubi and he’s the narrator outright, it seems odd. But it’s sort of telling us outright that this isn’t the Koyomi we know, but it is one obsessed with that high school version of him that all the other stories were as well. It’s a really cool narrative trick!
