001 · Prologue
Lacan teaches that truth can only be half-said. One way of understanding this claim is that the truth we utter is always distorted, while “truth” also inhabits what lies outside speech. In the terms of this essay, “truth” exists within lies as well.
This is an essay about Deishuu Kaiki’s story. To my mind, Kaiki is one of the most intriguing figures in the entire Monogatari series. I can only offer an inadequate account of the Kaiki I see. In the end, this essay is like Koimonogatari: the reader need not believe it.
002 · Nadeko Sengoku
To return to the story itself, Koimonogatari must first resolve its central conflict: the rampage of the lovestruck Nadeko Sengoku. That is why no one but Deishuu Kaiki can subdue Nadeko’s aberration. Kaiki alone is a con man. Meme Oshino is not; neither is Koyomi Araragi.
We may be inclined to think that Kaiki takes Koyomi’s place in Koimonogatari, but their positions differ fundamentally. Koyomi tends to open himself unconditionally to others, Nadeko included. Faced with Nadeko’s destructiveness, that openness is fatal. Koyomi is the object of her hatred; by killing him, Nadeko wants to “kill herself.” Her hatred of Koyomi is not hatred of another person, but hatred of herself.
After all, Nadeko’s “love” is itself a fraud. I do not love “you,” but certain traits you possess. I do not love a subject, but a position. I do not love you; you merely satisfy my desire. I love only myself, and such love is directed at no particular person. Nadeko, born for romance and romance alone, can take in nothing but lies. Only lies can reach her true core. This is Kaiki’s work: to tear open Nadeko’s A.T. Field with the kindness of a complete stranger.
Nadeko’s sole reason for existing is Koyomi Araragi. What Kaiki does is force her to face the utter emptiness within her and then, like Touko Aozaki, point out that precisely because the heart is hollow as an empty shrine, it can contain still more.
But how does Kaiki recount this story to Koyomi?
“What did you say to her?”
“What needed saying.”
As I answered, I pretended not to notice Araragi and crouched beside Sengoku. The job had been almost finished; I did not want this kid getting in the way.
“Just what needed saying. That romance isn’t everything. That there are plenty of other enjoyable things. That she should look forward. That everyone passes through some awkward, embarrassing phase of youth they would rather forget, and she only has to hold on a little longer… In short, all those trite homilies adults give children.”
So, if you ask what I did:
I did nothing more than these perfectly ordinary, commonplace things.
Kaiki’s version is that, as a well-meaning adult, he merely gave Nadeko a talking-to. Implicitly, he presents himself as only a pawn, with no agency of his own. This is where we should recall Kaiki’s warning that his speech contains fiction. We have every reason to think that he is evading something. Kaiki did, of course, save Nadeko, directing her toward another form of self-erasure1 and thereby ensuring that the story could continue. But what is Deishuu Kaiki running from?
003 · Hitagi Senjougahara
From the outset, Kaiki warns the reader that the story of Koimonogatari is fictional. Yet readers invoke that warning almost exclusively when discussing his death. After all, there is scarcely another way Nadeko’s defeat could have unfolded; whatever Kaiki invents must lie in the details.
Those details are precisely what matters most. Koimonogatari is a story narrated by Kaiki. The fact that he defeated Nadeko, the true part of his account, is an empty truism known to everyone. Only the fictional part, the part from which the impeccably impartial Koyomi Araragi and Yotsugi Ononoki are absent, can tell us why and how. It is the key to reading Deishuu Kaiki. His confidence trick becomes, once again, his means of escape. To return to the previous section’s question, what is he running from? My answer is this: Deishuu Kaiki is running from his own position. He has desires and feelings. He is a participant in Koimonogatari, one of its driving forces, not an impartial observer, however much his words try to make him appear as one.
As an aside, the Monogatari series resembles a psychoanalytic process, and any attempt to use psychoanalysis to evade the subject’s responsibility is bound to be vulgar. Either Kaiki fails to recognize this or recognizes it and can do nothing, for he introduces Senjougahara into his own story.
夜明け前の 一瞬の静寂，
(A moment’s silence before dawn,)
耳の中を 記憶が支配する，
(Memory fills my ears,)
その背中に あの瞬間 つぶやいた，
(In that moment, I whispered as you faced away,)
聴こえないふりをした 恋文，
(A love letter you pretended not to hear,)
すれ違い 振り向くこともなく，
(We pass each other without turning around,)
選んだ物語の続きは，
(The story I chose continues)
今日という，
(into “today,”)
あなたじゃない 未来 (a future without you.)
With the impartial Koyomi absent, we have reason to believe every character in Kaiki’s story except one: the Hitagi Senjougahara he describes. Kaiki pours too much feeling into his portrayal of her. Senjougahara may in fact be one of the few people able to understand what he truly thinks beneath his deceptions, and one of the few who genuinely cares for him. Kaiki’s guilt toward her is equally plain to see. He denies it as fiercely as he can, yet on matters of this kind he is ironically honest.
In the triangle “Kaiki → Senjougahara ↔ Araragi,” it is hard not to see the shadow of “Nadeko → Araragi ↔ Senjougahara.” Thus Deishuu Kaiki must leave the stage immediately after Nadeko Sengoku: even maintaining such a precarious balance is difficult. We now have one more reason why Kaiki alone could solve Nadeko’s problem. If every aberration can ultimately be resolved only by the person afflicted, then Kaiki and Nadeko attain a strange unity here.
Kaiki’s evasion now makes sense. His conversation with Nadeko truly is a fraud. But is his own heart not equally an empty shrine? It is difficult to find anything beyond kindness and feeling on which that hollow place can rest. Think of Touko’s “empty shrine” and of Shiki Ryougi. Kaiki cannot guarantee that his own method works; the exchange can no longer be reduced to an adult’s admonition to a child (an infant). Likewise, giving up his ambiguous relationship with Senjougahara would necessarily be difficult, even ruinous. Kaiki the realist can surely foresee his miserable exit. Senjougahara’s denial of “affection” is, in my view, among the details most likely to be fictional. Only once Senjougahara has severed their connection can his death, or departure, be lonely and cold rather than warmed by a final trace of tenderness. That is the salvation the story grants Deishuu Kaiki.
004 · Deishuu Kaiki
Yotsugi pronounces judgment on Kaiki from the beginning: he will fail when he feels most certain of success, and he will fail when he believes his lie is certain to reach some form of “truth.” Here is his mistake. If “a fake is more real than the genuine,” then the “genuine” should not exist within the Real made up of fakes. Once Kaiki’s lie reaches “truth,” the lie itself collapses.
I called Deishuu Kaiki a realist above. He long ago tore through reality’s false face and chose instead to walk upon “fiction” and “lies,” whether by making fraud his trade or by pursuing the immense confidence trick called “money.” Yet through his lies he really does glimpse the shape of the “genuine”: pure, real, unfading. The “genuine” in love lies in overlap and becoming one; the “genuine” in society lies in lowering the walls around the heart. Traces of a search for the genuine run unmistakably through everything Kaiki says and does. He has still not escaped the contradictory spiral of genuine ↔ fake. In passing judgment on him, we might say that he has encountered anxiety itself:
A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,
A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,
In word, or sigh, or tear—
The end of Koimonogatari also opens the final act in Monogatari’s tale of youth. Koyomi Araragi is finally forced to confront his own greatest contradiction: Ougi Oshino. As for Deishuu Kaiki, he lets go of the feelings that would have entangled him forever and attains his final release. We may as well believe that he “probably, indeed” died.
Editor’s note
Deishuu has found release; so he has probably, indeed, died.
More essays on the Monogatari series are reportedly on the way.
