【001 Introduction】
Lacan teaches us that truth can only be half-said. We might understand this as follows: on the one hand, the truth we speak is always distorted; on the other, “truth” often also exists outside discourse. In the context of this essay, “truth” also exists within lies.
This essay is about Deishu Kaiki’s story. Personally, I find him one of the most intriguing characters in all of Monogatari. These pale words are all I have to convey the Kaiki I see—ultimately, as with Koimonogatari, you needn’t believe this essay either.
【002 Nadeko Sengoku】
Back to the story itself. Koimonogatari must first resolve its central conflict: Nadeko Sengoku, a girl in love, running amok. So no one but Deishu Kaiki can subdue Nadeko’s aberration, because only Kaiki is a con man. Meme Oshino is not, and neither is Koyomi Araragi.
We may be inclined to think that Kaiki takes Koyomi Araragi’s role in Koimonogatari, but his position differs fundamentally from Koyomi’s. Araragi tends to open himself unconditionally to others, accepting even Nadeko. Faced with her destructiveness, this is fatal: Koyomi is the object of Nadeko’s hatred, and she wants to “kill herself” by killing him. Her hatred of Koyomi is not hatred of another, but hatred of herself.
Ultimately, Nadeko’s “love” is nothing but a deception: what I love is not “you,” but certain qualities you have; what I love is not a subject, but a position; I don’t love you, but you satisfy my desire. I love only myself, and this love is not directed at any particular person. Nadeko, born for romance alone, will let herself be filled with nothing but lies. Only lies can reach her true core—and this is Kaiki’s job: to tear open Nadeko’s A.T. Field through the kindness of a complete stranger.
Nadeko’s reason for existing is Koyomi Araragi, and Koyomi Araragi alone. What Kaiki does is make her face her utterly empty heart, then point out, as Touko Aozaki does: “Precisely because the heart is empty like a hollow shrine, it can hold more.”1
But how does Kaiki tell Koyomi Araragi this story?2
“—What did you say?”
“Said what needed saying, that’s all.”
As I answered, I crouched beside Sengoku, making a show of ignoring Araragi. The job was almost finished. I didn’t want this kid getting in the way.
“Just said what needed saying. Romance isn’t everything, there are plenty of other things to enjoy, keep looking ahead, everyone’s had an awkward youth they can’t bear to look back on, just hang in there and you’ll be fine… You know, the same old lessons adults give kids.”
So if you’re asking what I did—
I did nothing more than these utterly ordinary little things.
According to Deishu Kaiki, he merely gave Nadeko a lecture (as a friendly adult). The implication is that Kaiki is telling us he is only a pawn, with no agency of his own. Here, of course, we should bring out Kaiki’s own warning: there is fiction in what he says. We have very good reason to think he is evading something. Of course it was Kaiki who saved Nadeko, leading her toward another form of self-destruction3 and thus ensuring that the story could continue—but what is Deishu Kaiki evading?
【003 Hitagi Senjougahara】
Kaiki warns readers from the outset that the story of Koimonogatari contains fiction. Yet readers seem to relish this point almost exclusively when discussing his death. After all, there is virtually only one way the story of subduing Nadeko could have gone; at most, Kaiki’s inventions lie in its details.
But it is precisely these details that are most fatal. Koimonogatari is a story Kaiki narrates. The true part of his account—that he subdued Nadeko—is an empty statement of what everyone already knows. Only the fictional part—the why and the how, in those passages where the absolutely impartial Koyomi Araragi / Yotsugi Ononoki are absent—gives us the key to understanding Deishu Kaiki. His deception once again becomes his means of escape. To return to the question in the previous section: what is Deishu Kaiki evading? My answer is this: Deishu Kaiki is evading his own position. He has desires and feelings; he is a participant in Koimonogatari, a driving force, and precisely not an impartial onlooker (the image he hopes to project through his account).
As an aside, the Monogatari series is actually much like a process of psychoanalysis, and any attempt to use psychoanalysis to evade one’s responsibility as a subject is necessarily vulgar. Clearly, Kaiki does not realize this—or, if he does, he is powerless to do anything about it—because he brings Hitagi 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，
(My mind is full of memories,)
その背中に あの瞬間 つぶやいた，
(That lonely figure, seen from behind,)
聴こえないふりをした 恋文，
(Love, indistinct as words murmured in a dream,)
すれ違い 振り向くこともなく，
(Let us simply pass each other by,)
選んだ物語の続きは，
(The story I chose.)
今日という，
(From now on,)
あなたじゃない
(A future without you.)4
In the absence of the impartial Koyomi Araragi, we have reason to believe any character in Kaiki’s story—but not Hitagi Senjougahara as Kaiki describes her. He has invested too much feeling in Senjougahara. In fact, she may be one of the few people who understand what Kaiki really thinks behind his deceptions, and who genuinely care about him. At the same time, Deishu Kaiki’s guilt toward Hitagi Senjougahara is plain for all to see (although Kaiki himself strenuously denies it, there is an ironic honesty to him on questions like these).
It is hard not to see the shadow of “Sengoku → Araragi ↔ Senjougahara” in the triangle “Kaiki → Senjougahara ↔ Araragi.” Thus Nadeko Sengoku’s exit must be followed immediately by Deishu Kaiki’s—maintaining a precarious stability is difficult in itself. Here we have another reason why only Kaiki can resolve Nadeko’s problem: if every aberration can ultimately be resolved only by the person concerned, then Kaiki and Nadeko achieve a strange unity here, too.
This, then, explains Kaiki’s evasion. His conversation with Nadeko really was a deception: isn’t Kaiki’s own heart a hollow shrine? Finding an anchor for that hollow shrine beyond kindness and feeling is difficult (think of the “hollow shrine” Touko speaks of, Shiki Ryougi). Kaiki himself cannot guarantee that his method is workable, so the account of it as an adult’s lecture to a child (an infant) does not hold up either. Similarly, giving up his romantically ambiguous relationship with Senjougahara is bound to be difficult, even devastating. Kaiki the realist must be able to foresee his own wretched exit. Senjougahara’s denial of “love” is precisely one of the episodes I consider closest to fiction: only if Senjougahara severs her ties with him can his death (or his exit) be lonely and cold, rather than tinged with even a trace of warmth. This is the redemption of Deishu Kaiki in the story.
【004 Deishu Kaiki】
Ononoki pronounces Kaiki’s failure from the outset: when Kaiki feels most certain, he is bound to fail; when he believes his lies are certain to reach some kind of “truth,” he is bound to fail. For he has made a mistake here: “the fake is more genuine than the genuine article,” so the “genuine article” should not exist in a reality constituted by “fakes.” When Kaiki’s lies reach “truth,” the lies themselves no longer hold.
Earlier I declared Deishu Kaiki a realist. He tore apart reality’s hypocritical facade long ago, and so would rather tread on “fiction” and “lies”—whether by making a career as a con man or by pursuing “money,” that vast fraud. Yet through his lies, he really has seen what the “real thing” looks like: pure, genuine, never fading. What is “genuine” in love is overlapping and becoming one; what is “genuine” in society is bringing down the walls around the heart. Ultimately, there really are traces of a search for the “real thing” in Kaiki’s words and actions. Kaiki has still not escaped the spiral of contradiction between “genuine ↔ fake.” In a verdict on Kaiki, 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—5
The end of Koimonogatari also announces the opening of the final act of Monogatari’s story of youth. Koyomi Araragi is at last forced to confront his own greatest contradiction: Ougi Oshino. As for Deishu Kaiki, in the story he lets go of the feelings that will haunt him forever and finds his final release. We might as well believe that he is “probably really” dead.6
Editor’s Note
Deishu has found release. Then he is probably really dead.
Apparently, there are more articles on the Monogatari series to come.
