Wouldn’t it be nice if people could just do whatever they wanted?
First, I have to admit that this is my first time writing a column like this. I don’t know the techniques, and my prose is nothing special. There are bound to be oversights, so please do point them out.
People generally have different interpretations of a story, or of a light novel. Light novels are so strongly driven by plot and storytelling that, compared with an argumentative essay or a fable, it is harder to judge what ideas or views they contain. Besides, according to Roland Barthes’s notion of “the death of the author,” many works are simply products of the use of an existing linguistic system, not—or not merely—expressions of their creators’ inner thoughts. From another perspective, good literature, especially fiction, should resemble musical polyphony: several voices and melodies developing simultaneously, perfectly interwoven yet relatively independent. Precisely because readers participate in the making of literature, there is no real “truth” or “center.”
Likewise, my analysis of the Monogatari series starts from just one point of entry, offering only one reasonable explanation of its characters and events. This is not a compromise, nor is it because the series itself is obscure or difficult to understand. It is because, as a narrative work, the Monogatari series is worth studying in depth.
【001】
Let’s begin with a line from Deishu Kaiki that lies at the heart of Nisemonogatari (Fake Tale):
Precisely because it is a fake, it is closer to the real thing than anything else.
Put simply, admitting that you are a fake actually means accepting the doctrine that human nature is evil. Only by abandoning the view that the human heart is the source of goodness can the Fire Sisters learn, through understanding, how to practice justice and how to deal with hypocrisy.
With Koyomi Araragi as its protagonist, Nisemonogatari tells the stories of his younger sisters, Karen and Tsukihi. But the work gives shape not only to fictional characters, but also to a profound question structured around a binary opposition. (Put another way, if Nisemonogatari were merely a supplement to Bakemonogatari, written to portray the two sisters, why not call it Sister Tale?) In fact, the reason Nisemonogatari is called Nisemonogatari is that its theme is the “fake”: it is a discussion of the “fake.” Of course, this is not unique to Nisemonogatari. Many works in the Monogatari series share this feature. They link up with the overall Monogatari storyline, yet each has its own story to tell.
Nisemonogatari is divided into two parts, with two incidents. In the first, Karen, Koyomi Araragi, and Senjougahara approach Kaiki, each with their own reasons for negotiating with him. In the second, Yozuru Kagenui intends to eliminate Tsukihi, and Koyomi Araragi protects her. Rather than the object of discussion, the “fake” seems more like a thread running through the story. The first part seems intended to revisit the characters as a continuation of Bakemonogatari, though some discussion of the “fake” also seems to be buried there. In the final episode, Kagenui’s words sound more like a summation of the questions Nisemonogatari has been discussing:
“Because they’re family, I’ll lie to them. I’ll deceive them. I’ll cause them trouble and make things difficult for them. I’ll owe them favors, and even when they’ve done something for me, I won’t necessarily repay them. But there’s nothing wrong with that.”
“Miss Kagenui—you’re an ally of justice.”
“If being a fake is evil, then I’ll bear that evil. If what is false is evil, then I am evil.”
“Affection points don’t matter at all. I’m the worst human being there is.”
…
“…The doctrine that human nature is evil, then.”
“Hm? You don’t know it? It’s something both Oshino and Kaiki talk about all the time.”
The doctrine that human nature is evil appears here as Yozuru Kagenui’s summation of Koyomi Araragi’s position. This brings Kaiki’s “theory of fakes” to her mind: on a certain level, the two share the same structure. The genuine and the fake correspond to a considerable extent with concepts in the doctrine that human nature is evil. This essay therefore aims to find those correspondences and offer a reasonable explanation of the relationship between the characters’ actions and their worldviews.
When the genuine and the fake are discussed, they are compared to “man-made diamonds” and “natural diamonds.” Of course, the binary opposition between the genuine and the fake is everywhere in Nisemonogatari, and even throughout the Monogatari series. It encompasses not only objective genuineness and falseness—as in Tsukihi’s being an immortal aberration—but subjective genuineness and falseness, such as hypocrisy. Here are a few examples:
What was on that bookshelf was certainly distinctive. There wasn’t a single manga in sight: it was all classic literature from the Iwanami Bunko imprint. An unusual bookshelf for a middle-schooler. It practically announced that she read books like these all the time, showing off how mature she was. Or perhaps they were actually books from her father’s study, which Sengoku had put there to impress me, her guest. Maybe she was the sort of person who would make a misguided attempt like that without thinking it through.
—The description of Nadeko’s bookshelf. (Meanwhile, her closet is full of evidence that she’s a seriously skilled artist.)
“Nothing. I just thought, so you like handsome guys too, Kanbaru. Turns out you’re not that much of a pervert after all?”
“Wha…?!”
Kanbaru seemed genuinely shaken.
“And thinking back over today, your love of nudity doesn’t extend to letting your family see you naked. That’s about the extent of it, right? Listening to you talk, I really got the impression that you were naked all the time at home. Turns out you only act tough in the tiny little world of your own room. You could’ve said that in the first place.”
Kanbaru’s eyes had lost focus.
She was completely confused.
Genuine mental confusion.
—Kanbaru, after being exposed as not nearly as much of a pervert as she makes out. (Though that’s hardly something to be miserable about!)
I can’t judge whether the author intended this or whether I’m simply reading too much into it. Still, as parts of Nisemonogatari’s story, these examples have something to do with the “fake.” The connection seems more obvious in several of its central characters:
“Unless you’re prepared to settle for self-satisfaction rather than self-sacrifice—don’t go presuming to talk about justice. It just gets on people’s nerves.”
—Koyomi Araragi gets to the heart of it in a single sentence: Karen’s justice contains no self-sacrifice, only self-satisfaction.
“My heart isn’t racing, and I don’t feel happy.”
That was all I needed to know.
“You really are my little sister.”
“…Huh?”
Tsukihi looked bewildered.
—Tsukihi is an immortal aberration, but her bonds with her family are the real thing. (Coach, me too…)1
“Power alone means nothing. What the real thing needs—is strength of will.”
Take Hanekawa, for instance.
Her greatest strength
was her strength of will.
—Tsubasa Hanekawa owes her being the real thing to her strength of will, sometimes even forgetting to think of herself.
It would hardly be an exaggeration to call the characters above the main characters of the story. Yozuru Kagenui, Deishu Kaiki, and the absent Meme Oshino are more like observers of its events (Kaiki’s actions in Nisemonogatari amount, at most, to a poke in the forehead). Together, they embody three opposing positions. Their question is: “Which is more valuable—the real thing, or a fake exactly like it?”
- Yozuru Kagenui chooses the real thing, becoming an onmyōji diviner and traveling from place to place eliminating immortal aberrations.
- Meme Oshino chooses neutrality, becoming someone who maintains the balance between aberrations and humans.
- Deishu Kaiki chooses the fake, becoming a con man.
【002】
In fact, explaining so much human behavior through the genuine and the fake is itself somewhat hard to understand. Our definitions of the two are so broad that we sometimes confuse genuineness and falseness on different levels. Tsukihi, for example, is an immortal-bird aberration passing as human without knowing it herself. She is a fake in terms of what she appears to be, rather than something “insincere”:
Natural diamonds and man-made diamonds.
Even if their atomic structures are exactly the same—you can still distinguish them.
Even if you don’t distinguish them, a distinction still exists.
In this analogy, the natural diamond seems to represent the real thing itself, while the man-made diamond represents something that was not originally a diamond but was eventually made into one through imitation. Although their atomic structures are identical, a natural diamond is diamond to begin with, whereas a man-made diamond may originally have been something like graphite, subsequently altered and processed.
Between the natural diamond and the man-made diamond, Yozuru Kagenui chooses the natural diamond—the real thing. She thus affirms the uniqueness of what is objectively genuine. On this level, when we ask, “Which is more valuable—the genuine article, or a counterfeit exactly like it and indistinguishable from it?”, “exactly like it and indistinguishable” means indistinguishable to subjective awareness: neither Tsukihi nor the people around her know that she is an immortal-bird aberration. The emphasis falls on the objective difference between the fake—the immortal bird can live forever—and the genuine—human lifespans are finite. Faced with the choice between objective genuineness and falseness, Kagenui chooses to pursue what is objectively genuine. This makes putting her position into practice fairly easy: all she has to do is eliminate the objective impostors. This also seems closely connected to her preference for solving problems through violence.
Kagenui’s position is not actually hard to accept in real life. It is precisely because objective genuineness and falseness are easy to distinguish, and because that distinction matters more, that we have what we call a “truth-seeking spirit,” that we seek truth in scholarship and genuine goods in a commodity economy. In a materialist world, this position is fully accepted and affirmed, since we agree that the real thing must exist and that it can be obtained.
Yet in Nisemonogatari, it seems to be Kaiki’s position that makes sense. Kaiki believes that objective falseness does not really matter. Here, at last, I have the opportunity to explain the connection between his position and the early Confucian philosopher Xunzi’s doctrine that human nature is evil:
“If the doctrine that human nature is good is an idealistic view, then the doctrine that human nature is evil is a realistic one. Desire is the essence of human beings, and it rules them. Xunzi’s thought is blunt and undisguised—at birth, human nature is evil. That’s his view.”2
“So even when people do good, it doesn’t come from their nature. It’s hypocrisy—that’s the truth he exposed. Falseness, fakes—hypocrisy. Nothing more.”
“Wei—that is, human activity.”3
What people do. What people bring about.
That is why ritual appeared—as a set of norms.
Only correction through human activity can guide people toward goodness and society in the right direction.
“In contrast to the earlier politics of the kingly way, this is called rule by ritual. Goodness is purely hypocrisy from the outset, and precisely because of that—there is an intention to do good within it.”
Most of Yozuru Kagenui’s account of the doctrine that human nature is evil is accurate. It raises several important points:
- Desire is the essence of human beings.
- When people do good, it is a kind of fakery—human activity.
- Correction through human activity guides social order.
NISIOISIN’s understanding of the doctrine that human nature is evil has, in fact, had a considerable influence on the creation of the Monogatari series. As early as Kizumonogatari, there is a passage in which Kiss-shot regards Koyomi Araragi’s goodness as hypocrisy; Koimonogatari and Otorimonogatari also return to the “fake” again and again. But defining the “fake” and understanding the doctrine that human nature is evil both require further investigation. I’m not deeply learned, and I have no relevant academic experience. I will therefore only attempt to summarize scholarly interpretations of the doctrine:
【003】
I. “Human Nature Is Evil”: “Human nature is evil; goodness comes from conscious activity.”
Xunzi makes two claims about human nature here: first, that nature is evil; second, that goodness is artifice—or “hypocrisy.” The former explains the evil of human nature; the latter explains how human beings can be good.
The claim that “human nature is evil” means that people’s bodily desires often exceed the bounds of ritual and law, thus becoming evil. As for wei in “goodness comes from wei,” Yang Liang’s commentary reads: “It means acting, correcting—correcting one’s original nature. Anything that is not innate but is brought about by human activity is called wei.” From this perspective, the character 为, “to act,” might be more appropriate here. But this raises another question: why should human activity lead to, or produce, goodness? What sort of activity should wei be? Some scholars argue that we must understand wei in relation to the heart-mind: it should mean the heart-mind’s deliberations and the actions they generate, with definite values and aims.4 Everyone possesses a “heart-mind”; everyone is alike in that “the heart-mind has the capacity to know from birth” (“Undoing Fixation”). Thus, “Human nature is evil; goodness comes from conscious activity” can be understood as follows: human nature is evil, while goodness comes from the heart-mind’s deliberations and actions.
II. How Does the “Heart-Mind” Act?
If this is “the activity of the heart-mind,” how should it act? Where Mencius’s doctrine that human nature is good identifies the heart-mind with the morality that arises spontaneously within human beings, as the source of goodness, Xunzi’s “activity of the heart-mind” is closer to the activity of a cognitive mind. Xunzi holds that although the heart-mind can initiate moral practice, it must first recognize and accept ritual and rightness, then use them to regulate nature—to correct, refine, and improve it. On this understanding, Xunzi’s heart-mind can recognize but cannot create. It can recognize and understand ritual only once ritual already exists; it cannot create ritual and rightness or become the source of goodness.
If the human heart-mind is not the source of goodness, where does goodness come from? For Xunzi, the heart-mind prefers order to chaos and goodness to evil: it possesses moral judgment. This is an important characteristic of the heart-mind and an important part of how Xunzi defines it. It is precisely through this heart-mind that humanity leaves behind the “deviation, danger, rebellion, and disorder” resulting from “following human nature and indulging human feelings,” and moves toward the “proper order and peaceful government” of ritual, rightness, laws, and standards.
“Against Physiognomy” says:
What makes human beings human? The answer is their capacity to make distinctions. … Birds and beasts have fathers and sons, but not the affection between father and son; they have males and females, but not the distinctions between men and women. Thus, the human way always involves distinctions.
“Making distinctions” means distinguishing right from wrong and good from evil: recognizing “ritual and rightness, deference, loyalty, and trustworthiness” as right, and “corruption, contention, and greed for profit” as wrong. This is clearly a function and capacity of the heart-mind—its capacity for discernment.
But being born with discernment does not mean being born able to distinguish right from wrong and good from evil in particular cases. It means possessing the capacity or possibility of doing so. At first, this capacity is only latent, much like human language. We are not born able to speak, but over the course of our development we created language and passed it down. Ultimately, however, language arose because humans have the capacity to use it; that capacity simply has to be realized through practice after birth. Xunzi’s discernment can be understood in the same way: although the heart-mind is born with discernment, it still has to realize that discernment through practice.
IV. Evil Nature and a Good Heart-Mind
Ultimately, “Human Nature Is Evil” reveals and explains two forces in human life: a force drawing us downward into decline, represented by “nature,” and a force lifting us upward, represented by the “heart-mind.” By examining human nature through the opposition between good and evil, it actually proposes a doctrine of evil nature and a good heart-mind. This is the thought repeatedly expressed in the chapter’s statement, “Human nature is evil; goodness comes from conscious activity.” Among pre-Qin Confucian accounts of human nature, this is undoubtedly a distinctive and relatively complete account, deserving full attention. But because every chapter of the Xunzi has a two-character title, this chapter could take only the two characters “nature” and “evil” from its opening.5 This has led people, consciously or otherwise, to remember only “human nature is evil” while overlooking “goodness comes from conscious activity,” or failing to understand what the latter actually means. It is deeply regrettable that Xunzi’s account of human nature has been understood so one-sidedly as merely the doctrine that human nature is evil.
(In the literature cited here, the scholar argues that the character wei in “goodness comes from wei” was altered during copying. A character composed of 为, “acting,” above 心, “heart-mind,” would convey the meaning more vividly. But because that character no longer existed, it was replaced with 伪, which was ultimately misunderstood as simply meaning “falseness.”)
After all this discussion of Xunzi’s thought on evil human nature, let’s return to Nisemonogatari. Within the doctrine that human nature is good, “hypocrisy” is false goodness: goodness should come from within and be innate, so goodness acquired through learning is false. In the doctrine that human nature is evil, by contrast, wei means the activity of the heart-mind. Wei is a necessary path to attaining goodness. Thus, according to the doctrine that human nature is evil, all “goodness” is actually what the doctrine that human nature is good would call “false goodness.” We can say that Nisemonogatari uses the linguistic sign system of the doctrine that human nature is good to explain the doctrine that human nature is evil. This rests on the fact that our world prizes what is positive and uplifting. Since the doctrine that human nature is evil is, on a certain level, somewhat pessimistic and negative, we generally prefer to believe that human nature is good. But the doctrine that human nature is good has its limitations. If we use it to explain everything, it often becomes difficult to find ourselves; the self’s very existence seems to be a mistake. Nisemonogatari is discussing precisely this doctrine, trying to find a path to self-redemption for everyone.
We might now return to Kaiki’s position: he believes that objective falseness does not really matter. Kaiki likes money—and that is no lie—because he believes it can replace many things. Seen from another angle, he is emphasizing that what is genuine can be replaced, and even that genuineness is not unique.
【004】
These three positions express three different worldviews. Kaiki’s worldview accepts the doctrine that human nature is evil. The familiar doctrine that human nature is good holds that the “heart-mind” is the source of goodness, whereas Kaiki believes that goodness cannot be present in the heart to begin with. Only through “the activity of the heart-mind” do people come to recognize goodness. This is what makes everything the world sees as “false goodness” meaningful in Kaiki’s eyes. In other words, the doctrine that human nature is evil emphasizes that “goodness” comes from the activity of the heart-mind, from an acquired cognitive mind. For Kaiki, then, the goodness posited by the doctrine that human nature is good has no referent; all goodness is “false goodness” in that doctrine’s terms. “Goodness” does not merely mean good deeds in the narrow sense: it represents many products of “the activity of the heart-mind.” Thus, what the doctrine that human nature is good regards as subjectively genuine cannot, in Kaiki’s eyes, exist.
If the real thing is nowhere to be found, if it seems not to exist, then better to abandon the search for what is genuine, wrap the heart in lies, and take concrete action against an idealistic world to keep it from interfering. This is what Kaiki has always done. Any fake has meaning in his eyes. Yet when he encounters Senjougahara, he realizes that she seems to be one of a kind, and the love in his heart seems to be something real. But he still cannot escape the layers of lies he has built around himself, and so cannot free himself to pursue that reality. This is the story of Koimonogatari. The con man’s struggle and return seem, in turn, to remind us that the meaning of human existence still lies in seeking what is genuine: what is genuine gives human existence meaning.
Answering the question of what constitutes a fake in the subjective sense solely through the doctrine that human nature is evil seems somewhat narrow. It is precisely this narrowness that makes Kaiki forget what sort of thing love is, and love shakes his worldview. Likewise, in Nisemonogatari, Part 2, what is genuine about Tsukihi is her bond with Koyomi Araragi, her bond with Karen, her bonds with her family. Bonds and love are genuine because they arise from one’s own heart, rather than being bestowed from outside. In Koimonogatari, Kaiki conceals his need for love as he always does, only to be brought down by his own self-deceptive lies.
We are always trying to explain the world perfectly through a single theory. Kaiki, for instance, believes that nothing genuine exists in this world. Yet his theory of fakes is a genuinely held conviction. For him, then, it is his own “real thing.”
The failure of Kaiki’s theory of fakes, and the error in Yozuru Kagenui’s attachment to what is objectively genuine, throw Meme Oshino’s understanding of the genuine into sharper relief. The Monogatari series rarely describes Oshino’s worldview directly. Yet his answer to Kaiki’s question, together with his role as a “balancer,” makes it clear that his thinking lies between Kagenui’s and Kaiki’s. From his perspective, maintaining the balance between aberrations and humans also means maintaining the balance between the genuine and the fake. The fake refutes its own existence, while judging by the genuine tells us only whether things are objectively genuine or fake. It is precisely this that makes their coexistence necessary. The genuine should not pursue a narrow conception of genuineness, nor the fake a narrow conception of falseness. Truth often lies not at the two extremes of the genuine and the fake, but between them. This seems to be the ultimate answer to the question of the genuine and the fake.
References
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Nozomu Katakura [Japan], translated into Chinese by Zhang Yingzi. “The Distinction Between Nature and Artifice and the Doctrine That Human Nature Is Evil: Division and Unity in Xunzi’s Thought” (性伪之分与性恶论——荀子思想的分裂与统一). [Journal article.] Guoxue Xuekan (国学学刊), 2018, no. 1, pp. 17–26.
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Liang Tao. “Clarifying Xunzi’s Account of Human Nature: On His Doctrine of Evil Nature and a Good Heart-Mind” (荀子人性论辨正——论荀子的性恶、心善说). [Journal article.] Zhexue Yanjiu (哲学研究), 2015, no. 5, pp. 71–80.
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Lab on Roof. “Monogatari / Love / Deishu Kaiki: Speech / Fracture / Self-Deception.” [Online article.]
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DERTF. “A Guide to All the Characters in the Monogatari Series.” [Online article.] Read on Bilibili.
Editor’s Note
There are still points in this essay open to dispute. But we would never say that publication must wait until everyone agrees there is “nothing wrong” with it.