Following up on the high note of family ties on which the previous installment concluded, but preceding it chronologically, we find Araragi and his little sister Tsukihi, the heroine of the last volume, in full sibling rivalry mode as they bicker about love. The conversation that cannot end unfolds in its unabashed original glory herein. Like KIZUMONOGATARI, which delved into our narrator’s disastrous spring break, Cat Tale (Black) is a prequel about another catastrophe, mentioned often yet never recounted even in a foregoing chapter dedicated to Miss H.: namely, the model student’s rampage over Golden Week, a string of holidays starting at the end of April. Closing out what has come to be known as the “First Season” of the series, this episode of ’GATARI, as rich as ever in silly banter and poignant profundities, richer than usual in snide meta comments about the anime, will make you laugh and cry, or just put a grownup smile on your face, maybe, but is guaranteed to stay with you forever.

Launching into new territory that the author hadn’t mapped out when he embarked on the series, NEKOMONOGATARI (White) tells the tale of heroine Tsubasa Hanekawa from her own perspective, in her own voice—if that can hold true for a damaged soul who, depending on who you’re asking, suffers from a split personality or a supernatural aberration. The bone-chilling brokenness of her household, where father and mother and daughter keep three separate sets of cookware in the same kitchen and only ever prepare their own meals, and the profound darkness nurtured in the genius schoolgirl’s heart, come to life, if that is the word, through her self-vivisection. As for our customary unreliable narrator, Araragi, we seem to learn revealing tidbits about him now that we have an outside view of him at last, while his lady friends Senjogahara, Hachikuji, et al, freed from his predilection for proudly inane banter, show subtly new faces to us via their female interlocutor. Welcome to the Second Season.

The improbable imprisonment that transformed "I" into a novelist continues into a third, fourth and fifth day. "U" obsesses over formalities, as "I" quietly coaxes her into taking care of herself. As this bizarre farce of a kidnapping stretches towards the inevitable breaking point, "I" starts to discover the truth about "U", a truth he should never have learned…

Our sorry hero, his reformed girlfriend, and the amnesiac class president have all graduated from their high school out in the boondocks, and self-described Sapphist and ex-basketball ace Kanbaru, retired by reason of an “injury,” is starting her senior year and the narrator of this volume—her voice far more introspectivethan the smutty jock’s we thought we knew. Bereft of the company of her beloved mentors, the only other person around her with any working knowledge of aberrations the junior Ogi Oshino, apparently a relative of the Hawaiian-shirted folklorist, she feels a bit alone and blue, and sick with dread that the devil residing in her left arm courtesy of the Monkey’s Paw might act up again while she sleeps. Investigating a rumor that she fears might lead back to her, the former star ends up peering into an abyss of negativity called Roka—a “wax flower” to take the characters’ meaning. Trapped in a pit the like of which could only be escaped by the one girl who was able to pull off slam-dunks in her basketball nationals, can the penitent Kanbaru, however, still be aggressive?

How far does one go to help a lost child? In the case of returning narrator Araragi, the answer is too far, across the veil of time. Dutifully (if unknowingly) following up on Hachikuji’s cheeky foreshadowing, he concerns himself with his young lady friend and her fate in this installment of the cult-hit series, heroically unable, once again, to find his own way home. Thus the tale is also, or more so, about the journey itself, the dark honeymoon of a trip he takes into the past with the dweller in his shadow, Shinobu. Even among a cast that routinely disrespects chronology with their meta-commentary, she takes the cake, or the donut, by rewinding the clock for a perverse road movie, one that by and large goes nowhere, spatially. It’s Kabuki not as in the theater, but with the character for “tilt”—as in a slanted attitude toward the world, the posture of a bohemian. Or, perhaps, of a legendary vampire who once sought death, and of a high school senior who once tuned out life doing their dandy best to attend to an embarrassing wealth of aberrations in a provincial town.

Just when we thought the darkness menacing the town had been identified, named, and tamed, clear and unclear mysteries of seasons past looming or surfacing, then resolving, not without tears, not without bittersweetness, of course, but satisfyingly, in a tripartite finale, all loose ends tied up into, or at least with, a bow…
The End Tale continues—if only for one last time, in a bonus stage for the ages, as our softie of a protagonist who wished for all parties involved, including himself, maturely enough, to end up happy, sees his reflected image freeze in a mirror and regretfully, regrettably, reaches for it to find himself through the looking glass.
In an alternate reality where bits of the world have been flipped around, the hero comes face to face with the hidden side(s) of familiar faces, along with author NISIOISIN, whose bravura attempt to reimagine character possibilities concludes, with signature flair, the MONOGATARI series proper—thank you for reading.

During his third year in high school, Koyomi Araragi is introduced to a transfer student named Ougi Oshino Ougi tells Koyomi that there is something odd about Naoestu High School… a secret room on thats not on the map. What will Koyomi and Ougi find in this hidden room?