Bakemonogatari 09

Summary:

Ascending the hilly path to a small derelict shrine, Koyomi and Suruga encounter a young girl descending in a hurry. The pair are on a mission from Meme. Their discussion turns towards preparations for Hitagi's birthday celebrations; Koyomi thinks the more the merrier while Suruga believes that Hitagi will want some two people world time with Koyomi. She has also learnt from Meme that her arm will return to normal when she turns 20. Arriving at their destination, Suruga feels faint and proposes a bento powerup. Koyomi places the paper charm on the main altar as instructed but they beat a hasty retreat after discovering cut up snake corpses. Koyomi finally realizes the young girl was Sengoku Nadeko, a former classmate of one of his younger sisters.

Koyomi calls Tsubasa to Neo-Books to help him pick out reference books to focus on his future; Hitagi has got a recommendation to the local university but he doesn't want to raise her expectations too much yet. As expected of our busty catgirl, she knows the name of the place - Southern White Snake Shrine. She tells off Koyomi for being friendly with Suruga (how the hell does she know they were arm-in-arm but not that Suruga is a lesbian!?) and shocks him with the revelation that she will be taking a few years off to see the world after high school. Their encounter ends when she gets another sudden headache and leaves (not for home) just as Nadeko enters.

Koyomi sees Nadeko's choice of reading material (snake curses) and links the dots. He asks for Suruga's help to approach her at the shrine since the latter is good at bypassing the formidable self-defence mechanisms of adolescent girls. But she recognizes him and even has a little flashback to even loli-er days as he stops her from carving up another snake. They head home whereupon Suruga and Koyomi's quarrel about his choice of fetish porn (which Suruga claims to be able to reenact easily and casually) gets Nadeko to open up quite literally (with that immortal reaction) - she has snake scales creeping around her body and begs Koyomi-oniichan to save her.

Thoughts:

Ah, it's good to be back on board the Bakemonogatari train now that the blogging backlog of the less demanding series has been cleared first. I'm a little disappointed that there were no spoken lines from Hitagi but loved how, through Suruga, her presence continued to loom over Koyomi. Speaking of Suruga, I'm feelin' in the love too; strongly suspect that her arc will remain my favourite and not just because of the yuri.

There's a strong sense of foreboding to this arc; right at the beginning, Koyomi's voice over is already commenting retrospectively, implying that things will not end well, that things could have ended up better if he had realized who Nadeko was from the get go but, to rub salt into the wound, his regrets would mean nothing to Nadeko or the oddity. The sense of unease was further compounded by how Suruga and Tsubasa both felt unwell, with the former reacting badly to the site and the latter to the girl/curse. Even more so, when reflecting on this series after rewatching the Hitagi crab arc in all its full glory on Stripey's manly 42 inches, is that the girls get in trouble, not as victims of the oddities in question but often (even if in denial) as accomplices and collaborators.

I share the reluctance to see harm come to bishoujos, to see them being treated badly onscreen but I also believe that turning one's eyes away, to bail out when the going gets tough, to cherry pick just what we want to see/hear, to disregard her agency and the bitter harvest of the whirlwind she sowed is knightly only so far as the fleeting, fickle love of Der Rosenkavalier. Instead what this hollowed out romanticist believes in is facing full-on, as a whole, whatever ugliness might come and to take in all that she might be, come sorrow, pain and despair. It ain't gonna be pretty but my homage is to finish what was started, to hear her story in its entirety, helpless as I am to help, to its bitter end. But being, more or less, permanently single, what do I know about love even of the 2D kind?

Related posts:

1. Bakemonogatari 10
2. Bakemonogatari 11
3. Bakemonogatari 07