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Yotsugi Doll - An Analysis

We begin our march into the Final Season with an arc that feels both inscrutable and incredibly straightforward at the same time. Take the name, for example - typically the titular oddity is the one affecting our arc character, but in this case Yotsugi herself is the doll.

In terms of comparable naming conventions, I would bring up Tsukihi Phoenix and Mayoi Snail - both characters implicated in this arc, one by her presence and the other by her very notable lack thereof.

Hachikuji Mayoi is not the one afflicted by an oddity, I wrote back near the start of this project, but I think recently it’s become evident that this isn’t quite true. She was afflicted by the Snail - the role of the Snail that she was forced to play.

Looking at it that way there’s a question of how voluntary Yotsugi’s dollness, her emotionlessness, her lack of personality and ease of influence by others is meant to be. We know that she doesn’t actually lack emotions, she’s just incapable of expressing them, which is an important distinction. At the same time, she’s empty enough to fill and be filled by the roles of others, as a specialist’s shikigami & supernatural proxy.

Tsukihi is a character in a similar boat, so far as the core of her nature lacks stability and seeks it out from others. Is she, too, afflicted by the phoenix? She certainly doesn’t embrace the role of an oddity, unless we’re to say that her role is acting exactly like a human. Instead, she takes up the role of an Araragi, a Fire Sister, and in her deliberate attempt to become one etc etc we all know the quote.

That being said, there’s a question of how her life is impacted by the phoenix. Koyomi is certainly worried, in this book. In the scene where they get in the bath together her extremely short-term thinking is demonstrated in numerous ways as she fails to conserve conditioner, easily forgets what she was talking about upon being splashed with water, and of course proceeds with the whole plan heedless of the consequences of Karen’s inevitable return.

Tsukihi is stuck in the present, neither looking back to the past or looking forward to the future, and there’s no better representation of such than her frequent hairstyle changes. It’s the regenerative power of the phoenix that lets it grow so easily, allowing her to ignore consequences and return to the same, default state.

Koyomi is the opposite, his hair growth also evidence of his vampiric abilities, but in the sense that he keeps it long to hide the marks on his neck. He puts off cutting it over and over again, saying he’ll do it ‘after exams’. We might say that in opposition to Tsukihi his hair is evidence of him being stuck in the past, unwilling or unable to move on from the effects of his vampirism.

Both of them, though, need to move into the future, Koyomi thinks. But by the end of the bath scene, we’re getting the sense that Tsukihi already is. She hasn’t cut her hair in a while, she says, because she has a ‘wish’ she wants granted.

If Tsukihi is capable of developing as a person even despite the nature of the phoenix, then we might question whether Yotsugi is not also capable of change, becoming more human-like.

But is that true? Right at the beginning of the story, we’re treated to Shinobu and Koyomi discussing Yotsugi’s position. Shinobu says that while Yotsugi is an oddity, she’s an oddity whose role is imitating humans. Not to be or become one, Shinobu clarifies, but to be with them, to blend in alongside them. In that sense, she exists the way she does for the benefit of humans. She was created by them, serves as their shikigami, and acts similarly enough to them that you could almost believe she was one. She just isn’t quite there, her convenience located in the fact that you don’t actually have to treat her in the same way you’d treat a person, when it comes down to it.

This convenience, this privileging of the human perspective, is fundamental to oddities in general. They exist in the forms that they do because those forms are the most sensical to humans. The animals they draw their appearance from, the puns that make up their names, their sources in old myth - all are symbols that allow people to observe them, speak of them, and tell stories of them.

After all, in a sense they cannot exist without these stories. Koyomi, who has been telling them all this time, knows this better than anyone. The oddities are found in the gaps between reality and his narration. I don’t say that to suggest there’s some objective reality where they don’t exist, though. How could there be any objective version of the narrative when the whole series is fictional?

Regardless, in-universe there’s a shared common sense where oddities don’t exist and all the events of the story have a reasonable (or simply unknown) explanation. Koyomi and his friends have their narratives coloured by a different perspective, and the series takes care to not present this as them uncovering some kind of concealed truth, but merely stepping ‘backstage’ and looking at things in a different way.

A deeply human way, perhaps. The temptation to see animals, inanimate objects (and of course, especially, dolls) as possessing feelings or intentions is extremely common. An oddity, Shinobu says, is a ‘deep attachment’, a strong feeling, and I can’t help but think of Nadeko here, whose attachment to Kaiki’s charms was so deep that to her they became a snake constricting her entire body.

Her knee-jerk rejection of others’ affection, the shame of being perceived, the inability to speak up about her pain, these feelings coalesced into a form, a name, a word that made sense to her. She tells herself a story about snakes, so later, when she can no longer maintain a pretense of loving Koyomi, what form would her hatred towards both herself and the world take but a white snake hiding in her shoebox? She tells herself a story about snakes because it’s more convenient for her, makes things a little easier to bear if it’s not her fault.

Hitagi’s attachment is to her mother, and she conceptualises it as a weight around her neck, so of course when she casts it aside it suits her purposes to tell a story where it was taken away from her by someone else.

Mayoi’s attachment is to life itself, and as a young child from a broken home, of course she conceptualises it as something she’s only allowed to have if permitted by an authority figure, so she makes it a plausible excuse. She’s just going to her mother’s house. She’ll be back as soon as she’s done.

Suruga’s attached to her own attachments, things she could have been good at if she tried, things she could have had if she tried, people she could have saved if she just tried. She conceptualises them as still attached to her, a reminder that everything’s her fault, for wishing or not wishing or not wishing enough.

Tsubasa, despite everything, remained attached to herself, to her own identity and ability to lead a normal life. She conceptualises herself as a cat and as a tiger, and it’s only by telling their stories that she’s finally able to tell her own.

Koyomi was so thoroughly unattached to anything that he told the story of his own death. He no longer wanted to be a human, no longer felt like one, and he conceptualised that as a being with sharp fangs and a thirst for blood. Then he saw that being, really saw it for the first time, and in all his infinite selfishness decided he’d rather that she was human. He was attached to Shinobu, so he told a story where she was small and moe and a big fan of doughnuts. And she was attached to him, so she told a story where-

I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.

Ononoki Yotsugi was born without memories of her past life. Zero attachments. So people are free to attach whatever they want to her. She’s a bit like a lego piece. Hell, her limbs are even detachable. Rearrange them as you like. Turn her upside down and check what colour her panties are. She exists entirely for your convenience.

Yotsugi is a difficult character, for me, because I still don’t really know what she wants, how she feels, why she’s attached to the people she is. This arc doesn’t get into it much, either. Yotsugi’s dollness isn’t explored as a personal struggle. Rather, I think the question being asked is how different from her the other characters really are.

If Yotsugi is forced into the role of a doll then the whole cast of this tale is in a similar boat, ‘finagling [their] way through life’ as she puts it, trying to be ‘right and proper’ at their assigned role.

That being said, what it means for an oddity like Mayoi to be ‘right and proper’ (according to the darkness, according to Ougi) is made evident enough, but what exactly are the roles of the characters in this “Possession Tale”, and how do they differ from them in reality?

Tadatsuru is easily the most confusing here, a character we’re first introduced to here, who (we’re told) seems to materialise just as he’s needed by the plot. I, myself, don’t quite see the need for him, the thing that makes him a perfect opponent for Koyomi, apart from in the fairly shallow sense that his being a specialist confronts Koyomi with his newfound vampiric condition.

Ironically, despite appearing as an antagonist, Tadatsuru does actually provide some clarity on the situation in exactly the way you might expect from a specialist. Koyomi’s vampire problem is only the first layer of the mystery here. The second layer, and one that won’t be fully peeled off until much later, is the fact that these events were orchestrated in their entirety.

I suppose in that sense he also highlights how many of the people precious to Koyomi are oddities, or oddity-adjacent. Perhaps, building from Kagenui’s assault on Tsukihi in Nise, we’re supposed to consider whether Koyomi is really in the right for protecting these people. That’s kind of nonsensical though, we already know he’s right, and in any case Tadatsuru isn’t particularly invested in morality in the same way Koyomi is.

He has, we’re told, no ‘ideology’, but rather ‘enmity’ and an ‘aesthetic sense’, an appreciation for the beauty of undead abominations that leads to him working in a related trade, much like how an artist might work as a collector or curator. Who exactly he holds ‘enmity’ towards, then, is left rather vague, but to imagine it for a second, we might talk about someone like Koyomi, who’s at once both dead and alive. Who’s almost in the opposite trade to Tadatsuru, with how often we see him humanizing (‘twisting’, as Ougi puts it) immortal oddities.

His issue with Koyomi isn’t moralistic, but it could very well be aesthetic, a complaint about how he ruined a vampire by turning her into a little girl, ruined a ghost by making her stick around past her time, ruined a phoenix by letting her believe she was his sister, and maybe even ruined a doll by making her want to be an actual person instead of just a facsimile of one.

If this is his role, he doesn’t embrace it. He lets himself be killed, expressing regret for the changes that have already occurred in Yotsugi rather than trying to keep her the same.

He already lost the fight over her a while ago, it seems.

Kagenui Yozoru is almost as confusing, a character who finally starts to get fleshed out in this book only to invite further questions as to her history and the history of all the specialists. She’s Yotsugi’s sister seemingly by Yotsugi’s choice rather than hers, and it’s that choice which drove a wedge between her and Tadatsuru. We’re told that the difference between them is his focus on the immortal dead, (because he appreciates them aesthetically) while her focus is on the immortal living (because she wants to kill them).

It’s a little difficult to say which ones are which. Tsukihi, at least, is clearly in the alive category, and I’d argue Shinobu and Koyomi are too, but Yotsugi seems more on the side of the dead, which is presumably why Tadatsuru wanted her. On the other hand, if her human-like nature makes her a living oddity, then Kagenui’s conflicted feelings about it become more clear.

If she’s a living immortal, then, much like Tsukihi, it would become part of Kagenui’s justice to destroy her. This might be the ‘lesson ten years in the making’ that she learns in Nisemonogatari, when Koyomi argues to her that a sister who isn’t related to you by birth is still a perfectly valid sister.

We’ve seen a few takes on the role of a specialist now, and they all seem to come back to balancing the books in some way, returning things to their ‘right and proper’ state, even if they differ in interpretation of what that is. Kagenui’s attempts to resolve the contradiction of Tsukihi’s existence by force are mirrored here in her attitude towards Koyomi. You can’t be a human and a vampire. If you keep swapping back and forth I’ll just kill you.

For all that this places her on the side of humanity, it also makes her a singularly inhuman character, at least from Koyomi’s perspective. She rarely varies her tone or expresses emotions, her most violent declarations given the same weight as her pleasantries. It’s reminiscent of how Tsubasa’s human persona is characterised, almost, with the aggressive normalcy, lack of strong preferences, failure to understand those weaker than her. ’The little things that make us human’, Koyomi thinks.

He’s also wrong. She shows sympathy for Koyomi a few times, he just dismisses the possibility out of hand. He only gets it when she finally finishes unravelling Tadatsuru’s paper cranes that she expresses a little closeness to the guy, sounding ‘protective’ of his practice of folding all the cranes by hand. ‘She’s human after all.’

If her role as a specialist is to be an uncompromising wall between Koyomi and inhuman oddities, she’s already failed. She failed in Nise, and she fails now when she encourages Yotsugi’s friendship with Koyomi instead of letting this book end with them splitting apart permanently.

Because that, of course, is the role that Yotsugi was supposed to be cast in, here. Koyomi himself cannot defeat Tadatsuru, because he cannot transform into a vampire. He’s human. Yotsugi, on the other hand, is an oddity. Killing humans isn’t unusual for her. It’s right and proper. What isn’t right and proper is her friendship with Koyomi, his treating her as someone he can treat to icecream instead of a convenient object for disposing of his enemies.

Is that really how it works, though? As Yotsugi points out, there’s nothing particularly ‘right and proper’ about being undead. Her whole existence is thoroughly unnatural. The contradiction of an oddity made in the shape of a human is that she must necessarily stand on both sides. Being able to treat her as a tool of murder would be convenient to Koyomi in one sense, but I think far more convenient for him is her ability to act like she isn’t one. To let him forget the inherent danger of oddities, because in his mind he’d much rather they just be little girls.

This is something he’s gone through before, with Shinobu and with Mayoi, and I suppose I’m starting to see why these three get grouped together so often. I mean, really he puts every girl he meets on a similar pedestal, but these three full-blooded oddities are unique in the amount of direct influence he’s capable of exerting on their nature.

Shinobu is of course the root of it all. Koyomi was punished severely for his initial misapprehension of Kiss-Shot as weak and harmless, but his resolution to the situation made her weak and harmless in reality. In a horrific violation of her agency, Koyomi forced Shinobu to conform to his image. The gravity with which he treats this, though, is precisely the issue - his perception of Shinobu as a victim, his victim, is what leads him to neglect her feelings and their relationship through most of Bakemonogatari. He thinks he has no right to ask anything of her.

We see a similar thing going on with Mayoi, in Kabukimonogatari, as he takes on the mission of ‘saving’ her by removing himself from her life, only questioning whether Mayoi herself prefers her current state at the very end.

There’s a part of Koyomi that wants to see Yotsugi as human, that finds it more convenient, but I think there’s another part that views himself as self-indulgent. That wants to enforce a harsher line between humans and oddities. Not because he despises oddities, but precisely because he finds them too convenient. He doesn’t think he deserves to be able to get along so well with them, deserves to make use of them so easily.

As Ougi puts it, he prefers it when things feel a little bit bad. Subconsciously, it just makes more sense to him that way. The story Koyomi Araragi has been trying to tell, his Bakemonogatari, is one where he suffers for his successes and nothing comes without a price. Where he gets his guts ripped out over and over again in a kind of ritual purification of his sins. One where nobody can help him and nobody can save anyone else, only themselves.

It’s a bit of a breath of fresh air to realise he’s mostly gotten over it, by this point.

He still feels on a subconscious level that he shouldn’t be allowed to get away with all this, that he’s in violation of natural law, that with all his activities lately he’s selfishly exploited his relationship to Shinobu. You know, like some kind of. Undead creature. That drinks blood. Like yeah dude, of course you’re going to get too used to transforming into a vampire if you conceptualise both vampires and yourself, in the act of transforming into one as fundamentally self-serving entities! Oddities are what you make of them!

Nonetheless, he acknowledges Kagenui when she says all of that is just self-satisfaction. He only thinks this way for his own convenience, to put the universe in a kind of order where its repeated assaults on him make logical sense.

Ougi ends up being the one that embodies the universe’s viewpoint, congratulating him on his character development. Haven’t all his failures been learning opportunities? All of his suffering heading towards some noble goal? Now, he has once again been blessed by failure & an advanced warning to get his shit together in the form of his reflection not showing up in the mirror. The message is clear. Stop relying on Shinobu. Don’t be friends with Yotsugi. Oddities will ever betray you. They might be convenient, they might appear when and because they’re called for, to fulfill human desires and meet human expectations, but that doesn’t mean they’ll help.

Koyomi of course says ‘I feel astonishingly unrepentant’ and ‘I would’ve done exactly the same thing’. Bad things happening to you are in fact bad, not good. We’ve been over this already. He starts out as thinking of Shinobu as a victim, but by the end of Bakemonogatari he’s accepted that she actually wants to help him, that accepting help doesn’t make him a bad person. Whether it’s Shinobu or Yotsugi or Mayoi, it’s been clear for a while now that whether they’re human or not has nothing to do with whether he considers them a friend.

I think perhaps I was a bit hasty to assume there’s some kind of dichotomy between humans and oddities going on here. That we have to slot Yotsugi into one or the other, that she’s only worth considering a person if she’s secretly a human.

Bakemonogatari ends with Koyomi reflecting that there is darkness in the world, and things live in that darkness. That darkness lives in him! It’s his shadow! He can’t ignore it, can’t forget it, and he can’t make it go away. That’s just how Shinobu lives, but that doesn’t mean he can’t live alongside her. It doesn’t mean Yotsugi can’t live alongside humans, even if she isn’t going to become one.

It’s a pluralistic view that I appreciate and maybe should have expected from a series marked by characters who consistently choose third paths between either abandoning their humanity or eliminating the inhuman entirely.

Perhaps you’ll allow me to end on some hair-based reflections (or lack thereof). I mentioned how Tsukihi growing out her hair may be evidence of character development on her part, but Koyomi not cutting his was evidence he’s still stuck in the past. The trope of a character development haircut is of course common throughout this series, with Hitagi, Tsubasa, Suruga and Nadeko all showing the changes they’ve undergone through their hairstyle. Karen and Tsukihi are deliberate subversions of this, as they’re shown cutting their hair for no particular reason at all, remaining largely static characters.

Koyomi is one of the few characters that doesn’t cut his hair over subsequent appearances, but I’m not so sure it’s evidence that he doesn’t change at all. The changes just build up so slowly we don’t really notice them, until we’re met with an absolute mop in Hanamonogatari’s peek at the future. It feels like an obvious rejection of the idea that anything about this arc was a wake-up call, the idea that something bad must happen to Koyomi, or to Tsukihi, to allow them to grow in the future.

As always, he makes his way through life kind of half-assedly. He himself, at least, never feels as though he’s gone through significant enough changes to become a different person. But in holding on so tightly to the past, the person that he is now becomes clearly evident.

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