There’s a girl at their school who is always ill. She routinely arrives late, leaves early, or doesn’t show up at all, and skips gym as a matter of course. She’s pretty, and the boys take to whispering that she’s a cloistered princess. As the self-described worst loser in her class soon finds out, they just don’t know what a monster she is. So begins a tale of mysterious maladies that are supernatural in origin yet deeply revealing of the human psyche, a set of case files as given to unexp...

From VOFAN, the star illustrator of the Monogatari series of novels written by NISIOISIN, comes a full-color artbook of his best personal works. Praised by the fans around the world as "The Magician of Light and Shadow from Taiwan", VOFAN is famous for using a vibrant art style combined with unique camera techniques in his art.As the main illustrator for NISIOISIN's novel series for over a decade, VOFAN has illustrated more than 30 book covers and has created dozens of original cha...

Originally planned to be the series' conclusion, “final” chapter “Tsukihi Phoenix” invites us back to the seemingly eventless country burg where supernatural afflictions abound and characters change their trademark hairstyles at the drop of a hat. Rest assured, dear reader, that the story continued in Japanese and will do so in translation. In the first half of Fake Tale, lost soul Araragi helped resolve his bigger little sister Karen's feverish run-in with a fraud. In this second half, he...

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 himsel...

Around midnight, under a lonely street lamp in a provincial town in Japan, lies a white woman, a blonde, alone, robbed of all four limbs, yet undead. Indeed, a rumor’s been circulating among the local girls that a vampire has come to their backwater, of all places. Koyomi Araragi, who prefers to avoid having friends because they’d lower his “intensity as a human,” is naturally skeptical. Yet it is to him that the bloodsucking demon, a concept “dated twice over,” beckons on the first day of...

"Circling back to a middle school girl’s apotheosis, if we can call it that, in Otorimonogatari, and the mortal threat it poses to the hero and his girl, this “Season Two” finale is narrated, for the first time in the series, by a grown-up—but if the word conjures a sense of reliability, of stability and certainty to you, dear reader, then the lesson to take home from this is to trust no one.Because the teller of the tale, who has been summoned by the heroine to defuse the situation, despi...

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 d...

The latest book of the final season of the best-selling MONOGATARI series. Before we witness the series' climactic showdown in the third volume of the ""End Tale""-each part of which forms its own cohesive whole-narrator Araragi wrestles with a crucial bit of history that had turned him into the loner we met at the very beginning, who opined that friendships only lowered his intensity as a human. What initiates his pilgrim's progress of a reckoning is his first encounter, at school, with t...

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?

Unlike ne'er-do-well former vampire Araragi, his two younger sisters Karen and Tsukihi, who attend a private junior high, are little balls of energy and charisma that their peers look up to. That the “ka” in Karen and “hi” in Tsukihi are both written with the character for “fire” isn't the only reason they've come to be known as the Fire Sisters. Karen is the brawn and Tsukihi the brains of a vigilantism that the pair sees not merely as defending justice but as justice itself. They can't e...

Launching the third or “Final Season” of the international cult-hit series, Possession Tale returns the narrator's headset back to high school senior and amateur savior Koyomi Araragi, who used to eschew friendship once upon a time because it'd lower his “intensity as a human”-a loner's misgiving that was perhaps on the mark in a different way than he intended. At issue now is not the precarious fate of one of his cherished confrères, or rather consœurs, whom he'd aid, sight unseen, with a...

Presented in two parts with covers that will form a diptych, Calendar Tale, narrated by our titular hero, sends us to various earlier points in the story where certain events had yet to occur-when, for instance, the shady “expert” Oshino was still in town, and the ex-legendary vampire Shinobu hadn't tired of sulking in a corner. Weaving in a motif of ways, paths, roads, and streets-walks of life-the nostalgic vignettes hark back to the “case files” feel of the series-launching Monster Tale...