10 Second Anime - Monogatari Series Second Season - Episode 20

Monogatari Series Second Season - Episode 20

Gaen Izuko does indeed know everything. Hachikuji has to say goodbye. Ougi gives dark hints about who she really is.

Gaen has conditions on helping Araragi get back to town and reconnecting with Shinobu. They all involve Kanbaru, the girl with the monkey paw that became her arm. Gaen is a distant relative, and needs that arm's spiritual properties to complete a job she's taken up. And she'll need his help to complete the job that Ononoki was supposed to do, she was the client, before they all got caught up with the nameless darkness. With Araragi's agreement, she begins to explain everything.

Gaen does have all the answers about the nameless darkness. It is not an aberration, but more like an aberration enforcer. If an aberration begins not doing what it is defined to do, this thing seeks it out and eliminates it. It came after Heart-under-Blade 400 years ago because she had started acting like a lake goddess instead of a vampire. It did not come after her because she started acting like a vampire again in Antarctica, and she continues to act like a vampire now. So who was the target this time?

Hachikuji is supposed to be the aberration of a snail demon and lost ghost. Her job is to make people get lost if they follow her, but for the last few months after meeting Araragi, she has not been losing people. She directed Araragi to the exact spot where Shinobu had run away, and presumably saved the world in the process, and has been giving exact directions to Araragi and others since then. She was no longer acting like the aberration she was supposed to be. That's why the nameless darkness went after her. And it would keep going after her whenever she was awake. When she was asleep, Araragi and Ononoki were lost in the mountains; Hachikuji was doing her job, so the aberration eliminator didn't follow her. If Hachikuji doesn't want to get eaten, she just has to function as the lost ghost again.

But she doesn't want to do that anymore. She was aware that she was leading people the wrong way and hated it, but meeting Araragi changed that. She changed. The solution is to act like a ghost and pass on. Even Gaen called her the ghost of a ghost, because the original Mayoi Hachikuji died eleven years ago, and this lost ghost changed when Araragi was able to stop her from being lost. She has to say goodbye. With the help of Ononoki, she kisses her big brother friend goodbye.

In the epilogue, it's four months later, and Araragi is telling his story to Ougi. She takes her leave, thanking him for the story, but she has to go to work. From her description of what she does, she sounds exactly like the nameless darkness doing its job. Shinobu, from the shadows, asks why he told Ougi about Hachikuji, when he's been keeping her passing a secret to everyone else? Araragi wants to see how just Ougi knowing something will affect things. I'm reminded of Ougi's supposed chance meeting with Nadeko started the whole snake god story, and how this fits in with how she "rights wrongs and brings to an end things which must end." Ominously, she says Araragi will find out what she does soon enough, and she may need his help then too.

Ononoki turned out to be quite a kind girl for being an artificial construct made out of a corpse. Perhaps Araragi is changing her too.