10 Second Anime - Monogatari Series Second Season - Episode 21

Monogatari Series Second Season - Episode 21

New arc - Love Story. Senjougahara asks the conman Kaiki for help in fooling the snake god Nadeko has become. Surprisingly, he agrees.

The next chapter in the Monogatari series is koimonogatari (恋物語), meaning Passionate Love Story, or more simply Love Story. Since this the beginning of a new arc, that means rapid fire dialogue, rapid fire scene changes, and head tilts aplenty. Senjougahari calls Kaiki the conman out of the blue because she wants to hire him for a job. Trying to get out of the meeting, he gets trapped into flying to Okinawa to meet her in the airport.

Since they've been lying but playing at making their lies true, they try to one-up each other with terrible disguises. Senjougahara opts for the Groucho glasses, but Kaiki wins by putting on a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses. The subtext, of course, is that this is the usual garb of Oshino, the aberration expert, and now Kaiki is supposed to be filling in that role.

The job is to deceive the snake goddess Nadeko into saving Araragi's life, her life, and she supposes, the little blonde vampire. That last part was a little grudgingly, but a devoted lover must make some compromises. Senjougahara only won a temporary reprieve from Nadeko, but she wants a more permanent solution. Her options have become limited, because she can't find Oshino, and Hanekawa has even gone in search of him. So she turns to the conman, the cause of the fake charms that caused Araragi's sisters trouble, and indirectly was the cause of Nadeko's transformation. When Kaiki describes that indirect cause as similar to a chain of bankruptcies caused by the collapse of a ponzi scheme, Senjougahara has a brief flash of anger and dumps her drink on him. That's because what he described is exactly how her family became so poor so quickly.

Now that he knows the job, they need to negotiate the price. Senjougahara has been saving for just such an occasion, but Kaiki intimates that her sum is too low. She says it could be a down payment. She could even sell her own body... at this point Kaiki himself loses his temper, and throws his drink at her. She must have hit a sore spot there as well.

Kaiki excuses himself to the restroom to consider the job. Everything that Senjougahara presented, whether it was guilt over the little sisters, his own indirect responsibility, or even the amount of money, doesn't cross any kind of threshold for caring about deceiving a minor god, which also has some amusing challenge in itself. But he realizes that his old college colleague, Gaen Izuko, has a niece who goes to the same school as Senjougahara, and she might be affected by this snake god. He refers to Kanbaru, the monkey paw girl. This tenuous relationship to a tenuous relationship is enough to make him care, and agree to the job.

As with any Monogatari story, the title has many layers and many meanings, and here, Love Story is no different. On the surface, we have Senjougahara willing to do anything to save her lover, but with Kaiki's leap to help an old school mate's distant relative, we also have, perhaps, a deep unrequited love for the girl who knows everything. Many story threads are going to be woven into this story, and seeing it from Kaiki's perspective is a bonus.