NEKOMONOGATARI (WHITE): Cat Tale (Monogatari)

Launching into new territory that the author hadn’t mapped out when he embarked on the series, NEKOMONOGATARI (White) tells the tale of heroine Tsubasa Hanekawa from her own perspective, in her own voice—if that can hold true for a damaged soul who, depending on who you’re asking, suffers from a split personality or a supernatural aberration.

The bone-chilling brokenness of her household, where father and mother and daughter keep three separate sets of cookware in the same kitchen and only ever prepare their own meals, and the profound darkness nurtured in the genius schoolgirl’s heart, come to life, if that is the word, through her self-vivisection.

As for our customary unreliable narrator, Araragi, we seem to learn revealing tidbits about him now that we have an outside view of him at last, while his lady friends Senjogahara, Hachikuji, et al, freed from his predilection for proudly inane banter, show subtly new faces to us via their female interlocutor. Welcome to the Second Season.

Palindromic NISIOISIN made his debut as a novelist when he was twenty. A famously prolific author, he is known to publish more than a book per month at times. With his inexorable rise, he has become the leading light of a younger generation of writers who began their careers in the twenty-first century. Titles by him published in translation so far include Decapitation: The Blue Savant and the Nonsense User (formerly known as Zaregoto) and a manga adaptation of his novel Imperfect Girl (from our Vertical Comics imprint). The MONOGATARI series, widely considered his masterpiece to date, is becoming available in English for the first time.