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 spring break as he makes his way home with a fresh loot of morally compromising periodicals.
...

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 unexpected feeling as it is to irreverent humor. So begins the legendary novel that kicked off the...

Bakemono, literally -altered thing, - which translates as -monster.- Monogatari, literally -thing narrated, - which translates as -tale.- Combined into a neologism by he of the reversible nom de plume, they yield BAKEMONOGATARI, the monster tale that kicked off a series whose anime adaptations have enjoyed international popularity and critical acclaim.
A self-described loser, Koyomi Araragi is struggling at a prep school that he should never have gotten into. He has all but quit caring, but as a senior, he faces the chilling scenario of not being able to graduate. It's time...

A class president among class presidents, a bespectacled model student who soars to the top of honors lists without fail, Tsubasa Hanekawa also happens to be a decent human being. True, she does have a habit of making single-minded assumptions, but they come from a good place and turn out to be fortuitous as often as not.
Loser extraordinaire Koyomi Araragi owes her his post of class vice president and a more significant debt of gratitude for her unstinting support during the darkest spring break of his life. All of it has blinded him to the possibility that his saintly classmate's family...

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 encounter a harmful fad without trying to hunt down a specific source that had a motive for spreading...

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 must attend to his littler little sister Tsukihi's issues, but not before staging the Toothbrush...

Officially the second part of MONOGATARI's second arc, KABUKI dives into the past of one of the MONOGATARI's first heorines - Mayoi Hachikuji. With an animated series by SONY, KABUKIMONOGATARI is a must read for BAKE fans, and a must for fans of Japanese YA fiction.

A few months after he first met Mayoi Hachikuji (BAKEMONOGATARI), Araragi set out to deliver something to the young lady. Unable to find her, Araragi gives up and heads home and realizes that he has not done any of his summer assignments even though today is the last day of summer break. With help from Shinobu, Koyomi...