Bungo Stray Dogs

Episode 3

Things certainly escalate quickly in this third episode of Bungo Stray Dogs – just before the commercial break, the story goes from goofy antics involving Dazai singing about committing double suicide and Naomi making seriously uncomfortable passes at Tanizaki to a bloody fight between Tanizaki, Naomi, Atsushi and our officially introduced bad guys: Akutagawa Ryunosuke and Higuchi Ichiyo. The two halves don't fit together particularly well, but they are both good in different ways, so while there's a sense of disconnect between them, it still makes for a decent episode.

Perhaps the most important thing we learn this week is that Akutagawa is a member of the Port Mafia, a mysterious yakuza-style (although not strictly yakuza) group that works in the shadows of the town. Akutagawa is a wanted man in his own right, however, partially because his talent, “Rashomon,” is a tool of destruction that he in no way hesitates to use. For film buffs along with fans of Akutagawa's writing, the connection here is obvious: his talent shares its name with his best known work, later turned into a film by Akira Kurosawa. (Although the actual story is called “In a Grove,” most people tend to think of it by the movie title.) Both story and film revolve around a murder, and the demonic form of Akutagawa's talent certainly fits that tone. Both he and Higuchi are killers and make no bones about it, which makes the episode's eventual direction more shocking, given the lightness with which death has been treated in the previous two.

The use of Higuchi and Akutagawa as the antagonists is an interesting idea if you consider the authors – Akutagawa had a very public dispute with Tanizaki, and it was his suicide that sparked Dazai's obsession. Positioning him as the villain works to frame Dazai's pro-suicide stance in the show, indicating some sort of past corruption, which the reveal at the end of the episode works to solidify. Meanwhile, the fact that Akutagawa's talent and Tanizaki's “Light Snow” are basically opposites – Tanizaki's is a shield – plays nicely into their argument about opposing methods of storytelling. Higuchi is a slightly odder choice for a villain, but given her fierce will to live before her death from consumption, I can see how her real-life counterpart has been reworked to make her a mafiosa, because this Higuchi is nothing if not determined. Her loyalty to Akutagawa can also be read as a shout-out to her much more old-fashioned writing style; she was largely influenced by much earlier Japanese authors, where a lot of the others in the show took their influence from the West.

As long as I'm going on about this, it's worth mentioning that Naomi and Tanizaki's relationship is basically a joke based on Tanizaki's novel Naomi, which, as I mentioned last week, is about a woman who slowly takes over the narrator's life. This Naomi is like an updated version of the original, who the narrator was trying to turn into a “modern (Western) woman” before she became too modern and it blew up in his face. This Naomi is basically the embodiment of both the schoolgirl and incest fetishes, and whether or not Tanizaki made her that way, she's certainly going for the stereotypes with gusto. Likewise, Dazai's obsession this week with double suicide is yet another reference to his eventual death, which was, in fact, with a woman.

Literary references aside, while I'd like to say that this is the week where the show really gets going, it isn't quite. Bungo Stray Dogs hasn't quite found its balance between comedy and action, although I do think that now that we've got an established villain and conflict, it will get there sooner than later. In the meantime, it's still a smorgasbord of early 20th century literary references and jokes, which may not be as awesome for all viewers as it is for this bibliophile, and visually it's still a lot of fun to look at with references to the authors' original time periods in the color choices, costumes, and feel of the world in general, even as it brings in modern inventions like cell phones. I may be overly hopeful, but I do think that the show is about to actually take off next week, and I promise I'll stop saying that if it doesn't, because I've definitely said that for three weeks now. But whether it fulfills its promise or not, Bungo Stray Dogs' third episode is still entertaining on both an anime and a literary geek level, which may be enough to keep seeing it through.

Rating: B

Bungo Stray Dogs is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.