Bungo Stray Dogs - The Reason I Changed

By Adriti Kashyap Baruah

I first saw you in the April 2024. An innocent compilation of a character named "Dazai" being funny. So I traced the source and found the anime Bungo Stray Dogs. I went in thinking it would be a funny comfort show but it handed me chaos, trauma and philosophical debates on morality. It ended with me changing my identity and discovering a passion for psychology and literature. I used to read childish comic books before bed...now I read and recite Nietzsche in my sleep. 

Bungo Stray Dogs is what happens when you take classic Japanese authors and turn them into detectives with supernatural powers. It is a Japanese anime and manga series that blends supernatural action with deep psychological and philosophical tones. The story follows the Armed Detective Agency, a group of individuals based on Japanese authors with supernatural powers drawn from their works. They battle various criminal organizations from the Port Mafia to "The Guild" (a criminal organization consisting of American authors like Francis Scott Fitzgerald and Louisa May Alcott) and then later the "Decay of Angels" consisting of Russian literature icon Fyodor Dostoevsky as the mastermind. 

Kafka Asagiri the writer of the original manga (later turned anime) once said "Bungo Stray Dogs" is for broken people; and perhaps I didn’t know I was broken until I watched it. 

The first episode begins with the protagonist Atsushi Nakajima a teenager who's been kicked out of an orphanage and is on the verge of dying due to

starvation. Despite this he saves a man who was drowning in the river. The man in question Osamu Dazai..was actually trying to take his own life. 

This first scene itself introduces us to your many philosophical and moral themes- "The will to live vs The Will to Die". Osamu Dazai Atsushi's mentor is a broken man himself. 

He spends the majority of the show trying to end his life in various comical ways- like randomly jumping into a river or eating random mushrooms he found growing near the street this habit is framed as a dark recurring joke. 

But beneath the humour lies something far more hollow; the deep void that haunts Dazai's existence. 

It is reflected in his character design too! Dazai's entire body is covered in bandages with no particular explanation for them...and I remember staring at the screen thinking what kind of pain does a person have to go through to wrap your whole body in silence? I don't know why it hit me so hard, maybe I saw parts of me I tried to laugh off in Dazai's bandaged attempts at survival. 

You handed me a mirror and I wasn't prepared to stare at my reflection. 

The next character I'd say changed my life is Ranpo Edogawa- The only detective in the Armed Detective Agency without a supernatural power. Just an uncanny brain and the ability to solve crimes. Ranpo changed my life because... 

I see myself in him. Deeply. 

Entirely. 

I cosplay as him. I own a plushie of him. 

I even hand-made a figure of him. 

That's how much this character means to me.

He taught me that genius can feel like loneliness and that being right is pointless until someone believes you. So maybe I'm not gifted either. Just a little too observant. Just a little too strange. 

And that, you told me, is enough. 

Thank you, Bungou Stray Dogs, for giving me a mirror and a name for the way my brain works. 

Turns out, I wasn't too much. I was just too much like you.

By Adriti Kashyap Baruah