I admit it, the whole reason I was interested in Bungo Stray Dogs from the start were the author names. Beyond the simple novelty of having each character named after a different author from Japan’s formative years of literature, we were promised superpowers for each of them thematically related to and named after their most famous work, taking place in a noir-style story revolving around detectives and Mafiosos walking the line between gritty realism and lighthearted but intelligent banter. As outside narration, notes, and one-line gags are printed typewriter-style onto old manuscript paper along the side of the screen, immersing us in the literary experience, we could finally settle the debate once and for all: could Osamu Dazai take Akutagawa Ryuunosuke in a fistfight? Would Kunikida Doppo and Nakajima Atsushi have gotten along as fellow poetic short-story writers? And how would Edogawa Ranpo screw every discussion up? We get the answers to all these questions and more, but I can’t help but feel that where these great authors distinguished themselves with their fresh styles and crisp writing, Bungo Stray Dogs falls short of fully breaking away from being the same old story.
For one, the powers themselves suffer either from being poorly defined or not capturing any of the essence of their corresponding stories at all. Our protagonist Atsushi naturally fits the story The Tiger Man to a T, presuming himself haunted by the specter of a monstrous tiger before getting abandoned on the street by his orphanage only to fall into the company of a detective agency who discover that he himself was the tiger all along. By contrast his savior Dazai, who plays the role of the cheerfully suicidal but clearly intellectually gifted buffoon (a knock straight out of the park for voice actor Miyano Mamoru), has the ever-so-boring power of nullifying other people’s abilities, as if that had anything to do with his tragic masterpiece No Longer Human. Meanwhile the crazed antagonist Akutagawa just has some violent black energy that does whatever he wants, which is both ill-defined and far less befitting of the name Rashoumon than say Hell Screen. The cleverest by far is Edogawa Ranpo, whose stories were written to subvert and poke fun at the entire Western detective genre, whose name is a comical Japanese bastardization of Edgar Alan Poe, and whose character and power in Bungo Stray Dogs perfectly formulate the legendary mystery writer in the current time, in both his genius and his parody.
As for the noir style, despite being a detective agency there are very few scenes or stories of them solving mysteries at all, instead focusing the plot on the continual conflict between their force of justice and the sinister Port Mafia, itself a collection of super-powered writers with some vaguely defined goal of doing the Mafia thing of making tons of money in any illegal way possible. As far as the writers themselves go it seems that original creator Asagiri Kafka drew the lines in the sand arbitrarily, with no clear genre or time divides between the two sides, but it does lead to some clever choices in terms of backstory and who knows who, who meets who, who fights who, etc. The plot, pitting the two forces against one another in a series of small engagements, attempted assassinations, and schemes to capture Atsushi and harness the power of the mythical tiger he holds inside, is simply a generic shell to allow those character interactions to happen.
I would say that the comedy aspects were handled the best by far. The aforementioned use of the typewriter narration felt like a fun simple way to both tie in the literature theme and to get a nice hearty chuckle every time a Blood Blockade Battlefront or Kill la Kill style character introduction comes out word by word and ends with a satisfying ding. Dazai’s constant desire to kill himself is made even funnier by the fact that he’s bent on including someone else in it, longing for the elegant double suicide that escaped the real Dazai in No Longer Human . Because of his snide my-pace personality, everyone even seems to have a moment or two where they wish he’d get on with it.
There were also plenty of moments where the characters were suddenly drawn in a less detailed, more rounded cartoonish style to indicate a shift from their somewhat multidimensional identities as characters to their more caricaturized personality quirks. Similar to individual characters shifting in this way, multiple times our expectation and sense of tension is instantly dispelled in comic fashion, the largest such example being a whole episode built hyping up a villainous squad of hitmen who eventually arrive at the detective agency out for blood, but as we reenter the room along with the terrified Atsushi less than a minute later we see the fight is already over, and the protagonists are hard at work tossing the chibi-style bodies of their enemies out the window and complaining about the coming paperwork. Both these bait-and-switch gags are reminiscent of Ouran High School Host Club; no surprise that director Igarashi Takuya was in charge of both works, clearly obvious from the first episode where Dazai’s search for a beam to hang himself from comes accompanied with a flashing cartoon arrow, a direct reference to Ouran’s poor vase in the pilot.
However the bulk of the show is in drama and action, neither of which capture the same clever design nor do they live up to the interesting premise of pitting classic writers against one another in the modern age. The last few episodes are a mix of nonsensical and overly dramatic, from the tiresome brainwashed innocent little girl who is a Port Mafia assassin to the last-second curveball of having the North American cavalry come into town, an awkward ending even for a split-cour work. There are basic elements that seem to be plain overlooked until the end, such as Dazai’s partner Kunikida being able to summon anything and everything, or so we presume until we finally learn near the end of the show the (incredibly arbitrary) restriction on the objects he can create, thus explaining why he hadn’t instantly solved every single Port Mafia issue thus far. And of course there is the most cardinal sin of all: in a work about famous Japanese writers, neither Natsume Souseki nor Murasaki Shibata ever show up, along with Kawabata Yasunari, Mishima Yukio, Kenzaburou Oe, Fumiko Enchi, Futabatei Shimei, or Tayama Katai. Of course the story never could have taken on all or really any of them, but…well, I’ll just pretend I can never forgive them anyway. If they’re letting me see my favorite authors duke it out, I want all of them, dammit.