Grey and Gray Morality in Bungou Stray Dogs
I could (and probably will, when I get round to it) talk a lot about BSD, and its strong, diverse characters.
Sure, the overarching plot is somewhat episodic and aimless. Big Bad Organisations get thrown at the Armed Detective Agency constantly, and the whole point of it all is pretty vague (we know there’s this powerful “book” and Atsushi is somehow very important to obtaining said item, and that’s about it), to the point that it’s difficult to tell where we’re headed. However, I’d argue this is much less of a problem than it sounds. BSD is less concerned with what is happening and how Dazai’s master plot will inevitably allow the ADA to pull through, and instead focuses its attention on the building of nuanced characters, and powerful interactions between them all. The main plot isn’t so much the source of interest, as a means to force characters into various harsh situations, and develop interactions with each other.
What interests me the most about BSD is the effect of more meetings, conflicts, temporary alliances – as these characters grow more tangled together, both in the present and past. Gradually, we see what was initially presented as quite a clear distinction between the Good Guys and the Bad gradually becoming muddied and complicated. It gets personal. What appears a conflict of black and white morality between the Agency and the Port Mafia becomes a sliding scale of grey.
As we are introduced to the workings of Yokohama, we are presented with three major forces ruling over the city: the government, the Port Mafia and the Armed Detective Agency. There is a sort of tense balance between the three, and it is explained later that they all allow each other to operate (so long as they stay in their respective lanes) in order to maintain order on all levels, from the legal surface, to the much darker underground. In a broad sense, these forces, and their roles in the plot are all about pragmatism to keep the peace. This is what results in the Agency and Port Mafia joining forces against the Guild, who threatened to disturb the order, and were thereby an equal threat to both.
However, characters from all sides have methods that range from self-serving (such as Rampo’s unpredictable tendency to solve cases and do ‘good’ as it suits him), to morally questionable. A particularly memorable example is Tanizaki using Light Snow to crash a passing truck into the path of Steinbeck and Lovecraft. The fate of the driver, an innocent bystander is unknown; he could’ve survived, or he might’ve been killed. Tanizaki’s moral judgement is clouded by his immediate fear for Naomi and desire for vengeance against Steinbeck. The conflict evolves from moral and practical to a personal one.
All-grey conflict, though, isn’t purely defined by the protagonists using ambiguous methods to beat their opponents, or having some selfish motivations besides the overall moral and pragmatic purpose of the Agency. In fact, I’d personally argue the latter is simply an aspect of creating a rounded character. Instead, it is opposing sides having a mixture of individuals to varying degrees of good and evil, all having justifiable reasons for fighting the others. Whether, on a grand scale, one side is morally above the other, on a personal level, we can understand, and even sympathise with individuals from both. In BSD’s case, the Detective Agency certainly has the moral high ground over the Mafia, but neither is wholly good, or completely evil. The same applies beyond the central Agency/Mafia conflict to enemies from outside. Take the members of the Guild, where the likes of Steinbeck and Hawthorne don’t necessarily agree with Fitzgerald’s ultimately selfish goals, or his leadership. But when Fitz (almost inevitably) falls for rocking the boat in Yokohama, Steinbeck reforms a group himself from those left behind and Hawthorne just finds himself among Dostoyevsky’s rats, yet another group trying to upset the balance.
The Beast novel did a really good job of demonstrating how the only thing that designates Atsushi and Akutagawa’s respective places in the ADA/Mafia conflict is circumstance. A terrible chain of events led to Odasaku’s untimely death, which triggered Dazai leaving the Mafia to join the Agency. The fact that this “switch” was even feasible is testament to the murky morality in this story working for good. In Odasaku’s words, he left the side that killed, and is now on “the side that saves people”…usually. The series carries an interesting commentary on how the idealistic idea of ‘justice’ as the ultimate good is flawed, and justice as we know it is a “weapon” to harm that “can’t save anyone” (but that’s a whole different post there). Atsushi just so happens to meet Dazai after this shift, while Akutagawa is unfortunate enough to have encountered him before.
Atsushi’s immediate, violent hatred of his counterpart is understandable; upon their first meeting, Akutagawa is perfectly willing to slaughter the Tanizaki siblings in order to capture Atsushi for profit. We learn fairly quickly that he is also the man controlling Kyouka’s ability, forcing her to use it for murder. In every respect, Atsushi is a perfectly sympathetic protagonist. Not necessarily correct in every way, but sympathetic regardless. Equally, though, we can sympathise with Akutagawa’s vengeful hate of Dazai, given how the latter abused him and moulded him into a death machine only a couple of years prior. Dazai, in the past at the very least, was a despicable person, to the point that, once we first see this side of him (in whatever iteration), it seems impossible to separate him from it, particularly when people he directly impacted are so close. It’s not right, in any stretch, how Akutagawa projects his negative experiences onto Atsushi in the way he does, but it’s incredibly understandable why he does. It was literally impossible for him to gain Dazai’s approval in the past, due to his superior’s amoral state of mind, and yet Atsushi seems to have received what he wanted so badly, relatively instantaneously.
But, at the same time, we learn that Dazai’s amoral, Machiavellian traits were carefully engineered by Mori since he was a child. Kyouka’s ‘evil’ actions stem from Akutagawa (and Kouyou, probably), who was manufactured by Dazai, who was manufactured by Mori, and so on. Chuuya, knowing now that he was literally created in a lab somewhere, is a perfect metaphor for engineered evil. The kid had no choice in the matter and seems to have been passed from one bad set of hands to another ever since. Even Mori has reasons for making the choices he does – although on the scale of grey morality, he’s veering towards just plain black.
Another strong metaphor, for the apparent necessity of a grey-er morality in this world, is the tenuous cooperation between Atsushi and Akutagawa – Shin Soukoku. Dazai acts as a mentor-figure for Atsushi, though it’s important to keep in mind that, all the time, he has been foreseeing, even crafting the partnership between these two. The pair are foils to each other, remarkably similar in many ways, but also existing in contrast (this is even made visually obvious in their excellent character design). In terms of the spectrum of morality, Atsushi sits closer to white, the good, while Akutagawa is markedly closer to black, or evil. The coming together of the two, then, is presented as potentially unstoppable, more powerful than any duo that came before them. Dazai perches perfectly on the fine line, and the pair he engineers is, likewise, that ruthlessly effective. Not another Double Black, in truth, but a pragmatic shade of grey.
