Akutagawa Ryuunosuke and the Absurdity of Random Violence
[BSD 002] [Masterpost]
In this chapter, Akutagawa is introduced, and the way in which he is introduced really struck me when interpreting the story with the absurdist lens.
Basically, what happens is that he pretends to be returning a lost bag to the police station, but instead slaughters everyone inside and sets off the bomb in the bag once he’s left, killing multiple people within the vicinity. It’s brutal, it’s violent and seemingly has no purpose.
Something that will be highlighted in later chapters and become a central theme to his character development is Akutagawa’s merciless disregard for human life (including his own, of course). He embodies nihilism which is likely because he was trained under Dazai when Dazai was at his absolute worst — when he, too, was almost a full-blown nihilist.
This is why he’s a great foil for Atsushi because they do share certain similarities (protogés of Dazai, seeking validation from others, lack of self-preservation), but in the end, they’re an absurdist and a nihilist butting heads.
I do want to go back to Akutagawa’s introduction, though, and talk about how this is great worldbuilding for an absurdist story. Absurdist storytellers take aspects of our real world and emphasize them in order to highlight absurdity. Asagiri does this by giving multiple people in this universe magical abilities, and it’s how they use these abilities that lends to the storytelling. For example, you have Akutagawa, pretending to be a commoner, but in secret, he’s a mafioso with an extremely overpowered ability that’s basically able to slaughter non-ability users on sight.
And not only does Akutagawa do this, but he does this in a police station. The police are supposed to be the protectors of the people. Yet, they’re powerless against this guy because he just so happens to have this insane ability that they’re powerless to defend themselves against. There’s a bitter irony in that, I think, and we’ll see as the story progresses that Asagiri has a lot to say about the government and the police, institutions set in place to protect society, and how they fail at this job so often.
To me, the absurdity lies within the randomness of this violence, that idea that one day you could be this woman minding her business, and then you walk into your local police station to this bloody scene, only to get eviscerated by an explosion moments later.
Yes, this is something caused by an ability user in the BSD universe, but something like this could easily happen in our world, too. Think of terrorist attacks and shootings, this is just another version of that, is it not? Asagiri, as an absurdist storyteller, uses Akutagawa and his ability to emphasize something that happens in our world that we don’t usually think about (or have gotten used to).
