Buckle up, y’all, it’s going to be an extremely long one.
It’s currently 10:42 where I live and, because I refuse to sleep, here’s a post inspired by @sometimes-i-try ‘s comment on my “The Cycle of Abuse in BSD” post. Basically, exploring this question:
How much did Oda inspire and influence Dazai, and how much did he change?
To start, let’s break down the relationship between Oda and Dazai. Oda was, IMO, Dazai’s only true friend. Despite the age difference, Dazai doesn’t see him as a mentor. However, Dazai does have an immense amount of respect for him. He holds Oda in such a high regard that he talks about how Aku could never defeat him in a hundred years.
Numerous times, Dazai is concerned for Oda’s safety. He says, “don’t push yourself too hard until I get there” when Oda phones him about the Mimic sniper, and he brushed off Oda’s remark about having the Silver Oracle. That says that Dazai would have gone to help him regardless. After Oda gets poisoned and immediately decides to go rescue Akutagawa, Dazai seems reluctant to let him leave. Yet, something important to note here is that Dazai doesn’t actually stop him. After Oda’s kids are brutally murdered by Mimic, Dazai again tells Oda not to go. But this time, he reaches out to grasp his shoulder, yells his name, does the Dazai equivalent of begging him not to go after them because he knows he’s walking to his death. This is significant to my next point.
Something I noticed about Dark Era Dazai is that he’s a really passive character. He notices from the beginning that Ango is lying about going to a deal, right after seeing his bag, and figures he’s a traitor. But instead of trying to salvage the situation, he accepts that he’s going to lose someone he clearly values. He even states this outright later on, saying that:
Ango. Go before I change my mind. I’m not sad. I knew this from the beginning…anything I never want to lose is lost.
Dazai is, at his core, utterly resigned to losing what’s important to him over and over again. By this point, it isn’t something he fights against.
Until that scene, as they stand by the wreckage of the van, when he reaches out and actually tries to physically stop Odasaku from throwing his life away. Oda gives Dazai agency as a character, something to fight for other than himself.
But we learn the most about these two at the climax, when Oda is fighting Gide and the anime cuts between epic gun fight and Dazai talking to Mori. This is Dazai, for the first time, doing something incredibly out of character. Mori calls him out on it, too, reminding him that there’s no logical reason for Dazai to try and save Oda. Dazai agrees but he goes anyway, because Odasaku is his friend and he can’t let him die.
But Dazai comes too late. The shot cuts to a wider angle, so we can see Dazai full on sprinting toward Oda’s body. He casts off his jacket as he goes (remember that for later) and he kneels, cupping Oda’s head in his lap. Dazai isn’t a man who makes a habit out of lying to himself, as we saw with the Ango situation. And yet, he says this:
You might still make it. No, you will still make it.
He genuinely sounds freaked out and distraught, and Oda corrects him because he knows he’s about to die. This is Dazai showing his only moments of vulnerability in, I’d argue, the entire anime. Because then Oda tells him that if he keeps going on like he has, “nothing beyond what you expect will appear”. Dazai’s eyes widen and his mouth goes slack. He looks horrified, even more than at the idea of Oda’s death.
I chose to interpret this as that Dazai’s been carrying on with the PM hoping something will change, hoping that he will find a reason to live. Part of him expects that he will always be lonely and purposeless, but he keeps going anyway, for that small sliver of hope that it will be different eventually. Oda shatters his conviction.
Dazai, for all his character flaws, is defined by his conviction. He is almost never wrong and seems near-omnipotent with his genius intelligence. Even when he is wrong, he has a backup plan. Dazai doesn’t ask for help from anyone, and he never needs it.
Then he says, “Odasaku, what should I do?”
Out of everything in this scene, this question hit me the hardest. In this moment, Dazai doesn’t look like a ruthless PM executive, the youngest ever, who has killed people and will do so again. He looks startlingly young, especially as after Oda answers–telling him that since good and evil aren’t things that matter to him, he may as well be on the good side–and he asks, “How do you know?”
Dazai’s uncertain, and he’s showing that uncertainty to the one person who has ever seemed to understand him by cutting past his facetious bullshit and personas to see him underneath. Visually, this is when Oda’s hand falls and he tugs off Dazai’s bandages, letting him “see” clearly.
Oda was the first, and so far, only, person to see Dazai for who he was. For that, Dazai trusted Oda’s opinion over his own, because he knew him better than he knew himself.
We see the impact of Oda’s death immediately after. Dazai wastes no time in following his last words, because two weeks later, Dazai’s in his ADA outfit and asking Taneda for a job. He says two things during that conversation that struck me. When Taneda asks where he wants to work, he answers, “somewhere I can help people”, and asks later, “Can I do work that saves people?”
For seemingly the first time, Dazai isn’t asking about himself, or to further to goals of his boss. Those are two entirely selfless things and a complete 180 from his previous apathy. Before, he woke up each morning to find a reason for himself. After Oda, he wants to save others. (Visually, this change is foreshadowed when he takes off the coat while running to Oda. It’s the coat he got after being inducted into the PM, and it was originally Mori’s. He, quite literally, rejects the PM.)
We see the extent of Oda’s influence at other points in the series. He was told to save the weak and the orphans–Atsushi, namely. In the scene where he’s convincing Kyouka to pilot the helicopter to stop the Moby Dick, he obviously believes that she can redeem herself. He draws parallels between Kyouka and himself, though she doesn’t see them. So, in the end?
Oda helped Dazai believe in redemption, that a person can become and stay good. In doing so, he gave Dazai something to live for.
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