i will personally never forgive yenpress for botching the translation because now it's impossible to find chuuya / dazai / yosano takes that do not start with "first off, mori sucks and he's a predator"
mori is the don of the port mafia and has committed several war crimes, but not those ones. yell at him and hate him for the severe psychological manipulation of yosano & for dazai joining the mafia n being his witness. you know, the things he did.
I think an important piece of context that is missing from a lot of the hot takes about Mori and Elise is, well, the legendary 1970s manga Black Jack.
(very long illustrated explanation below)
I thought about the extreme fandom wank about Mori a little more, and here is more context that might be useful for thinking about this fictional character. Don't ask me to explain why the mangaka for BSD did or didn't make any particular jokes - I can't read minds! But this might be a useful bit of background.
Kafka-sensei is clearly aware of how "reality" was for these authors and he likes to make jokes inverting or modifying those relationships in his literary superhero story, probably as easter eggs for the other literature nerds in the audience and also to keep it from being too predictable. Akutagawa is obsessed with Dazai instead of the other way around, Tanizaki and his sister(?) are apparently in a relationship (as opposed to RL Tanizaki and his sister...in law....), and so on.
So, thinking about all the jokes about Mori makes about "only liking girls under 12" (which Kouyou does not ever seem perturbed about and she just tells him to shut up) ...this is my guess, or at least an observation.
The real author was, as far as I've read, well-known to be a doting and devoted father, but had two unhappy marriages. "Great with kids, not so great with adult women," if you will. All of his children have written books about growing up with this famous man as their father. The eldest son, Oto, didn't seem to have had as close a relationship but it's been thought that that's because as the eldest son he had to grow up to lead the family (much like Mori himself, and Oto also became a doctor) and therefore Oto couldn't be coddled. But the three younger children - Annu, Mari, and Rui - all have generally good things to say about their father, especially Mari.
Rui wrote, for example, about how when his father was meeting an important official and little Rui ran in the room to see his daddy. He remembers his dad picked him up and put him in his lap and cuddled him and let him stay for the important discussion instead of sending him away for being disruptive. Mari wrote extensively about her father in glowing terms as the perfect man and perfect father* (another long story) and Annu wrote about the process of caring for him when he was dying of tuberculosis in his sixties. They describe him as involved in their lives in a way which was apparently not always typical of the era, often more so than their mother was.
Mori, for his part wrote at least one short story ("Half-Day" which can be found in English in this anthology) is about an unhappy marriage where the husband and wife deeply dislike each other (just fundamentally incompatible personalities - she is jealous of his mother and has no interest in his hobbies or frugal personality, he thinks she's vain and weird about his mother and she keeps threatening to take the kid and leave, that kind of everyday stuff) and how this unhappy marriage plays out in front of his beloved seven year old daughter. Mori commented later that fiction is fiction and not everything he writes is autobiographical, but...there are some points in his biography which do line up with his stories and what he chose to write about.
Mori's writing about children is always very specific and very tender - this is a dude who loved children and actively cared for them, like getting up and taking them to the bathroom in the middle of the night and making sure their bedrooms were warm enough in winter and feeding them breakfast and hugging them when they woke up in the morning and dressing them and so on (work often done by mothers or servants).
So the ACTUAL writing that the real Mori Ougai did about children is along the lines of BEAST Mori (even when he writes about sick or dying children, it's not at all with indifference).
Mori Mari is such a long story, but I'm certain that this daughter of Mori Ogai's, who wrote books about her relationship with him and is his most famous child, is part of the inspiration for Elise-chan, specifically the spoiled, doted-upon daughter who gets dressed up in fancy clothing and gets fancy treats whenever she likes them. Mari writes that her dad spoiled her to the max. There's another little possible reference in the BSD mobile game -
This card is called "The Scent of Jasmine" (薫る茉莉花) and yes, they're drinking jasmine tea I presume, but Mari's name literally means "Jasmine" (茉莉).
Come to think of it, I wonder if Kafka had seen these drawings Mori did for his children (I can only source it to this old blog post and probably comes from this book by Kitano Noritoshi):
(Two sacred deer fighting over mochi at Nara...he's not much of an artist, huh)
So in summary, if Kafka decides to joke about that by saying Mori can only get along with women under the age of 12, or if his imaginary daughter calls him a lolicon and says she hates him, then...that's possibly because the real author's known as someone whose kids admired him and his favorite daughter idolized him and loved being spoiled by him. A good dad, maybe not so good a husband? This is presuming that Kafka has read more than one story by the authors he chose to write about, and that seems fairly self-evident given the nonstop references.
There are many other things you can wonder about in BSD about Mori's relationship with Dazai and Yosano, and he treats those children like adults which is so difficult for them in the long term, but I think that's a different set of issues and conflicts between an adult caregiver and a teenager, which folds into the other parallel stories about that type of relationship in BSD.
Now you can argue "well WHY DOES KAFKA CASUALLY MAKE JOKES LIKE THAT ABOUT FAMOUS PEOPLE" - don't ask me, but I will note that the Mori Ogai museum in Tokyo has done collaborations with BSD which I don't think they would do if they thought this series was actually libelling the author!
OK, going outside to touch grass now lololol I'm clearly a Doyleist about these questions but what to do in a series about authors with meta about authors? Also, if you have more expertise in this subject or have read contrasting stories, I'm interested to hear what other people know.
