10 Second Anime - Bungou Stray Dogs - Episode 4

Black Lizard, the Port Mafia's special hit squad, targets Atsushi and the Armed Detective Agency.

Episode 4 - "The Tragedy of the Fatalist"

Heh.

This whole episode was bait-and-switch! There was a huge buildup to how menacing and powerful the Black Lizard group of the Port Mafia was and then... well, you'll see.

Thankfully, no one died from their injuries last week. What looked serious was rendered moot because of the tender ministrations of the Agency's in-house medic Dr. Yosano.

Maybe not so tender... If this were a harem anime, Tanizaki would be the main character and all the male characters would be asking, "Why is it always Tanizaki?" Well, it's Tanizaki because the author wrote about disturbing sexual topics.

The real life Akiko Yosano was a prolific poet who mothered 13 children. Her main contribution to Japanese literature was presenting women in her poems as open, assertive and sexual creatures, anathema to the morality of pre-World War II Japan.

Part of hinting that Atsushi's concerns about the Port Mafia raiding the Agency to abduct him needed to be set aside was showing Dazai still flirting with that waitress at the café. She's a smart one. She won't enter into a double suicide unless Dazai has life insurance to pay off his considerable tab.

One could also read this scene as an ominous portent. If Dazai isn't at the office to help the others during the upcoming attack, things might go really bad for the other characters. He was shown to be more than a match for Akutagawa, but how would the others do against three elite Port Mafia heavies?

Also selling the danger to Atsushi, and playing to his worries that he could never really belong anywhere, was Kunikida's terrible nervousness that a Port Mafia raid was a real possibility. From "reading" his book upside down and misplacing his glasses on his own forehead, these are supposed to be obvious signs of somebody trying to pretend not to be nervous.

Those fighting moves aren't very convincing, Kunikida...

Then we had the buildup of tension from the Port Mafia side. Showcasing the old guys special powers and showing the lieutenants more concerned about their own rivalry instead of whom they'd be attacking added more evidence that a bloodbath was coming unless something special happened.

The Black Lizard leader, Hirotsu Ryurou, has the special power Falling Camellia. The real life Hirotsu Ryurou was the father of the Japanese tragic novel genre. There were no happy endings in his stories, which read like the hard luck experiences of Job without any redemption. His character is probably the reference the episode title is making, but Atsushi is the fatalist in that regard.

The other named Black Lizard member, Michizou Tachihara, is based on a real life author too. The real Michizou Tachihara was a young poet and architect who died of tuberculosis at only 24.

Atsushi figured self-sacrifice was the better route to protect his new friends, but the Port Mafia guys are pretty shrewd. Better to attack the two groups once they're separated to make sure there's no interference during the weretiger's retrieval.

In the end, Atsushi's concerns and the huge buildup of how scary and capable this Black Lizard squad was supposed to be was treated as a huge joke.

Apparently, raids happen at the Agency quite a lot and Kunikida's worry was only about the budget for repairs! The worst-case scenario he kept referencing was the use of machine guns, because the damage would be most expensive that way, and that it was his turn to apologize to the neighbors for the uproar. Worst-case, indeed.

It appears that meeting the Port Mafia while paired with Tanizaki gave Atsushi a false impression of how capable the Agency members really are. First of all, Tanizaki had no offensive capabilities. His power is all about illusion, defense and obfuscation. His sister is just a normal person. And Atsushi has no conscious idea of how to use his own formidable power. The other detectives suffer no such deficiencies.

The bosses of the supposedly scary hit squad were tossed out the window as if they were fodder too.

The sentimental hook for Atsushi is that he has found people who have accepted him and his "fate," whatever that is, and their only concern is how much the repair bill is for unsuccessful raids.

So now we know. The Port Mafia may be scary, but the Armed Detective Agency is scarier.

There was one scene that looked like it advanced the overall plot. Akutagawa was trying to scare an admission out of a girl his group had detained, but she showed her strong will. I suppose Atsushi is not alone in being a special person worth billions of yen to capture.

Next time, the one dude drinking Ramune in a Sherlock Holmes looking deerstalker features in an actual detective story. Maybe.