Bungo Stray Dogs: A Crash Course in World Literature

Disclaimer: The contents and opinions of this blog post do not represent the views or values of Honours Review as a publication.

All right, let’s say you’re an avid reader and love F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925). Or maybe Fitzgerald isn’t really your thing, but you simply can’t get enough of E. A. Poe’s short stories.

Now, how would you react if Jay Gatsby suddenly started walking down the streets of Yokohama and, or wait, let me rephrase this. How would you react if Jay Gatsby suddenly started flying above the streets of Yokohama in Moby Dick with Herman Melville, E. A. Poe, and Mark Twain aboard, while H.P. Lovecraft is wading in the Tsurumi river below them, after having transformed into a giant, humanoid octopus?

Well, these are all pretty mainstream events in Bungo Stray Dogs. 

Cover of Bungo Stray Dogs volume two.

Bones studio’s Bungo Stray Dogs (lit. Literary Stray Dogs), a popular Japanese anime series which originally started airing in 2016, is making a big comeback with its third season this April (1). The otaku fandom is naturally excited; it has been almost a year since the series’ last movie adaptation, Bungo Stray Dogs: Dead Apple (2018), was released, and the adaptation, by introducing a bunch of new characters, excellent villains, and a fairly complex plot, only left us with much more questions than it answered. 

Bungo Stray Dogs is based on the supernatural action manga of the same name that follows a group of skilled agents gifted with supernatural powers which they use to solve mysteries, fight Yokohama’s underground mafia, and occasionally blast a building or two into the sky. 

But apart from the crowd that is regularly engaged with Japanese animation, Bungo Stray Dogs has a lot to offer to audiences that are not that well versed in Japanese anime and manga culture. Above all, it offers them a crash course in Japanese, American, and Russian literature. 

Written by Kafka Asagiri and illustrated by Sango Harukawa for Young Ace magazine in 2012 (1), Bungo Stray Dogs is probably best known for basing its characters on famous writers and their books, such as Osamu Dazai, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, E. A. Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and F. M. Dostoevsky. While each Bungo character represents a particular writer, their supernatural power is in one way or another connected to that writer’s works. 

This way, for instance, Bungo Stray Dogs’ Osamu Dazai (all characters are actually called the same way as the writer they’re were based on), one of the series’ central figures, was inspired by the early 20th-century Japanese writer Osamu Dazai, author of The Setting Sun (1947) and No Longer Human (1948). The writer had a short but turbulent life: he lived during the two world wars, experienced a series of more or less serious diseases, wrote a number of novels and short stories whose popularity quickly turned him into a celebrity and attracted a secret admirer, regularly enjoyed way more sake than is advisable, and attempted to commit suicide several times until he finally succeeded in doing so in 1948, together with his wife Tomie Yamazaki. Inspired by these elements from Dazai’s life, Bungo’s Dazai is, as a result, constantly preying for a partner to commit a double suicide with, and his special ability, which allows him to cancel other ability-users’ power, is called “No Longer Human”, just like the ‘real-life’ Dazai’s famous novel.  

Similarly, one of the series’ main antagonists, the Port Mafia member Ryunosuke Akutagawa, is based on the Japanese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa, “Father of the Japanese Short Story”, whose famous works include Rashomon (1915), Hell Screen (1918), and In A Grove (1922). Many of Akutagawa’s stories are characterized by their macabre character. Rashomon, for example, is a story about an encounter between  a servant and an old woman at the southern gate of Kyoto, where corpses were sometimes dumped. Hell Screen recounts the life of the painter Yoshihide who looses his mind in the process of creating a folding screen depicting the Buddhist hell. Akutagawa’s macabre aesthetic is also one of the main features of Bungo’s antagonist Akutagawa: the sickly, pale-skinned member of the mafia is always wearing dark clothes with a slight aristocratic touch and his ability, “Rashomon”, allows him to summon a phantom-like creature from his coat. 

The same character-modeling principle (i.e., developing characters based on famous writers and their works), applies to the American and the Russian part of Bungo’s character repertoire. Bungo’s F. Scott Fitzgerald, a young millionaire and leader of the North American organization called The Guild, parades through the streets of Yokohama together with his fellows H. P. Lovecraft and Nathaniel Hawthorne just as the ‘real-life’ Fitzgerald’s Gatsby probably paraded through the streets of New York City during the Roaring Twenties. The Russians, Ivan Goncharov and A. S. Pushkin, are grouped together in an underground secret organization called Rats in the House of the Dead (the name is a reference to F. M. Dostoevsky’s novel The House of the Dead (1862)), led by the mastermind Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose ability is none other than “Crime and Punishment”, inspired by the Russian writer’s famous work.  

All these different characters’ encounters on the streets of Yokohama, whose night scape is beautifully depicted in classically neon, cyberpunk tones, generate a unique atmosphere in which different cultures collide; E. A. Poe struggles to outwit his Japanese counterpart Edogawa Ranpo, while Herman Melville is gliding above them and the Yokohama skyline in Moby Dick, The Guild’s official aircraft (you can probably guess it’s in the shape of a whale). 

But besides letting you pick up a few names from Japanese, American, or Russian literature, Bungo Stray Dogs has few more things to offer. The dynamic between the various literary-inspired characters creates original (although sometimes a bit complex, and sometimes a bit dark) plot lines. For example, while the initial plot line largely centers on Nakajima Atsushi, who was kicked out of an orphanage and has no food and no place to go but suddenly runs into Osamu Dazai and his partner Kunikiada who are tracking down a loose tiger that appeared in the area (the tiger later turns out to be Atsushi himself), the initial focus on Atsushi, who nevertheless remains one of the central figures of Bungo’s story world, gradually fragments into several plot lines which follow the Armed Detective Agency’s encounters with the Port Mafia, The Guild, and, later, the Rats of the House of the Dead. The perspective also frequently changes from that of the detective agency to a close-up view of the mafia’s business, which allows us to discover some elements of the characters’ dark past. Finally, although Bungo Stray Dogs is generally not a ‘dark’ anime (apart from some bloody visuals here and there), it does get pretty dark in Bungo Stray Dogs: Dead Apple with the introduction of  the antagonists Tatsuhiko Shibusawa and Fyodor Dostoevsky as special ability users in Yokohama and all over the world suddenly start committing suicides.

All in all, even if anime and manga are not really your thing, but you do have an interest in literature and cross-cultural encounters of all kind, I would definitely recommend giving Bungo Stray Dogs a go. The series is pretty unique in the way it plays with cultural figures from different parts of the world and engages them into unexpected encounters on the streets of Yokohama. Its underlying literary theme gives the otherwise ‘yet-another-action-anime’ an original touch and might end up being just right for all the ‘less-anime-and-manga-inclined’ bookworms out there. 

Sources: 

1. Valdez, Nick. “Bungo Stray Dogs’ Season 3 Shares New Poster.” ComicBook.com, 1 January 2019, https://comicbook.com/anime/2019/01/01/bungo-stray-dogs-season-3-poster/. Accessed 9 February 2019. 

‘Reinventing the Wheel’: How the Current Anime and Manga Scene Is Drawing Its Inspiration from the Theme of ‘the Doppelgänger’

Disclaimer: The contents and opinions of this blog post do not represent the views or values of Honours Review as a publication.

Anyone who has ever read Sui Ishida’s popular dark fantasy manga series Tokyo Ghoul, or watched at least one episode of its anime adaptation, probably noticed how the series largely builds its plot around the theme of the so-called ‘(evil) double’ or ‘the Doppelgänger’. 

Tokyo Ghoul is set in an alternate reality where humans coexist with cannibalistic ghouls. The ghouls look exactly like ‘normal’ human beings as well as mimic their behavior and appearance. Most of them live among the human population in secret to avoid being caught by the authorities. Some of them, however, are consciously trying to suppress their ‘ghoulish’ nature, integrate with the human population, and pursue a ‘normal’, human life. 

Throughout the greater part of the series, the protagonist Kaneki Ken struggles with his ‘inner-ghoul’ and tries to find a balance between his human and ghoul side. Kaneki’s struggle, however, is a bit more intense than that of an ‘every-day ghoul’ because Kaneki is a half-ghoul; neither a complete ghoul, nor a complete human being. A half-ghoul is usually an offspring of a human and a ghoul or is created artificially by transplanting ghoul organs into a human, as was the case with Kaneki.

As a half-ghoul, Kaneki experiences double-alienation; both from the world of ‘pure’ human beings and the world of ‘pure’ ghouls, due to which his character development primarily revolves around balancing the ‘human Kaneki’ and the ‘ghoul Kaneki’, as well as finding a way for humans and ghouls to coexist. The whole concept of the inner coexistence between the ‘human Kaneki’ and the ‘ghoul Kaneki’, together with the character’s attempts to suppress his ‘ghoulish’ nature at the beginning of the series, is also reflected in the first seasons’ opening theme Unravel by Toru Kitajima from Ling Tosite Sigure and its lyrics: “Is there someone inside of me?”   

In Ishida’s world, the figure of the ghoul can be seen as a metaphor of duality and the darker side of human nature. The ghoul metaphorically channels suppressed desires and/or uncontrollable feelings. So, for instance, while ‘human Kaneki’ would not even dare to hurt a fly, the ‘ghoul Kaneki’ channels precisely those aspects of Kaneki’s character which largely remain suppressed or hidden in his ‘human side’, such as Kaneki’s eventual decision to ‘hurt’ (i.e., completely smash) other ghouls in order to protect the people he cares for. But this dynamic between the two sides of Kaneki’s character and the idea of suppressing some uncontrollable aspects of human nature is not really that new in contemporary Japanese popular culture. 

In general, the theme of the “Doppelgänger” (German: Literally “double-goer”) actually goes all the way back to German Romanticism and the German poet Heinrich Heine. Heine’s poem Der Doppelgänger (1828) introduces the figure of ‘the double’ through the image of a man who suffers a mental breakdown once he encounters an individual looking uncannily like him. 

Even though the theme of the “Doppelgänger” has roots in German Romanticism, it has become better known through the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louise Stevenson, and the Russian writer Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. Poe’s short story William Wilson (1839) revolves around a student who meets a boy of the same name, age, and appearance. As a result, he loses his mind as the story unfolds and ‘the other William Wilson’ keeps appearing at different stages of ‘the original William Wilson’s’ life. Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) is probably the most famous story dealing with the theme of ‘the double’, in which Dr. Henry Jekyll experiments with chemicals that eventually turn him into the devious Mr. Edward Hyde. Finally, Dostoevsky’s famous novel The Double (1846) tells the story of a mentally-unstable clerk who is convinced that a double is stealing away his job, girl, and eventually bedroom. There’s a bunch of other books dealing with the theme of ‘the double’, but these are probably some of the best-known examples. There’s also a ton of pretty interesting movie adaptations to check out, such as Richard Ayoade’s The Double (2013), focusing on Dostoevsky’s novel.

The theme of ‘the double’ is also flooding the contemporary anime and manga scene and many popular series and productions are arguably inspired by the same themes that intrigued the minds of Poe and Stevenson almost a century ago. Tokyo Ghoul is just one of them. Recent volumes of Yana Toboso’s manga series Black Butler, for example, have revealed that the young Earl Ciel Phantomhive actually has a twin brother (as if one spoiled English lord was not enough for Sebastian to handle). 

Although dealing with the theme of ‘the double’ in a different way, Hajime Isayama’s Attack on Titan is similar to Tokyo Ghoul in some of its underlying ideas. For instance, while in Ishida’s story world the ghouls turn into a metaphor of some darker aspects of human nature, the same can be said for the humanoid giants in Isayama’s. Attack on Titan’s protagonist Eren Yaeger also goes through similar struggles as Kaneki while trying to control the transformations into his titan form. The figure of the titans, and the idea of humans transforming into them, can also be read as a metaphor of uncontrollable or inhuman urges that are sometimes difficult to suppress or should, for better or for worse, perhaps remain hidden.

The same goes for Ichigo Kurosaki from Tite Kubo’s manga and anime series Bleach. In Bleach, the theme of ‘the double’ is represented through Ichigo’s struggles with his hollow side (in the fictional world of Bleach, hollows are corrupted spirits which devour the souls of human beings), and many episodes of the anime and manga are visually impressive in their way of depicting how the human in Ichigo is gradually being devoured by the hollow inside him.

The list of anime series inspired by the theme of ‘the double’ could go on into infinity, but I will wrap up with one last example: Kazue Kato’s Blue Exorcist. This one is perhaps not the most obvious example but we can read Rin Okamura’s initial urge to suppress his demon instincts as representing a struggle between his ‘human self’ and the ‘demonic other’.

All in all, it is interesting to see how many anime and manga series are actually inspired by similar themes. From Tokyo Ghoul to Attack on Titan and Blue Exorcist, some elements in all of these series can be seen as based on the concept of ‘the Doppelgänger’ or ‘the (evil) double’. The frequent occurrence of the motif of ‘the double’ and the protagonist’s inner struggle to balance different aspects of his/her personality attests to these themes’ recurrent presence in contemporary Japanese popular culture, even though they have roots in German Romanticism and Edgar Allan Poe, or probably even further back in history. In any case, one could easily say that the series discussed above are just ‘reinventing the wheel’, but they all are still pretty amazing and give a ‘centuries-old theme’ their own, unique twist.