The Winter 2023 Anime Preview Guide

Bungo Stray Dogs Season 4

Things haven't been calm in Yokohama for quite some time. If the Armed Detective Agency and the Port Mafia aren't engaged in a power struggle for the soul of the city (watched over carefully by the government), outside groups like the Guild and the Rats in the House of the Dead are turning the city upside down in pursuit of a mysterious artifact known as The Book. Said to be a magical blank tome where anything written within its pages will become reality (provided it's written in the form of a story), desire for The Book has driven Fyodor Dostoyevsky, among others, to try to get the detectives and the mafiosi to take each other out and create a power void. He recently failed, but that doesn't mean that the danger is over – a new group is setting its sights on controlling Yokohama, and any single group of skill users won't be able to solve this new problem on their own.

Bungo Stray Dogs is based on Kafka Asagiri and Sango Harukawa's manga and streams on Crunchyroll on Wednesdays.

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

I know I just wrote an article about how Bungo Stray Dogs' anime adaptation freely takes material from the manga and the light novels. Somehow, I still didn't expect season four to open with an adaptation of the third light novel, The Untold Origins of the Detective Agency. It does make a lot of sense thinking about where the present-day storyline is going to head, and given how little chance Edogawa Ranpo has to shine on a regular basis in the main story, it's nice to see him take center stage here. It also balances out what we know of both the Armed Detective Agency and the Port Mafia; we've seen much more of the Port Mafia's back story than we have of the Armed Detective Agency's. That changes here since this storyline is about the founding of the agency by Yukichi Fukuzawa and Edogawa Ranpo.

The way that it's being animated is striking. Nearly the entire episode is done in black and white, with bursts of bright color from red blood or blue eyes shining through. Apart from a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment of the fact that in television, the past is nearly always in black and white (or in a British accent), it does an excellent job of establishing how Ranpo sees the world. He sees so much that he's constantly viewing things in all their possible shades of grey, still able to tell where the dividing lines are between truth and fiction. To him, the world is transparent; no blurred lines can be found. He is the living embodiment of the Golden Age concept of the fair play mystery, as illustrated beautifully when he barges in on Fukuzawa's crime scene and immediately solves the case using a set of clues that any mystery aficionado will be very familiar with. Interestingly enough, when the scene shifts to Fukuzawa's flashback, everything is in color, indicating that the black and white view is meant to symbolize something within Ranpo himself.

As always with these flashback storylines, it's a thrill to see what the characters were like in their past. The most striking is the cameo by baby Odasaku, who has yet to become the person who would have a transformative effect on Osamu Dazai. I freely admit that at this point, I'm basically Pavlov's dog whenever Odasaku shows up, and a sense of impending tragedy instantly strikes me. The contrast between preteen Odasaku and the adult man whose death will eventually make some of the most significant changes in the story's world is striking, and it certainly helps that his fight scene with Fukuzawa is implausibly fascinating to watch. Starting here feels like a real treat for fans of the source material, and we could always do with a reminder of why the lines are drawn where they are in the first place.