Bungo Stray Dogs Season 4

Episode 46

The real-life Akiko Yosano could be said to have contradictory views of war. In the early 1900s, when her brother was fighting against Russia, Yosano was a pacifist, loudly against war. By the 1930s, she had pivoted and began writing positively about soldiers sacrificing themselves on the battlefield. This week's episode of Bungo Stray Dogs seeks to capture both aspects of her as the fictional version of her details her past with Ougai Mori, himself a real-life army surgeon. This Yosano was snatched up by Mori (possibly literally) because of her Skill, “Thou Shalt Not Die.” Mori brought her to a remote battlefield where the electricity in the atmosphere interfered with modern methods of warfare, catapulting everyone back to WWI in terms of tactics and munitions. Yosano's job was to constantly heal the soldiers so that they could be sent back to the front over and over and over again until there wasn't enough of them left to fix. To say it's a horrible task for anyone is to understate. To make an eleven-year-old child do it is a crime.

So much of the Yosano we've learned is a façade she's put up to protect herself. After the events of the Great War (which, in our world, is what World War One was originally called), she spent three years in a psychiatric facility, and it was not until Rampo came and helped her that she was able to reclaim her mind. His reassurances that the Armed Detective Agency was the only place where she wasn't needed and therefore could live in peace are what saved her, and it's frankly unconscionable that no one before him ever thought to reassure her that she could live her life. But then, no one before him saw her as a person, much less a child – to everyone else, she was a tool or, as the soldiers she forced back into battle put it, an angel of death. Her glib, sometimes prickly front is her way of trying to prevent anyone from putting her in that position again.

I'd be lying if I said this wasn't one of the most challenging episodes of the series. What Yosano went through is horrible and familiar, whether from family stories, the news, or our own experiences. Yosano's interactions with the young soldier who at first hailed her as an angel only to tell her that her “kindness” was too much sums up the entire thing neatly: her ostensibly positive power becomes an evil that he can only escape through death, and he can only die if he makes sure that she knows that reviving him would be cruel. There's no way for her to come out unscathed; maybe deep down, that's what he wants. Why else would he let her know what he was going to do? Perhaps he wanted her to watch him die and understand that death, which she saw as hers to void, was the only way he could escape. It's the harshest lesson he could leave her with.

What, then, does the butterfly he made her symbolize to Yosano? Is it a reminder that once she had someone who valued her? Is it a cross she has to bear in memory of how her Skill was used against her? Or is it symbolic of how one small thing can change everything: a gift, a word, a wish? Certainly, he was the last person to treat her like the child she was until Rampo gave her back the very same butterfly. Maybe it's nothing more than the dusting of scales left on your hands after touching a butterfly's wings: a reminder that there are some things you shouldn't touch.

In any event, I'm sure most of us would now do anything to stop Mori from getting his paws on Yosano again. Even if she is walking right into a trap, better to deal with Fitzgerald than the man who actively tortured her. Sometimes the only thing you can do is make a bet on which evil will be the lesser, which I think is what Yosano just did.

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Bungo Stray Dogs Season 4 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.