Dazai And The Ladies

Dazai and the ladies

Hey Nonny! Ooh, an excuse to talk about my favourite chapter in BSD! Don’t mind if I do. So the scene you’re talking about is this one, in the Double Black episode.

It’s very much played for humour. Throughout the chapter, they’re constantly dragging each other and this is like the one thing that actually seems to give Dazai pause for a moment. But how much truth is there in it? Now there’s a question.

Dazai the flirt

Dazai is aggressively, vocally into women. It’s one of the first things we ever learn about him.

I’m not, here, gonna go into whether or not the boy doth protest too much, but I don’t think I will shock anyone by saying that he is, when it comes to women he doesn’t know, an incredible flirt. He’s seemingly forever trying to get in the pants of the waitress at their coffee bar, he lays it on super thick with clients, etc.

It’s interesting to note here that most of that is an act.

For one, he only seems to do this to women that are not close to him. We, as readers/viewers, also know that he doesn’t mean it. Any of it. He’s probably already suspicious of Higuchi long before he decides to ‘woo’ her. The same for the waitress. He’s not actually expecting her to go “Oh yes, random weirdo who hangs out here but rarely pays his tab, let’s go drown ourselves together. It’ll be romantic.” We know Dazai as a highly intelligent man, who is very adept at reading moods. No way in hell would he be so unaware as to think his blunt flirtations would ever actually work.

Dazai the womanizer

So where does that flirt/womanizer idea come from? As you say, nonny, a lot of that is down to Dazai’s real life counterpart.

!Historical Dazai ( born Tsushima Shüji) was a pretty tragic figure. He attempted, multiple times, to take his own life, several times in a 'double suicide’ that cost the life of at least two young women, besides his own. To say that !Historical Dazai’s history with women is painful, is to put it mildly. That stuff is straight messed up.

Now, it’s tempting to think of !Maffia Dazai as reflecting the tragedies of !Historical Dazai. It’s fairly obvious that the character is based on the writer, and !Maffia Dazai is certainly… broken enough. Whereas!Agency Dazai mostly jokes about the suicide thing, and has long since given up actually killing, !Maffia Dazai is shown as extremely nihilistic and just downright depressed. He is cold, and cruel, and just… really sad. I wouldn’t put it past him to try and drown his sorrows in women, like he does in liquor. !Historical Dazai didn’t only have several wives, he had a thing for prostitutes, hostesses and geisha’s, which would fit neatly into the maffia persona. It is even possible that he ruined the lives of several of these women, the same way (or worse) as !Historical Dazai did. We are not shown evidence of this in the series (at this point), but it’s certainly a possibility.

If you think of it that way, all those jokes of his do take on a decidedly dark turn. It’s one thing to joke about your own death (we’re on tumblr, people do it all the time), it’s another to talk of double suicides if you’ve actually ruined a young woman’s life. In that sense, Chuuya’s threat is also incredibly bleak. The initial idea when you read that joke is the whole 'Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’ thing, but in this situation, it would rip open some old wounds and guilt on Dazai’s part.

But that is probably reading Too Much into what is essentially a good joke. Let’s assume that Dazai, being a big shot mobster, had a whole bunch of flings with dancing girls or whatever, and that he dumped them like the troll he is.

Dazai the s/o

Headcanon time!

I think it’s safe to say that !Agency Dazai is not the same man as !Maffia Dazai, or !Historical Dazai. Mentally, it seems to me as if Dazai is now in a better place, and the same goes for his relationships with the world around him. His general stance seems to be ‘don’t harm, care if you must, but troll the shit out of everyone’. Please note how much respect he has for Yosano, how he treats Naomi and Kyouka (once she’s inducted). He deeply cares about these people, but he also trolls the shit out of them. The same pretty much goes for the likes of Maffia and Guild members, such as Chuuya, Kouyou, Akutagawa, heck, even Q. He ostensibly hates these people, but he’s not about to truly hurt them. He just trolls the shit out of them. It is like this for pretty much the whole world. Dazai saves lives. It’s what he does, but he’s not exactly a gentleman about it. He protects, but he also trolls. 

So what this means for any s/o he may have, is that at the very least, they will be trolled on a near-daily basis.

The question is: would Dazai even have an s/o. I’m pretty big on the importance of healthy relationships, and I am also fairly certain that Dazai, in his current state, is incapable of having a healthy, loving relationship with any s/o. He cannot love another, because he friggin hates himself. It’s gonna take a very long time to heal that. And I think Dazai, in his current state, is also wise enough to realize when a relationship isn’t healthy, and to avoid it. He may be prone to flirtations, to flitting from one person to the next, to double suicides, even, but at this point he’s also trying very hard to avoid those situations from ever happening. He claims, way near the start of the show, to want a death where there are no victims but himself. To do this, he builds walls around himself, even as he is with people that are close to him.

You can see that in the way he treats someone like Atsushi. He cares deeply about Atsushi, I truly believe this, he wants to guide him and watch him grow, he wants to give him important advice to help that boy heal his wounds, but at the same time, he keeps his distance (see that 'i’m not into guys’ thing up there). His first instinct in any situation is to push people away, to gloss it over with a joke.

He’d do the same thing if he were to actually fall in love.

If he does, as you put it, find that special someone, I believe he wouldn’t even make a move until he’s a hundred percent certain that he can control all his urges, can keep himself in check, so that No One Gets Hurt. Dazai the character may be based on Tsushima, but he’s actively trying to avoid living the same life. He’s a that point in his life where he’s looking for atonement, he’s trying to make up for the hurt he caused, not make more. So unless he meets someone who is ok with open relationships, I doubt he’d cheat on them. He’s a troll, but he’s not heartless. The last thing he wants is another notch on his belt, another life ruined. Especially if it’s someone he truly cares about.

PS: I did a profile on Dazai a while back, that is Even Longer and goes deeper into some of his personality.