Reading Literary Giants

It didn’t take a genius to figure that Meursault hadn’t been the sunniest of places. Dazai had returned home after an eternity, his skin paler by a degree. After Atsushi released him from a crushing embrace, Dazai had collapsed on Atsushi’s shoulder into a deep sleep. So still, a crumpled figure, exhausted like a child who knew he was finally safe. Atsushi had wept again, and he fell asleep with an ear pressed to Dazai’s chest, to heartbeats freed from its forced control. And finally, Atsushi did not dream.

Fourteen hours later, Dazai stirred on their futon, and for the longest, most terrifying moment, his eyes had stared into nothing.

Like he was an apparition, living only within Atsushi’s mind.

But Dazai smelt of sterile plane air and gunpowder, and the warmth from the sun-dried sheets of their futon. Atsushi brushed Dazai’s fringe off his forehead—his hair was greasy, and Atsushi didn’t care. He pressed a kiss to Dazai’s forehead and mouthed his name, and he waited.

In slow degrees, Dazai focused back on their world. He looked at Atsushi, eyes tracing Atsushi’s face in lieu of touch until they fluttered close again. Then, in a cracked voice, he said, “Let’s go for a walk, Atsushi-kun.”

They hadn’t much by way of casual clothes. Fukuzawa had told them to lie low until the Armed Detective Agency could clear their name, and that included putting aside their favoured work outfits. Incognito was the name of the game. Between them, they dug out a loose shirt and trousers that, even on Dazai’s tall frame, dwarfed him. A pair of patchwork jeans and a simple worn shirt, scrounged from a secondhand store, worked for Atsushi. But the problem was his hair; he had become a recognisable figure ever since the crash of Moby Dick, and white shone in the sun.

Out of nowhere, Dazai grabbed a baseball cap and put it carefully on Atsushi’s head, back to front. And when he teased, “What a rebel you are, Atsushi-kun,” he sounded almost like himself again.

“Rebel enough to send our enemies running for the hill?” Atsushi said.

“For another country,” Dazai declared, rolling with the pretense that this was all the weapon they needed.

They looked into the mirror, side by side. Atsushi had the strangest sensation of them being in another universe altogether. Like this, they could pass as university students—Dazai’s eyebags were from an all-nighter to finish his essays, and the tension in Atsushi’s shoulders was from the shock of his first mid-terms. Not from sunless prisons, or impossible rebirths.

A pretense for just this one day.

Dazai smiled at him through the mirror. “Shall we to our date, Atsushi-kun?”

He held out his hand, and Atsushi locked eyes with him through the mirror. He took Dazai’s hand, and smiled too, and said, “Let’s.”

.

They blended in with the flow of people, looking for all the world like two students soaking in the sun. At one of the outlets of that ubiquitous coffee chain, Dazai bought a monstrous matcha frappuccino for them, and the counter staff said a bored thank you for your patronage. The machines whirred, a girl spilled some coffee in dismay, and nobody took a second look at them. On the television, there was footage of ongoing repairs made to the airport. The rain had washed the worst of the blood away, and the cleaners had done the rest.

The news anchor had moved on to Nara’s shortage of deer crackers by the time Dazai got their drink.

They passed the drink back and forth as they walked, down the broad path along the bay, from which the distant horizon of the sea could be seen. The frappuccino was far too sweet, yet they continued to sip at it. A girl shoved a flyer into their hands for a job-hunting exhibition taking place the next month; now we can join their ranks, Dazai said with a wink at Atsushi, then he folded the flyer into an aeroplane and sent it soaring, to the delight of a column of toddlers.

In this way they spent an hour, then two. Most of the time, they walked in silence. In unanimous accord, they did not speak of the rest of the agency and what they might be doing, scattered to the wind. A pretense worked only when they balanced that see-saw perfectly.

Atsushi murmured, “It’s nice, being out here like this.”

I’ve forgotten how peace felt like, he didn’t say.

But even as he said that, the see-saw began to teeter. The peace sat odd on his shoulders, like the overlarge sleeves draped over his elbows, so different from his usual crisp dress shirt. Dazai’s hair was in need of a trim, and the voluminous clothes could not hide his sharply thin wrists. Yet Central Yokohama had resumed its routine, as though a child hadn’t cried in a tunnel with bombs strapped to her neck. The church was quiet without a service, all the dead of the mafia buried and mourned. And where Moby Dick had once lain in the sea, forlornly beautiful in its destruction, it was now endless waves that the seagulls flew over.

“Yes, it is nice,” Dazai said, as a child ran by with an ice cream cone stacked three balls tall. “But how strange,” Dazai murmured, in an uncanny echo of Atsushi’s thoughts. “The evidence of our success is in this, in the very absence of change.”

The see-saw wobbled, and sank, and stilled.

“Our success,” Atsushi echoed.

Success winked at them in the form of their family disbanded, their home locked up, Closed Until Further Notice. It took the form of Atsushi’s feet treading on the pavement in an off-kilter beat, and Dazai tilting his face towards the sun as a man in the desert fell upon a mirage. Their steps, silent by instinct, could never have hoped to have the loud vigour of university students.

“So why,” Atsushi said, “does it not feel like that? Dazai-san—” his steps slowed, and Dazai’s did too. The drops of condensation on the frappuccino rolled down the cup, then onto the ground. Atsushi followed its path, to the circular bloom of wetness that disturbed the smooth pavement. “My dreams did not stop, until you came back. But all this time, you…you did not even sleep, did you?”

Atsushi’s voice had trailed into a whisper. Dazai was smiling. There was even praise in it, like when Atsushi had resolved a particularly tricky case.

“Dazai-san…what did they do to you?” Atsushi said in quiet horror.

A seagull cried, and another answered its call, and the pretense fell apart. “Nothing,” Dazai said airily. Then, with a laugh, chilly enough to cool the air several degrees, “No, really, Atsushi-kun. They did nothing. And that was the point of it all.”

But that couldn’t be it. Even now, even with this heat, Dazai was leaning into Atsushi’s space, their arms brushing with every breath. “Nothing?” Atsushi repeated.

Dazai’s smile turned distant. “Because emptiness is their weapon,” he said.

Atsushi blinked, and he was in that fourth-dimensional plane again, empty and overfull all at once. The world was rushing beneath him, above him, around him. Familiar places, familiar people, thrown onto a dazzling plane of white then fading rapidly into nothingness. And in that space, void of time, Dazai was the only anchor. A steady unforgiving figure, the only shadow in all that white, that told him to look and think and walk forward with every frightened desperate beat of his heart.

But no, that was not Dazai. Because Dazai had never looked at him in that way, with eyes a dark pool of shadows. Dazai teased him and pushed him forward with a hand on his back and he liked to say you can do it, right? because he had never once lost faith in Atsushi. And Dazai—Dazai couldn’t be dead, like Atsushi and the rest were, and Dazai was desperately fighting too, fighting to claw them back, Dazai had always been the very opposite of emptiness—

He gasped. The frappucino was a shock of cold against his skin, and the condensation rolled down his cheek. Dazai was gazing at him, tired and wan, but warm. The drink, more slush than substance by now, caught the light at an angle, creamy green that they had taken turns decimating as the sun beat down on them. His breaths slowed, and steadied.

“…let’s sit down, Atsushi-kun,” Dazai said. Whether it was coincidence or otherwise, Atsushi knew this bench—one among many in this peaceful park, the very same one he had sat on the day after the headmaster’s death. “Talk to me, Atsushi-kun. Tell me everything you went through—everything that I put you through.”

Not far from them, a group of students were seated under the shade, snacks and drinks spread between them, laughing. The waves continued to wash up against the bay, and on the bench the entire line of their thighs was pressed together. Dazai was so solid, so present, that the events in Atsushi’s head began to gain a certain surreality. And somehow that made it easier, dressed like this as though he were not Nakajima Atsushi, and could finally bear to look back with the aid of distance.

“Where do I even begin?” Atsushi said softly. He pressed his lips closed again and looked at Dazai, mutely. Dazai smiled at him in a sad sort of compassion.

“Tell me,” he said, “how it felt to die.”

.

For the first time since everything ended in the rain, or since Dazai was taken away, or perhaps since Atsushi joined the Agency—for what felt like the first time in his life, Atsushi talked.

He talked for hours, with starts and stops. He backtracked at several points—when he missed out Kenji’s unwavering optimism, or the surety of Yosano’s smile. He meandered and lost his train of thoughts at others: when had Ranpo commandeered that press conference, that gave them so much hope in the despair?

As he talked, Dazai absently toyed with Atsushi’s fingers. It was ticklish, unpredictable. It held the tiger at bay, calmed the roiling instinct to flee from the darkness. A grounding touch.

He talked of Akutagawa dying before his eyes, without anger or hatred. He talked of Kunikida, stern and clear-headed and determined, cut down and taken away. Then Tanizaki, trust in his eyes and determination in his lips, making a promise to Atsushi—then disappearing into a void before his eyes.

He talked of being left all alone, and of begging like a worm, and of a piece of paper torn to shreds before his very eyes.

“Dying,” Atsushi swallowed. “Dying was the most difficult, and easiest thing to do.”

“Yes,” Dazai said, a sigh. “It truly is.”

Atsushi looked at him, as one sought the comfort of the sun. And Dazai returned his gaze with a quiet understanding that could only come from one who danced intimately with death. Dazai had died once before, truly died, his final words a goodbye to Atsushi. In that moment, Atsushi’s world had shattered.

But this time, as the world he loved slipped away from him in fragments, it hadn’t been horror so much as it was relief that perhaps, if all else failed, he would join them, too.

It had been the easiest thing in the world to throw himself in the path of the sword.

“While I was…dead,” Atsushi whispered, “you were there.”

“Was I?”

There used to be a flicker in Atsushi’s mind, a shadow. But no longer.

Atsushi said, “I didn’t know what to do. I haven’t the brain like yours, you know…so many times I thought it was the end of the road, and then there you were, next to me. But when I died—when I leapt into the blade that Fukuchi-san wielded—that was not you there.”

Dazai smiled slow and sad. “So who was?”

“...a phantom. A phantom who knew the only way I would listen was if he took your form.” Atsushi inhaled deeply. The roses were blooming, and in the late afternoon sunlight, their fragrance wove around them gentle and sweet. “But more than that—something inside me knew, even before my mind did, that Dazai-san is not allowed to die.”

Dazai laughed quietly. “That’s cruel, Atsushi-kun.”

“Maybe it was,” Atsushi admitted. “But it was knowing that the real Dazai-san was out there, waiting for me to solve the puzzle, that made dying the easiest thing in the world.”

Dazai was silent for a while. Then he said, “Without your death—we would all have died. A magnificent lovers’ suicide, if you think about it.”

Atsushi chuckled. Dazai had said that without fervour, simply as a statement of fact. He leaned against Dazai, strands of their hair brushing against each other. The clock began to toll, six o’clock at night, the sky turning orange at the edge. Dazai gazed up at it, like the day giving way to night was as wondrous as the sun itself.

“Jeremy Bentham designed the Panopticon,” Dazai said, light and easy, as though he were giving a lecture. “The idea is simple: a prison with a central tower, and all around the tower were the cells. The guards are shrouded in darkness; you do not know when you are being watched. You do not see a single being other than yourself. The cells saw no daylight, no night—only bright fluorescent lights, all around the clock. What do you think happens to the prisoners in a place like that?”

Atsushi tightened his grip on Dazai’s hand. It was warm and sweaty and he could not let go.

Dazai nodded slowly. “Meursault was like that. Lights all around, cells with no walls. Nothing to entertain myself with but the devil before me. Nothing to hurt myself with but my own mind. An expanse of nothingness before me, an expanse of nothingness behind.” The tilt of his lips was wry and mocking. “I suppose I was lucky. There was a devil to play with, and a world to save. Who can afford madness with such luxuries?”

Atsushi hung on to every horrible word. He would have wept, but he had cried his terror and relief out in Dazai’s arms, against his beating heart, and all that was left was the necessary pain of lancing a boil. Dazai’s cheeks had regained colour in the sun, and even as he said each terrible word—chess with the devil, endless time, the world spinning outside this vacuum—he kept their fingers laced together.

“In Meursault,” Dazai said, “I nearly died thrice.”

Once by the hand of the devil, and once by the hand of his ex-partner. Dazai said this without intonation, as a matter of fact. As someone who had survived being entrapped in a lift of water, and who escaped the kiss of a bullet through the control of an ex-partner whom Dazai admitted he could always trust. Poison had coursed through his veins for the shortest and longest thirty minutes of his life, and faded into nothing upon his victory.

Three deaths, three escapes.

“It would have been the easiest thing in the world,” Dazai murmured, “to not take the antidote. To let the poison run its course.”

“So why didn’t you?” Atsushi said, equally quietly.

It was a sunset like this, Atsushi recalled. Returning from a mission in which Dazai had saved the day, and Atsushi had marvelled at his intelligence and the lonely figure of his back, in the light of the setting sun. He had asked Dazai, voice clear in the wavering light, why does Dazai-san want to commit suicide? And what had Dazai said, then? How had his words, so dear and important, disappeared into the fading light?

“Even though you always said you wanted to die, you didn’t submit to the poison. So why…why does Dazai-san always try to commit suicide, then?”

The roses were silent without the whisper of wind. Dazai looked at Atsushi and said, heartbreakingly soft—

“Because only then do I feel alive.”

Even the seagulls were silent. The park had emptied, and soon the night would take over. So that was it, Atsushi thought. He felt like smiling and crying all at once, at the solving of a mystery, at the ache in Dazai’s expression echoed in Atsushi’s heart. For the man who was so desirous of life that God bestowed him the gift of nothingness.

“And how did it feel, this time?” he said.

Dazai gazed at the sea beyond the park. “This time,” he said, “it tasted foul. To die where the sun was shut out, where darkness never took her turn?” He shook his head. “The worst sort of death, for a connoisseur like me.” Atsushi laughed, a choking sound. Dazai continued with a squeeze of Atsushi’s hand, “But the truth was, even if it was the easiest death in the world…I don’t think I could bear to anymore. If I had—I wouldn’t have shared a stupidly sweet frappuccino with Atsushi-kun, and Atsushi-kun wouldn’t have laughed when I got a brain freeze. And we wouldn’t have walked around in these absurd clothes, and baked in the sun for no reason at all.”

Atsushi laughed properly then, until it hurt. The cup had left a ring of condensation on the bench, and it was a disgusting cloudy white within, and it was the most wonderful thing. Dazai tugged Atsushi to lean against him, and in a small voice, honest and raw, he said, “I couldn’t bear to let this world that we love shatter.”

After a long, long moment, Atsushi said, “I don’t know if Dostoyevsky is truly gone.”

“Neither do I.”

“And—the Book that he had a page of—it’s not really safe, is it?”

“It isn’t,” Dazai said quietly.

Atsushi took a deep breath. “He called me—the bookmark. Just like Fitzgerald called me the tiger beetle—the guide.”

“Yes,” Dazai said in an exhale. “Yes.”

“What does it mean? What…what will we do, from now on?”

Dazai looked at him for a long moment, with a gaze far older, far wearier than any student’s could ever be. And so gentle too, the last light of the sunset bringing out the warmth in his eyes.

“I don’t know if I can say what it means. But whatever it may be…we fight on,” Dazai said. “Struggling like stray dogs. Even when dying is the easiest thing that we could ever do.” He curled the long lock of Atsushi’s hair around his fingers, infinitely fond. “Are you ready for that, Atsushi-kun?”

Atsushi closed his eyes and leaned into the touch. It might be tomorrow, or the next week, or even months before the sign would be removed from their door, and the agency is up and running again. Even Dazai couldn’t say. But already Atsushi was missing the crisp dress shirt that Dazai ironed for him, the ridiculously long belt that curled around his hip and flew with him into battle. The Book continued to whisper its secrets, and Dostoyevsky haunted his mind, with his devil’s whisper of the head may err, but never the blood. And Dazai might have to go far away again, to wage his own desperate battle.

“We struggle on,” Atsushi said, in a declaration.