i CANNOT hear that one my little soda pop song without thinking of my beloved oda sakunosuke
who even came up with the idea of writing soda on his tombstone 😭
jokes aside, fun fact! did you know that aparently oda's grave actually does not have a name in it?
In the middle of a verdant mountain trail atop a hill overlooking Yokohama was a cemetery with a view of the ocean. There were many new graves lined up — among them a small white burial marker without a name.
— excerpt from the dark era epilogue
it saddens me how this is yet another example of how oda is just another dead man, just another tool of the underworld. i wonder if dazai meddled in that. it says "many new graves", i wonder how many didn't get one. did the children got theirs? did gide and his men?
also, in dead apple, when atsushi asks whose grave that is, i wonder if instead of asking what that person meant to dazai, he was really asking “who?”. dazai calls atsushi by his full name, but atsushi never had any way of knowing the name of the person dazai was visiting
i really like how this reinforces that faceless, nameless figure whose shadow sometimes looms over the narrative. (oda haunting yay)
anyway, there are probably very few people alive who knew who he was, and consequently, whose grave that was.
(i wonder if they like. mark it with something. if they count the steps or the rows of graves. if they carved “s.oda” into the stone. if they memorized which one it is over time.)
