Chapter 118

That was probably why he wanted to leave. After all, he had to get out of my house in order to be freed from his pain and reach the eternal slumber he yearned for. But since I was preventing his escape, he found himself separated even from death itself. Therefore, Dazai decided instead to shower me with complaints—and he had quite a bit to complain about. Meals, sleep, entertainment, even the passage of time—he criticized every aspect of my care with ruthless precision. Absolutely nothing escaped his criticism. He was a tyrant; it got so bad that I had every right to break down and cry like a nine-year-old girl if I wanted to. To tell the truth, though, I was completely fine…because I knew that his criticisms were merely an act driven by his objective to wear me down. He wanted to break my spirit, exhaust my patience, and push me to the point that I’d want to toss him out of the house just to be free of him. If I did that, he would win, and that was why I didn’t take a single word he said to heart. In fact, I was positive that he was secretly impressed by how well I was taking care of him. And yet, his complaints were… “Hey, you! This porridge is hot! I can’t eat this!” “Hey, this is really hot! I can’t use my arms when they’re tied up like this, you know! No, wait! Don’t feed—mfff?! Hot! It’th tho hot!” “I can eat! I can eat on my own! So stop feeding me! W-wait… I can’t move—gaaah! It got in my eye! It burns! It buuurns!” “Hey, uh… Can we do something about how I only get to go to the bathroom twice a day…? Even the Mafia’s prisoners have a little more freedom than this…” “Look, I know I said I was bored, but don’t you think I’m a little too old for you to be reading books to me in bed? And you keep reading me the same book! Plus, it’s missing the last few pages, so I have no idea how it ends! Is this torture? Some new type of torture?!” It was a very convincing performance. I completely ignored the whole thing as I nursed him back to health, and thanks to my unwavering devotion over the next few days, he eventually gave up. “This is hopeless… It’s like talking to a brick wall… He’s clueless…,” Dazai muttered that day, his voice hoarse and his eyes dull and lifeless. I had no idea what he meant by that, but from then on, he started to actually become a little more compliant. Dazai shifted tactics after that. Instead of complaining about how I was caring for him, he began making specific requests regarding food—especially about particular ingredients. Clearly, his goal was to wear me down, but I was a man of patience and consistency. I also happened to be practical enough to believe that anyone whose arms were bound deserved a bit of entertainment, so I became his kindhearted personal chef. Dazai’s first request was sashimi made from puffer fish entrails—a rare delicacy. However, when I went to the market to get some, the fish seller called me an idiot, leaving me with no choice but to give up. Next came grilled destroying angel mushrooms. A beautiful white variety of fungi, apparently. I wandered the mountains in search of them but couldn’t find any. I’d assumed they’d be plentiful, since the locals refused to eat them, but I had no such luck. Instead, I stir-fried some edible wild vegetables I’d found on the way back home, and when I served them to Dazai, he said, “This is delicious,” while shooting me a resentful, murderous glare. Finally, he asked for a salad made from sprouted potato eyes. Those were easy to come by, but I didn’t have time to wait for enough eyes to sprout, so instead of a salad, I reluctantly served them as a sandwich filling. Dazai ate the sandwich with odd enthusiasm, but later that night, he began vomiting profusely while writhing on the floor, screaming, “It wasn’t enough…!” To crave something so badly that you’d eat it to the point of illness… It must have been one of his favorite snacks, so that made all my hard work feel worth it. Then, on another day, I received a new complaint. “Look, I get that you genuinely want to take care of me only until I get better,” Dazai began, flapping his newly freed arms around. By the way, his legs were still tied to the bed. “But I’m so bored! I’m not allowed to read or use the phone, and there’s no TV or radio, either! All you have are a few music records! I’ve already listened to them so many times that I could probably perform the songs myself… So, like…is there really nothing else here to do? Anything even remotely entertaining?” “No.” “Wow… You didn’t even have to think about it. How can you live here without going crazy?” Dazai gazed at me, his eyes quivering with unmistakable terror. “How about we play a game, then?” I said, sitting myself in a chair. “The last person who lived here left a deck of cards behind.” “Yeah, I saw that. They’re on the bookshelf over there.” He shot me a skeptical glare. “But I’m not a little ten-year-old. It’s going to take more than that to entertain me.” “Then why don’t we make a little bet?” I asked, taking the cards out of the box. Dazai’s eyes flashed for an instant, sharp as a blade. “Oh? Doesn’t seem like you have anything you can bet, though. You don’t strike me as particularly wealthy.” He was right. I wasn’t drowning in cash, to say the least. “How about this?” I began. I took a chessboard from the shelf and arranged the thirty-two white and black pieces in rows facing one another before us. “These will be our chips. We’ll play poker and bet with them. The rules are Texas Hold’em, and it’s a ring game. The small blind is one chip; the big blind is two chips. No betting limit. If you win all my pieces, then I will allow you to leave this house as a free man.” “Heh.” His eyes narrowed. “Are you sure? You seem confident. What happens if you win? Would you like for me to offer some of my hidden assets?” “It’d be pointless to bet something you don’t have on you right now. There’s no way for me to confirm if what you’re saying is true.” “Then how about this counterfeit—?” “No. Absolutely not.” I pushed back the wad of cash Dazai was holding out to me. It looked like I was right; I knew the money was fake. “Hmm… Let’s do this,” I said. “Every time you lose sixteen pieces, you tell me one of your secrets.” “One of my secrets, huh?” Dazai faintly smirked. “You really thought this one through.” It was a suggestion born entirely from my own self-interest. The problem was simple: Once Dazai recovered and I let him go, there was always the chance he’d come back for revenge, and there was no way I was going to be able to stop him. After all, no wall in this world was high enough to stop the Port Mafia once they decided to retaliate. That meant I needed insurance or, at the very least, something that resembled it. If I could pry even the smallest sliver of truth from Dazai—his identity, his secrets, the tools he used—it might somewhat serve as a deterrent. Of course, I currently had no way to verify any secrets of his. They’d be merely for my own peace of mind, at best. But if I could get him to divulge a few secrets, that false sense of security might grow just enough to feel real. “Heh. This is getting interesting. So you think you can squeeze a few secrets out of me, huh?” Dazai wore a twisted grin. “It’s been a while since I met someone who truly believed they could beat me.” “Sounds like I got your attention,” I said while I dealt the cards. “Are you ready?” “Ready when you are.” Heads-up. Pre-flop. I dealt two cards facedown in front of me and two in front of Dazai. “You strike me as a fair person, so in the spirit of fairness, I’m going to let you in on a little trick I pulled,” Dazai said before even looking at his cards. “What kind of trick?” “Although you’re the one who suggested we play cards, I was the one who steered the conversation in this direction so that we’d play.” He looked at me with eyes that held a profound, unsettling stillness. “I’d already spotted the deck of cards on your bookshelf, and it didn’t seem like you had much else around for entertainment. Plus, with neither of us having much to bet, it was only a matter of time before you landed on the idea of wagering my freedom. And if you didn’t, well, I figured I could always whine until you gave in. Either way, I nudged things along until you did exactly what I wanted you to do.” “Interesting,” I replied, studying his face closely. “Then I take it you think you can win.” “I do,” he said, wearing a faint smile—one that seemed to flicker out from the shadows. “I never lose.” There was no bravado in his voice, no trace of irony or humor. He genuinely meant what he was saying. “And that’s why…,” Dazai began while he slid his small blind forward, “…you’re never going to get a single secret out of me.” Thirty minutes later: “The passcode to the Port Mafia’s emergency armory is…7280285E…,” Dazai muttered, his expression lifeless. He was bent over with one cheek on the table. “You have a lot of secrets,” I said, genuinely impressed. “Of course I do! I’m the leader of the Port Mafia boss’s personal special task force, you know!” he cried. “Gaaah! What’s going on here?! You made me give up almost every single secret I have! How humiliating…!” The game dragged on for eighteen rounds—and I won every single one of them. Where he lived, the nature of his subordinates’ unique skills, when he’d joined the Mafia, the total amount of funds at his disposal, his current duties within the organization, his favorite food, the location of a secret vault, the fact that the current boss was a former back-alley doctor named Mori… Each of the eighteen secrets Dazai revealed was more outrageous than the last—more than enough to convince me that he truly was someone important in the Port Mafia. In fact, he had likely revealed too much. Very few people probably knew the true history of the Port Mafia’s boss—the shadow ruler of Yokohama—and even fewer had learned it and lived. Now Dazai lay slumped over the table, looking thoroughly deflated. I guess he truly believed there was no way he was going to lose. “You tricked me…didn’t you?” Dazai said, glaring at me with a gaze thick and sluggish like mud. I tilted my head, confused. “How?” “I noticed halfway through that you were predicting what was going to happen. You used a skill. I let my guard down at first, since skills don’t work on me. However, if your skill affects the environment instead of people, then that would explain how you were able to so annoyingly foresee every single one of my moves.” “Sorry. It wasn’t really something I was trying to keep a secret,” I told him as I shuffled the cards. My skill allowed me to see events that were about to unfold. The window was longer than five seconds but shorter than six. Therefore, I could see Dazai’s next move, how much he was going to bet, and even the exact cards that were coming. On rare occasions during tight months when money had run thin, I would take a trip to the casino in the Yokohama Settlement and use my skill to scoop up a bit of easy cash. “You’re right, though. I wasn’t playing fair,” I admitted. “Like you, I’ve never lost a gamble like this before. Anyway, let’s just say that nobody won. No contest. To be honest, I only wanted to give you something to do, since you were bored.” “You can’t simply pretend like it didn’t happen.” Dazai shot me a protesting glare. “You couldn’t take back what happened even if you wanted to because unlike money, you can’t give information back. Or are you saying that you can somehow magically make yourself forget everything I told you?” “I can try if that’s the only way to make things right.” “What…?” he muttered with a weary expression. “Your jokes aren’t that funny, you know. I mean, they don’t even sound like jokes, since you say everything with a straight face.” I tilted my head. “I’m not joking, though.” “Yeah, yeah.” Dazai looked away and pouted. “Man… I can’t believe I leaked all that information. Mori’s gonna be furious with me.” I pondered for a few moments. “…Who’s Mori?” I asked. Dazai seemed stunned with disbelief. “Did you really forget…?” he said. Several days went by like this. Dazai’s injuries were no longer life-threatening and were beginning to heal. Although his wounds must have been inflamed and throbbing with pain, he remained strangely lighthearted for some reason. He didn’t seem interested in struggling or escaping, either, so I undid the restraints around his legs. I still kept the front door locked, though. It was a pleasant autumn day. The fallen leaves along the streets whispered memories of their time high up in the trees. The fragrance of Osmanthus drifted by, transforming memories into hazy, beautiful recollections. I sat by the window, lost in thought, contemplating my own past as I waited for the water to boil—time without purpose. It was a luxurious way to spend the day. “What are you thinking about?” Dazai asked me from the bed. “I was thinking about when I quit my last job. The Osmanthus were in full bloom that day, too.” “Your last job?” I cast a glance at the kettle in the kitchen, confirming it would still be a little while before the water boiled. Looking back, I must have been in an odd state of mind, because in that brief stretch of time before the kettle whistled, I was actually thinking that I might as well indulge Dazai in a little conversation about my past. “It wasn’t anything special,” I said as I approached him. “It was a dirty job, but I’ve left that world behind.” “How dirty was it?” I didn’t reply. Silence settled over the room for a while after that. I could hear the soft calls of a mockingbird and its young, speaking to one another from somewhere in the garden. “You don’t want to talk about it? All right,” Dazai said in acquiescence after a few moments. “Once I get better, I’m out of here. I guess that’s the extent of our relationship.” Again, I didn’t reply. A wisp of steam began to quietly rise from the kettle in the kitchen. “You’re right,” I told him. “You will leave once you get better, and you’ll be free to end your life however you please, wherever you want. Could I speculate for a moment, though?” “About what?” “About why you want to die so badly.” “Huh?” “You want to die because you’re an idiot,” I said resolutely. Startled, Dazai widened his eyes at me in disbelief. And then there was silence. He shifted slightly, the old floorboards creaking beneath his weight. Somewhere in the distance, a dog on a walk barked at a roadside tree. “That’s an interesting take.” When those words eventually escaped Dazai’s throat, his gaze transformed into something no longer human—unlike any living creature’s. His eyes were a pair of exposed wounds on his face where only darkness peered out. “You certainly talk big for a simple deliveryman. Then again, a lot of people have called me an idiot before, but there’s no way of knowing why they did…since they’re all dead now.” His expression resembled the end of a canal—a black wall at the point of no return, leading nowhere farther. “You don’t say,” I remarked. “Still, you would definitely be an idiot if you died before going there even once.” “Oh? And where’s that?” “It’s a quiet place. It’s not that far from here, either. And while it’s open to all, not everyone can truly appreciate its inherent worth.” “What is this? Some kind of riddle?” Dazai laughed hoarsely. “Trying to pique my interest with a little mystery?” “Not at all. Because I know that wouldn’t work on you.” “Good point,” he replied, averting his gaze. “I just can’t figure you out.” He cocked his head to one side, though his gaze remained fixed on me. Then, without a word, he glanced toward the entrance and softly chuckled, not at me but seemingly at the situation itself. And with that, the heavy air hanging over the room seemed to have gotten somewhat lighter. “Fine,” he said. “As a thank-you for treating my wounds, I’ll entertain your nonsense for a moment. You told me I’m stupid for wanting to die, right? Here’s a question for you. If it’s so stupid, then why does everyone die in the end?” I stared at Dazai. He sat in silence, serene and still like an ancient manuscript waiting patiently to be unraveled to reveal its secrets. “The mortality rate for being alive is one hundred percent,” he said. His voice carried a hoarse echo, like that of a hermit who had been alive for thousands of years. “However, if you look across the entire biological world, there are creatures that do not die. There are creatures that have no internal clocks ticking down until their death. In other words, human death is merely one of the functions included in life—simply a final, obligatory scene written into the script.” I pondered over what he said for a moment. “So you’re claiming that life isn’t something to be cherished?” “That’s not what I’m saying. It’s worse than that. Despite this preordained script of death, every single human being is born with a preset desire to not want to die, and that desire will never be fulfilled.” There was an emptiness to his words, as if he was reading lines from a script he’d recited thousands of times—like well-worn clichés muttered over and over, each one accompanied by the same groans of resignation. “This implies that the very act of desiring is merely a tool—a convenient hypothesis far removed from the truth—and we are simply followers mimicking this hypothetical thesis of our predecessors. They lived, and therefore, you must live. How do you refute this bleak theorem?” I looked at him. Several rebuttals came to mind. For instance, desires were difficult to achieve—that’s precisely what made them desires. But I intuitively understood that Dazai hadn’t revealed even a ten-thousandth of his true intentions. Even if I had voiced a rebuttal, he’d already prepared a counter-rebuttal. This was a discussion that had been fully exhausted in his mind. Plus, he likely had a counter-rebuttal to that counter-rebuttal as well. Like an endless staircase descending into the underworld, there was no bottom to Dazai’s dark reasoning. I glanced briefly at the kitchen where the kettle had started to steam. “And that’s why you want to die?” I asked, but Dazai shook his head. “No. This is nothing but a little play on words. There are things that cannot be expressed through language. Whereof one cannot speak—” “Thereof one must be silent.” I finished his sentence before continuing. “I get that. You’re the only one who can understand your world, but that still doesn’t change the fact that you’re an idiot. That much I can say with certainty.” “Yeah, yeah.” Dazai let out an exaggerated sigh and flopped onto the bed. He reminded me of a teacher fed up with a mischievous child who never ran out of tricks. “I’m not going to correct you or anything, but are you referring to this place that you were talking about a second ago?” he asked. “You’ll see when we get there,” I said, glancing out the window at the bright and quiet street. “How about trying to explain the place to me now just to see how I’ll react?” “I’ll pass. Sometimes—most of the time—things like this can’t be put into words.” “Oh? I wasn’t expecting to hear you say that. I thought you loved to read.” Dazai shifted his gaze to my bookshelf. “I do, and that’s why this really bothers me” was my honest reply. Dazai stared at me for a moment and then suddenly laughed—a little more naturally than before. “Interesting,” he muttered. “You’re modest. I don’t hate that.” Steam was gradually escaping the kettle in the kitchen. “I don’t hate staying here, either,” Dazai added. “At least, not as much as I thought I would.” All of a sudden, there was a knock at the front door. Me and Dazai briefly exchanged glances before a man outside started to speak. “Excuse me. We’re with the local police. We received a report of an injured man last sighted around here, and we would like to ask if you’ve seen anything.” A silhouette came into view through the decorative glass panel on the door. It was a patrolman from the city police—the literal power of the state. Ever since meeting Dazai, my luck had been in free fall, and now it appeared to have finally pierced straight through to the Earth’s core. “Excuse me. This is the police. Is anyone home?” The insistent knocking rattled the front door repeatedly. It should be locked. What’s this about? Dazai directed his gaze at me, then pressed his index finger to his lips, gesturing for me to be quiet. It seemed he wanted me to pretend that I wasn’t home. A thought finally began to stir in my sluggish mind. Sure, I could pretend that I wasn’t home, but why would I? The cops weren’t here to arrest me. I hadn’t done anything wrong. I ran through the possibilities. Let’s say I opened the door and greeted the officers with a casual “hello.” If I only cracked the door open, they probably wouldn’t be able to see Dazai in the back. They would then ask if I had seen a man covered in blood. Then what? Should I tell them about Dazai? Should I keep quiet? If I kept quiet, they’d leave. That part was easy, but what about after that? If Dazai had committed a crime (and obviously, he almost certainly had), then I’d be guilty of harboring a criminal. I could even be tried for aiding and abetting, depending on how things played out, and that would mean spending the rest of my days in a lovely little government-funded inn, eating three square meals a day. Now, let’s say that I opened the door and told the police that Dazai was here. He’d almost definitely be arrested. I mean, just look at him, I thought. He had gunshot wounds and clearly hadn’t gone to a hospital for treatment; that was suspicious enough to spark any police officer’s curiosity. In fact, these officers might even be here specifically because Dazai was already wanted by the police, and if that were the case, then there was a high chance that I was going to be arrested as an accomplice. Saying that I’d had no idea he was a criminal when I’d patched him up probably wouldn’t fly, either. Even if it did, Dazai and I would have to collaborate on a story in advance for when we were questioned at the station. Of course, we never did any of that, though. There was no time to come up with a story now, and knowing Dazai, there was zero guarantee that he would actually stick to the story, either. I glanced at him, clinging to a faint glimmer of hope…and found him grinning like a mischievous child plotting a prank, albeit he looked fifty times more sinister. He obviously wasn’t going to be any help. That look on his face reminded me of another problem. If I handed Dazai over to the police, I could expect a visit from the Port Mafia later. And they wouldn’t just knock on my door—they’d wash over everything like a tsunami, wiping me and this whole house off the map. Therefore, I had no choice but to pretend like I wasn’t home. I quietly hid behind the bed right next to Dazai. The police’s knocking was the only sound, like a stray dog’s relentless barking. With nothing else to do, I found myself counting the rhythm of my own breathing. Ten. Twenty. But when I got to twenty-eight, the knocking stopped. “Maybe no one’s home,” said a man with a deep voice on the other side of the door. “Looks that way,” replied a slightly younger-sounding man. It seemed like they were about to leave as long as we stayed quiet, and then peace might return to the world. Unfortunately, nothing in life is ever that easy. Dazai quickly tapped me on the shoulder twice. His expression was stiff as he pointed in the opposite direction of the door. I followed his gaze until I figured out that he was pointing at the kitchen, and I immediately noticed why. The kettle. The kettle that I was using to boil water for coffee was steaming vigorously, and the intensity of the steam indicated that it was about to reach a boil. Why was that bad? Because it was a whistling kettle, and once it reached a certain amount of internal pressure, then steam would shoot through the spout and whistle with all the ferocity of a tuba. Put simply, it was loud enough to reach the other side of the street, alerting the officers that someone was home. I scanned the room, but there was nothing useful nearby. It was about eight yards to the kitchen, and the wooden floors creaked, which would yet again alert the officers to our presence. I directed my gaze at Dazai once more. After a brief moment of hesitation, he started to perform a series of gestures. He pointed at the kitchen, then at me. Next, he held out one hand, palm up, and with the other, he slowly walked his index and middle fingers across his open palm. After that, he pressed his index finger to his lips, then held up his thumb, smiled, and nodded. I nodded back. “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked. “Shhh!” whispered Dazai. “You didn’t get any of that? I’m telling you to sneak into the kitchen and turn off the stove! I’d do it, but I can’t walk like this…” “All right. The water’s about to boil. I need to hurry.” “Hey, are you really taking this seriously?” He shot me a skeptical gaze. “Because it’s hard to tell, since your expression never changes…” I carefully took a step forward. The amber-colored floorboards, which were thin due to the shoddy construction, would creak with even the slightest misstep. I had to pay close attention to where I placed my feet. Imagining that my toes were like soft cloth falling, I took each step cautiously. Here was another situation where my unique skill would come in handy, allowing me to carefully inspect where to place my toes so that the floorboards wouldn’t creak. A single second felt like an hour. The kettle hadn’t started whistling yet. On the other side of the door, the police officers were discussing what to do; after about thirty seconds, I had made it halfway to the kitchen. Things were going smoothly. Incidentally, there’s a phrase called wishful thinking that perfectly describes this situation: wishful thinking noun /‘wish-fl ‘thiŋ-kiŋ / How Sakunosuke Oda was feeling up until just a second ago I suddenly saw a future where the kettle started whistling a high-pitched, almost merry tune. In other words, I had five seconds left before my own personal death sentence was announced. It was a heart-pounding experience, to say the least. I wanted nothing more than to leap across the room and grab the kettle, but I held myself back. What I needed now was a new kind of strength—something cautiously savage, you could say. I placed my fingers carefully on the floor and began to crawl forward, moving low and flat like a water strider gliding silently across the surface of a summer pond. Dazai, however, let out a soft snort of laughter, clearly unable to contain himself at the sight and rightly so. If someone had filmed me doing this and submitted it to the local newspaper, I would have packed up and moved to another city before sundown. My eyes were locked forward, my face hovering just above the floor, my torso trailing along while my limbs scrambled about like machines with minds of their own. One second. Two. My shameless crawling was proving to be effective. I was almost at the kettle. In fact, I could probably reach the stove and turn it off from here before a rooster could say cock-a-doodle-doo. But yet again, I had underestimated the situation. I’d forgotten about the one foreign element in this house: Dazai, a man more unpredictable than anyone I had ever met. The kind of person who would suddenly start sprinting in the opposite direction for no reason during a three-legged race. The type of guy who would desperately climb up a cliff to survive being mauled, then instantly change his mind and decide he wanted to fall to his death instead. A man so far removed from the logic of this world—our dearly beloved agent of chaos. Dazai suddenly stood up. “You think the police officers will shoot me if I rush outside with a gun?” I instinctively looked back with what must have been the most ridiculous expression on my face. Just how much more suffering did I have in store today? “There aren’t any guns in my house,” I replied. “Really? Then I guess a kitchen knife will have to do.” Dazai smoothly slipped right past me…and after all the hard work I’d put into crawling quietly toward the stove, too. To make matters worse, the officers at the door obviously heard our little exchange. “Hey! I know you’re in there!” one of them shouted. “Open the door!” I was so overwhelmed that I couldn’t keep up with everything. That was when Dazai skipped off toward the kitchen. If he got his hands on a knife, the whole situation would spiral out of control. I had to stop him. I wanted to cry out for help, but unfortunately, I was the only one who could do this. I sprang forward, sweeping his legs out from under him. Dazai did a little spin in the air, landing cleanly on his back, his eyes and mouth opened wide in surprise. Immediately, I grabbed his neck, slipped behind him, and locked him in a rear naked choke, my forearm pressing against his carotid artery while I wrapped my legs around his torso to hold him in place. Dazai and I wrestling on the floor. Police shouting at the front door. The kettle beginning to obnoxiously whistle. It was a goddamn party. Somehow amid Dazai’s gleeful flailing, he happened to land a perfect kick on the kitchen counter, causing everything atop to rattle. Then another kick. Something shifted with a foreboding clink, but I couldn’t see what it was with my back plastered to the floor. However, the instant I realized that those kicks had been deliberate, I saw the future, and I honestly wished I hadn’t. I saw a future where the kitchen knife Dazai had been trying to grab was shaken off the edge of the counter, and there was nothing I could do to stop it—at least, not without releasing my chokehold on him. I promptly used my skill to predict its trajectory and narrowly tilted out of the way. The knife plunged straight down, embedding its razor-sharp blade into the wooden floor with a satisfying thunk. I’m never sharpening that thing again. “Stop struggling,” I demanded. “Don’t fight it. It’s okay. This isn’t going to hurt.” Even I had no idea what I was saying anymore. “Liar! That’s what Mori says when he gives me a shot!” Dazai yelled as he thrashed about. It sounded like I wasn’t the only one who had a hard time with Dazai…but who the hell was Mori?