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Dazai is trying so hard.
He has been, for the past four years. In fact, for as long as he can remember—many, many years in the past, though his life has arguably barely even begun—he has been struggling with understanding people, the world, the reason for his existence, everything.
That statement could perhaps warrant some clarification.
Rather than a lack of comprehension, it would be better phrased as an overwhelming excess of it. Dazai understands people to an alarming degree. They are entirely too predictable to him—he can finish people’s sentences before they have barely gotten a word out themselves, just by reading the context of the situation. He can anticipate someone’s actions before they so much as move a muscle. No one can surprise him. No one ever has, and no one, he fears, ever will.
There was someone, once, that he thought could.
While he may not be the world traveler that others can claim to be, what he lacks in geographical breadth he makes up for in brutal, sickening depth. He has gazed into the deepest recesses of the human heart, and has stared into the darkest corners that this world has to offer. He did not even blink, because what he saw did not surprise him. If anything, his open eyes had a better chance of being blinded, bestowing him with the ability to finally, finally not see what he knows and despises.
The Mafia found in him an ideal killing machine—an ideal Executive—not because he was full of rage, or malice, or murderous intent, but because he could not conceive of a perspective where dying would be regarded as anything other than blissful, merciful release. His victims (no, recipients—recipients of the finest gift he could give them) would resist, of course (he did not grant them the painless death that he himself sought, after all), but surely in the end they would be grateful.
After all, if one has seen everything that this despicable, predictable world has to offer, then is there even a point to being alive?
This is a question he struggles with every day.
He wouldn’t struggle, though. He would let the current take him, or the rope strangle him, or the poison destroy him, if only that man hadn’t said those words to him. He could have died years ago—only in theory, of course; in practice, clearly, he has yet to succeed.
Something always stops him.
It isn’t Oda’s hand pulling him out of the water (it’s just a fishing net, this time), and it isn’t Oda cutting the rope around his neck (it was just too weak, again), and it isn’t Oda holding an antidote for whatever concoction he downed without hesitation (he just didn’t take enough pills, as usual), but it feels that way to Dazai all the same.
Dazai cannot fill the void in his heart. He will never find the reason for his existence. Oda said so himself. So why won’t he let him die?
Oda wanted to live. He wanted to live in a house by the sea, watching the waves as he relished in finally achieving his dream of becoming a writer. He wanted to find his purpose, his reason, his life’s meaning. Dazai would have liked to be right there beside him, if he could. He would still not have his own motivation, but at least he would be with Oda.
Is that why, then? If Oda himself cannot live and make something of himself, something good and full of light (though Dazai would say he already had, oh, he already had—no matter how dark his job, Oda had not a shred of darkness in him, not until someone else brought that darkness to him first, forced it upon him to see just how dark Oda could become), must Dazai live on in his stead, followed by the ghost of the only thing that his ruined heart has ever let him care for? Must he keep going, knowing that his every effort is meaningless?
If that is the case, then Oda is unbelievably cruel.
Dazai listened to him, because even he can appreciate the words of a dying man who was also simultaneously his first, closest, and only friend, but that does not mean that the path he chose to walk is an easy one.
Before he met Oda, he had nothing tying him to this world. When he still knew him, he had a reason to stick around, tenuous as it was. Now, in the aftermath of the only event that has ever shaken Dazai to his core, shattered to pieces what he thought was already too broken to be damaged further, Dazai has to fight against both his need to die and his desire to be with Oda again, if he meant what he said to him that day.
If he truly wants to honor Oda’s dying words, he knows that he has to live.
Dazai doesn’t want to live. Oda himself knew that—knows that, wherever he is. That may very well be why Oda made him agree to his request. Oda, the man who could not bring himself to take a human life, would surely not want to leave the world knowing his friend might intentionally follow him. So he made a promise, one to join the side that saves, and Dazai does not make promises that he cannot keep.
And yet, when he watches the waves on a particularly rough day, or sees a length of rope just begging to be used, or catches the eye of a sketchy back-alley dealer skulking in the shadows of a Yokohama street, he wonders if Oda would forgive him for breaking just this one.
Because Dazai both knows himself completely and doesn’t know himself at all, and if nothing else he knows that he can’t be the person Oda wants him to be, but even so, for Oda’s sake, he’s trying.
He is trying so hard.