Life is ugly and unpleasant, Chuuya. That has nothing to do with the Port Mafia.
[Again, he meets the challenge of trying to explain a lack of something so fundamental to most as to be taken for granted. He wouldn't change the life he's lived up to now; when he says his world is more beautiful now, it's not that it was previously the inverse.
Rather, there was nothing. There's still nothing; he won't ever find something that fills that hole inside of him. There's no great meaning he's found, in saving lives rather than taking them, nothing that makes him want to get up each morning. It's just that he could draw his attention away from that oxidizing world, just a little. A reason to live wasn't necessary to save someone else's, after all.]
You know why I joined to begin with? I had believed that surrounding myself with death, with violence and bloodshed and destruction might reveal to me the reason why people cling so desperately to life. ...I can't forgive Mori-san, but I don't regret that he brought me into the Port Mafia, or the time I spent there. It didn't help me find a reason to live, but before that, I had given up on even looking.
[Sounds to me like he wanted you to live.
Dazai knows that Chuuya isn't wrong, and yet those words might be the most painful ones yet, like that sealed vacuum inside has suddenly imploded, pulverizing what remains of the shreds of his insides. Odasaku did want him to live, for all he always humored his endless suicide talk, and yet went ahead and died without him.
How do you know? Dazai had asked him, back then.
I know. I know better than anybody.
Odasaku had wanted to live, too. He wanted to be a writer.]
...For all your claims of celebration, though, I think it makes you angriest that I could come back, but I won't. It'd be easier for you if Mori-san would want me hunted down, wouldn't it?
[It's cruel of him to turn the tables like this, to set his attention on Chuuya's door first. But he's realized, suddenly, what it wants from him. And he's not prepared to say it.]
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[Again, he meets the challenge of trying to explain a lack of something so fundamental to most as to be taken for granted. He wouldn't change the life he's lived up to now; when he says his world is more beautiful now, it's not that it was previously the inverse.
Rather, there was nothing. There's still nothing; he won't ever find something that fills that hole inside of him. There's no great meaning he's found, in saving lives rather than taking them, nothing that makes him want to get up each morning. It's just that he could draw his attention away from that oxidizing world, just a little. A reason to live wasn't necessary to save someone else's, after all.]
You know why I joined to begin with? I had believed that surrounding myself with death, with violence and bloodshed and destruction might reveal to me the reason why people cling so desperately to life. ...I can't forgive Mori-san, but I don't regret that he brought me into the Port Mafia, or the time I spent there. It didn't help me find a reason to live, but before that, I had given up on even looking.
[Sounds to me like he wanted you to live.
Dazai knows that Chuuya isn't wrong, and yet those words might be the most painful ones yet, like that sealed vacuum inside has suddenly imploded, pulverizing what remains of the shreds of his insides. Odasaku did want him to live, for all he always humored his endless suicide talk, and yet went ahead and died without him.
How do you know? Dazai had asked him, back then.
I know. I know better than anybody.
Odasaku had wanted to live, too. He wanted to be a writer.]
...For all your claims of celebration, though, I think it makes you angriest that I could come back, but I won't. It'd be easier for you if Mori-san would want me hunted down, wouldn't it?
[It's cruel of him to turn the tables like this, to set his attention on Chuuya's door first. But he's realized, suddenly, what it wants from him. And he's not prepared to say it.]