Bungo Stray Dogs, Vol. 27

文豪ストレイドッグス [Bungō Stray Dogs] (Comic) #27

by Kafka Asagiri, Sango Harukawa (Artist), Kevin Gifford (Translator)

最悪の状況から、一縷の望みを掴み取る――多次元空間で敦が見たものは!?
神人に斬られそうになった芥川を庇った敦は、神人の多次元空間に取り込まれてしまう。そこで、過去や己の内なる太宰と向き合う敦は、雨御前の謎に迫り…。反撃の糸口を掴むことはできるか…!?

Genres: Manga, Fantasy, Seinen, Mystery, Graphic Novels, Supernatural, Comics

180 pages, Paperback

First published September 4, 2025

About the author

See 朝霧カフカ (Asagiri Kafka).
Japanese scenario writer and novelist.

Reviews

[Zuli]

I'm not ready to say goodbye to those beloved characters and each one of them has a special place in my heart forever, I can't wait for the next vol 🤌🏻

[Alexandra Elend Wolf]

Can I just say that I have completely lost the thread of what's happening?

I've loved Bungo Stray Dogs for a while. All their wacky shenanigans felt very fun and zany in all the best ways but, well, at this point it all just feels very pointless. It's not that the manga has lost its charm in its characters, as I think that they are still very fun, and the ever-evolving dynamics between them just makes them even more interesting to read; but, more accurately that the villain just feels like too invincible for its own good.

See, like in most stories, we've had a revolving villain for quite a steady little time now, and he was quite fun at the beginning, allowing us to play a fun game of cat-and-mouse; but, here's the thing with games of cat-and-mouse, and that is that they get very repetitive, really fast.

At this point, I want it all to be over. Any cool moments feel cheapened because I know it'll have no lasting consequence and something improbable and insane will happen in the next few chapters to return everything to the status quo. It makes for a very souless reading.

Truly, it makes me very sad to see where the manga has come to, and I still have hope that this state can be reversed, and we can have our ridiculous, little adventures back; but, well, for the moment I'm not enjoying it here too much.

[Danielle Murray]

part one????😛😛😛

[Sima Khairullah]

This volume low-key made me cry. I don’t know why, but somehow all the characters came back, including past ones we haven’t seen for ages. It felt so nostalgic. I mean, I read Bungo Stray Dogs about four years ago, and it completely changed my life. It made me fall in love with reading, and it pushed me toward classics without making me feel intimidated by them. I read Crime and Punishment like it was a piece of cake, and honestly, that still feels unreal to me. I never imagined I could do that one day.

The fact that I’ve kept reading classics over and over just because of Bungo Stray Dogs and the influence it had on my love for literature is so impressive to me. I’m genuinely proud of how a manga can do that to someone. How a story can do that. How something this unique can change your life.

Yes, it has its ups and downs, but once you read the first volume, that first experience is so amazing, so fresh and new. I just loved it. I love Bungo Stray Dogs. I’ve been reading the light novels, all the side manga versions, watching the anime and the movies. I’ve consumed so much BSD content and all the book references that now I feel like I understand literature better. I know my reading style, I know what kind of books to choose.

But even though all that is true, the plot has been pretty weak lately, and I haven’t really been enjoying it. Especially in this volume, where they keep bringing in themes about God, power, the divine, and destroying God. I really don’t like those themes. They feel unreal and unrealistic. I mean, come on. Something divine, something as powerful as God, and you just casually build a plot around destroying it? I hate that.

I’ve come across many stories with similar plots, and I always end up disliking them. It feels disrespectful in a way. Beliefs and deeper meanings get neglected, and I don’t support that. I don’t feel comfortable reading it. Every time the story goes in that direction, I just think, is this really all you’ve got? When it could have done so many things better.

And Atsushi, oh my God. You blink, you die. If you don’t blink, you still die. But don’t worry, Atsushi will save you. He was cool for once in this volume, but still. Come on.

We still haven’t reached the end, and I honestly feel like it’s getting close. They were so close in this volume. I don’t know how many volumes we have left until everything is over, and that thought is heartbreaking. It gives you goosebumps if you’re attached to these characters.

I started this series when I was a teenager, and now I’m in my twenties. That’s a huge difference. The impact Bungo Stray Dogs had on me is real. When I first found it, watched the first episode, and read the manga, I was at one of the lowest points in my life. And it made me happy. This world, this story, these characters made me happy. They helped me discover new authors, new books, and fall deeper in love with literature. They opened the door to so many amazing works throughout literature history. And That kind of impact is rare.

[ava]

randomly decided to catch up Man never again😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 this is just getting worse and worse asagiri what the fjck you mean part one what are we even talking about. disappointment on the verlaine front as well i can’t believe i used to pray every month for verlaine crumbs and i wasn’t there to see the actual verlaine debut.. and thank god i wasn’t asagiri truly only ever misses. + Q + lovecraft and their pity panels. and dazai you will Always be my Entire World but Omg you need to die… he has to go… since he’s realistically never ever dying i’m genuinely hoping he’s the one transferring into pm it’d be so ridiculous for his character but i think we’re past that point. and it’d be so entertaining give us verlaine and chuuya and dazai and aku 2026 year of toxic parenting

[bethie!!]

part 1????? i'm going to die before this series is through, i'm never going to see the end. the decay of angels arc was INSANE

[Jos]

Mi conclusión es shin soukoku canon

[H]

*This review is for Bungo Stray Dogs as a whole, not just this volume. I will add the same review under every volume.*

BSD is good, but not great. I like the character designs and the art is amazing. But it's way too overhyped in my opinion. There are some things I didn't like or found pretty dumb.

1. Everyone is a genius syndrome: 10 characters or even more have an insanely high IQ. if everyone is a chess god playing mind games, then nobody actually is. At some point it stops being 'clever' and starts being exhausting. Like let someone actually miscalculate ONCE without it being part of some bigger plan. BSD intelligence is stylized, exaggerated, plot driven, "genius aura", and characters know things because the story says so. So when someone says "Dazai has an IQ of 200" That number means basically nothing. Just "Please believe he is very smart." Same with Ranpo. An IQ of 200+ is not even useful in real world context. Authors use it like a power level. I prefer characters with realistic intelligence. Because they could exist, you could meet them, and you wouldn’t realize what they're doing until it’s too late. That’s way scarier than an IQ stat pulled from someone’s ass. Actually, where do BSD IQ numbers even COME from?? Asagiri did not run these characters through a Wechsler test. There is no in universe scene where Dazai sits down with a psychologist, Mori hands out scantrons, or Ranpo speedruns Mensa. IQ in BSD functions like "This character is very smart, please clap." Dazai's IQ is 200, Fyodor's is 200 (people argue about Dazai's and Fyodor's IQ, but I really don't care if it's 200 or 215), Ranpo's is 215, Mori's is 175+, Ango's is 170+, a lot of people say Chuuya's is also secretly 150+. So what does "smart" even mean anymore? It becomes a badge, a hierarchy, a fandom flex instead of a special skill/trait and something demonstrated. If everyone is a genius, no one is. There’s no contrast.

2. plot armor thicker than concrete: some characters should’ve been dead five arcs ago. I don't actually mind the plot armor that much, but sometimes it's a bit ridiculous. It gets a bit annoying when every loss is secretly a win in disguise.

3. Fake ugliness: This is the one that bothers me the most. BSD talks about the dark, ugly sides of humanity but then makes them hot, tragic, romantic, and conveniently justified. That’s not ugliness that’s aestheticized suffering. BSD wants to say "Look how ugly and broken humans are." But everyone is hot, everyone is exceptional, everyone has poetic trauma. So the ugliness is symbolic, sanitized, controlled. It’s shown from a distance. The characters are extremely competent, hyper talented, admired by the narrative, rarely truly powerless. They’re bad at living in a romantic way.

4. The female characters are badly written: not necessarily offensively bad but thin. They’re underdeveloped compared to the men, their trauma is glossed over, they rarely drive the plot in a way that isn’t immediately overshadowed, and when they are competent the narrative doesn’t linger on their inner world the same way it does with the guys. Meanwhile the male cast gets internal monologues, philosophy dumps, elaborate mind games and mythologized suffering.

5. The tragic backstory inflation: people don't like when someone complains about this, and I think all the backstories are interesting, but practically every character has the most insane past ever. Everybody’s parents are dead, abused, betrayed, experimented on, orphaned, shot, drowned, and emotionally obliterated. What bothers me is that for a lot of characters (especially female ones) we get a tragic past, one flashback, maybe one emotional speech, and then it’s never meaningfully addressed again. No long-term consequences, no behavioral patterns that actually complicate the plot, no messy coping, regression, or contradictions. It’s always maximum suffering, minimum specificity. Abuse. Experiments. Dead family. Betrayal. Rinse, repeat. Nuanced backstories would be things like loving parents who still fucked you up unintentionally, doing something morally wrong by choice and having to live with it, being privileged but empty, being loyal to the wrong people for too long, slow corruption instead of "one horrific event", failure without a villain to blame. BSD almost never does that. It prefers "Something horrible happened TO me" instead of "I made a decision that shaped who I became." And that’s why it all feels glamorized. If the character is a victim of extreme circumstances, the narrative can always go "see? not their fault." Nobody has to sit in the discomfort of agency. That’s also why characters like Dazai get sanitized by the fandom. If his past is framed as 'he was broken and saved" then people can pretend he was secretly good all along when the whole point should’ve been that he’s functional, charming, and still morally fcked. BSD could have been so much stronger if it trusted quieter uglier human flaws instead of trauma shock value. Less "experimented on as a child" and more "I chose wrong and kept choosing wrong."

6. The characters are not relatable: You always see many people being like "I kin Dazai" but in my opinion, they are not relatable at all. BSD characters don’t feel like people, they feel like concepts wearing drip. The constant galaxy brain IQ, hyper optimized trauma, perfectly timed suffering, flawless execution of plans…creates distance. You’re not watching someone LIVE, you’re watching someone perform a role the author assigned them. Real people misread situations, act out of insecurity, get lucky instead of smart, regret things that weren’t "necessary", fail in boring embarrassing ways. BSD characters almost never do that. Even their breakdowns are aesthetic. Even their mistakes are "actually part of the plan." That kills relatability HARD. You can always relate in theory. But it’s surface level "I relate to their trauma" or "I relate to feeling lost" and not "I recognize this person’s thought process" or "I’ve made that exact dumb choice" That’s why they feel unreal. It also ties back to the IQ thing. When everyone’s a genius the story stops being about human limitations. You can’t project yourself into someone who’s always five steps ahead, because most of us are just trying to survive step one without tripping over our own shoelaces. BSD wants you to admire its characters.
It rarely lets you recognize yourself in them.

7. Sometimes the story also can be straight up boring. Not all the time, but enough that you start checking how many chapters are left like "okay… are we done cooking or what?" To me, early arcs were meh, middle arcs slapped, later arcs felt like Asagiri just kept stacking twists because of escalation addiction.


BSD’s biggest crime is that it pretends to be deeper than it is. It wants to be profound, literary, morally complex, but it rarely commits to letting characters genuinely fail, rot or face consequences. It’s not bad. It’s just overhyped. Dazai especially feels more like a concept and less like a person. Everything in BSD is so glamourized. It refuses to make anything actually genuinely uncomfortable. Nobody is allowed to be truly pathetic, cruel, or wrong without the story going "actually, this was all justified." Like. Let someone be ugly and stay ugly. Also the overhyping of characters is wild. The fandom treats them like they’re the most complex beings ever written when half their personality is: smart, sad, hot, morally ambiguous (but not really). Everyone likes something different, of course, but instead of epic despair, operatic suffering, genius masterminds above consequence, I prefer just people being messy. So yeah. BSD isn’t trash. But it’s not the literary holy text people act like it is. It’s a stylish, sometimes fun, sometimes frustrating series that thinks it’s deeper than it actually commits to being. It's interesting, dramatic, fun at times. But relatable? Grounded? Human? Nah.

Important: If anyone ever reads this, don't take this review too seriously. I was just bored and decided to write a long review. Nothing against BSD or people who enjoy it. I actually used to be a huge BSD fan from like 2020 to 2024. And I glazed it a LOT, so I know how much people in the fandom exaggerate. I would give it 2 or 3 stars for how enjoyable it had been for me. The time in the fandom had been fun, but the story and characters itself are not something I like that much.

[Meghan]

(2.5 rounded up)

*gently rests hand on shoulder* i think we're gonna have to actually kill this guy, asagiri.

[Emily Grace]

I loved seeing Akutagawa and Atsushi understand each other a bit more with Atsushi seeing a little mini flashback of how Dazai and Akutagawa met, the dark circumstances surrounding that, and Akutagawa possibly starting to understand why Dazai chose Atsushi. Their realizations and overall dynamic in this volume was my favorite part to read. But is this truly Akutagawa? Before, I thought maybe not, but maybe it is him. Somehow. There was a mention of his vampire regeneration ability slowing down, so I think that means this Akutagawa is the same? Honestly though, I don't believe everyone from the detective agency who has "died" has actually died. They're all trapped in some dimension. I would still like to know what happened to Jouno, he got bit, supposedly becoming a vampire from that, but he hasn't shown up at all since then.

I hate Fyodor with a burning passion. This only further solidified that for me. He wants to start a war to bring about peace, but his entire plan is flawed. If the agency members truly aren't dead and are simply trapped, does Fyodor plan to keep them there? Or will he release them at a certain point? I think Atsushi will ultimately be the one to bring everyone back somehow. Fyodor did say he doesn't care who lives or dies, so why not kill the ADA anyway?

Other than that, I don't care for Fyodor in general. Yes, he looks better drawn in the manga compared to the anime (anime did him dirty), but his entire character seems too unkillable. Yes, his ability is arguably one of the most broken abilities, but there needs to be some sort of balance to it. It feels like this arc is getting dragged out too much, and it's hard to care when anyone else "dies," because you get the feeling that they aren't truly dead and will return.

I still love the majority of the characters so I'll keep reading. It's only a bit disappointing to see everyone fail constantly and for Atsushi to keep getting false hope. As far as the story goes, I hope it gets better and eventually reaches a solid conclusion for this arc.

I'm rating this 4 stars because of Atsushi and Akutagawa. If not for them, this would probably be a 3.

Volume contains chapters 120-124.

[Jinko]

Ya no sé qué decir, me queda un tomo para terminar bsd y me quiero matar.

Loco, Atsushi viajó a otro espacio temporal (no entendí nada) junto a la ilusión que siempre se encuentra de Dazai, al final, era el director del orfanato, no Dazai. Yyy apareció un nuevo personaje (que murió altiro) que era el creador de las dos espadas de mierda, no sé cómo lo hizo Atsushi pero venció a ese loco y a los ame no gozen raros que estaban tratado de matar a Aku.

AAAH YYY, Aku, estaba a nada de morir y cuando cerró los ojos lo único que recordaba eran los momentos que luchó junto a Atsushiiii 💔💔, y recordó su promesaaa, yyyyyy cuando abrió los ojos LE BRILLARON, A AKU, SABEN LO IMPORTANTE QUE SON LOS OJOS EN BSD???? LOS DE AKUUUUUU, LE BRILLARON AL PENSAR EN ATSUSHIIIIIII 💔💔💔💔😭😭😭😭😭.

Ahora les queda vencer a Fyodor nomás, dale q se puede, son el dúo dinámico así q demás la hacen 😭🙏.

[Jenna Accurso]

I fell in love with the BSD universe because of the complex characters and their different beliefs. The Decay of Angels was an amazing inclusion in the story, and each member had a unique goal to fulfill.

For example, Fyodor wants to purify the world and erase the "sin" of ability users, while Fukuchi wants to create a single unified state to bring all of humankind together. These are fascinating ideas to think about.

While I love the complexities of these characters, the execution of the story often drags on and feels unbelievable. There are not enough lasting consequences, too many fake-out deaths, and I believe too many characters have been added. I have been disappointed by the current storyline, but I will continue to read the series for the characters.

[Lia]

we all know that the plot’s gone absolutely insane these past few volumes. some people like it, some don’t. i for one am cool with it. i still find bsd thoroughly enjoyable and love each and every single character too much. i feel like one of the things that drew me so much to this series was the character dynamics and it made me happy to go back to my beloved shin soukoku. those two have a special place in my heart, i swear. i also really liked going back to atsushi as the main character, since for a while it felt like this series had strayed from him a little too much with all the other characters. i love atsushi’s character, i love aku’s character, and i love reading their dynamic. this series just holds a special place in my heart.

[Ilenhyuccia]

É stato più interessante di quanto pensassi questo volume.
All’inizio pensavo che fosse una pisciata fuori dal vaso il Gozen, ma invece ha senso se mi dici che è Comunque il potere sovrannaturale di qualcuno.
Ha senso, senza dubbio. Anche il fantasma nella testa di Atsushi del direttore, molto bello.
Ora: che cazzo é quella specie di demone Gozen?!??

[Bell Potter]

Alguien que le dé un abrazo a Atsushi cuando acabe este lío, por favor.

(Aviso: lectura hecha en ejemplar en español, publicado en México. La presente nota se modificará cuando se dé de alta en GR la edición correspondiente).

[Grecu Anna]

peak

[Lisa musa]

Makes death seem so cheap sorry drop for me now

[Lorena]

3,5⭐️

Bring fukuzawa back or i’ll riot

[Nessa]

tears. genuine tears.

[canariez]

Verlaine showed up for 2 panels just to aura farm

[eliza]

i wanted to be mad at all the stupid plot points but i really liked how all of the old characters showed up at the end and VERLAINE???? my stormbringer heart is tweaking rn

[Dabi]

efectivamente, con el culo roto y yo sin el tomo 28 💀💀💀

[sofiacoppola]

emmm ya siento que está todo medio extraño 😃

[Grace]

"away with you, you fool."
"weretiger!"

so i'm actually crying and screaming in agony.

[Chuuya_obsessed]

I LOVED IT! I FREAKING CRIED WHEN AKUTAGAWA YELLED WERETIGER! DGSHDGDGDGDGHDHCHF (cryin so hard)

[MK]

5 stars

[Allysia]

sskk shippers come get your food

[☆Martynale☆]

No Fyodor you AREN'T getting away I'm coming for u count your last days...

[stéphanie ( taylor’s version )]

this is lowkey THE sskk volume

[Mati]

This was... GOD I CAN'T EVEN THINK ANYMORE
I'll just accept my destiny and keep crying