About Bungo Stray Dogs
Bungo Stray Dogs — BSD to most of its fans — is a Japanese manga written by Kafka Asagiri and drawn by Sango Harukawa, serialised in Kadokawa's Young Ace magazine since December 2012 and still running. Studio Bones adapted it as a TV anime directed by Takuya Igarashi and written by Yoji Enokido, which ran for five seasons between April 2016 and September 2023: sixty-one episodes, counting an OVA that is officially numbered as episode 25. A film, Dead Apple, followed in 2018. The title is part Japanese: a bungo is a classic author, so the name comes out roughly as 'Literary Stray Dogs'.
The story is set in Yokohama, where a handful of people are born with supernatural abilities. Atsushi Nakajima, an orphan thrown out of his orphanage with nowhere to go, pulls a man out of a river and finds that he has rescued Osamu Dazai, an eccentric detective. Dazai recruits him into the Armed Detective Agency, which takes on cases too dangerous for the police, and reveals that the man-eating white tiger the city is hunting is Atsushi himself. A bounty on Atsushi's head soon sets the Port Mafia, the city's criminal underworld, on his trail.
The hook is that almost everyone is named after a real writer and fights with a power drawn from that writer's work: Dazai's ability is No Longer Human, Akutagawa's is Rashomon, and the Guild's leader, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, gets stronger the more money he spends. From there the series widens in rings. The Agency and the Port Mafia are dragged into a three-way war with an American organisation, then targeted by a Russian mastermind, then framed as terrorists and hunted by the state's own elite unit — and each time, rivals who despise each other end up fighting on the same side.
Want the archetype rather than the character? The dere type quiz scores you across all eight anime dere types — tsundere, yandere, kuudere, dandere and four more — and explains where each word comes from.
What the Bungo Stray Dogs Quiz Tests
Our Bungo Stray Dogs quiz — the BSD quiz most fans are looking for — covers the five TV seasons only: no manga chapters beyond the anime, no Dead Apple, and nothing from the Wan! or BEAST spin-offs. Easy levels cover the premise and the main cast: Atsushi's tiger, Dazai's ability-cancelling touch, Kunikida's notebook, Chuya's gravity, and who runs the Agency and the Port Mafia. The middle levels move through the arcs in order — the Guild war and Moby Dick, the Dark Era flashback, Chuya at fifteen, the Cannibalism virus, the Hunting Dogs and the Decay of the Angel — along with the organisations and partnerships that hold the story together, such as Double Black and Natsume's Tripartite Framework. The hard levels test the literary layer and the fine print: which real authors and books sit behind the names, where the Decay of the Angel and the prison Meursault get theirs, what the episode titles are quoting, and the small details of the Agency's origin story and the Meursault jailbreak.
Key Characters
Atsushi Nakajima is an unusual lead for a battle series: an orphan who still hears his old orphanage director telling him he is worthless, and who keeps throwing himself in front of danger anyway. His mentor, Osamu Dazai, is the opposite — flippant, idle and usually the cleverest person in any room, a former Port Mafia executive who changed sides after his friend Oda died asking him to save people instead. Doppo Kunikida keeps the Agency running from a notebook full of ideals; Ranpo Edogawa solves cases in seconds without any supernatural power at all. On the other side stands Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Dazai's old apprentice, who will do anything for one word of approval and hates Atsushi for getting it so easily. Their forced partnership is the spine of the series. Around them sit Chuya Nakahara, Dazai's furious ex-partner; Ogai Mori, the Mafia's calculating boss; and the two great schemers of the later seasons, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Ochi Fukuchi.
Available Quizzes
Bungo Stray Dogs Trivia
50 hand-crafted questions across 5 categories. 10 levels of increasing difficulty.
Which Bungo Stray Dogs Character Are You?
Answer 10 questions to discover which member of the Armed Detective Agency or the Port Mafia matches your personality!
Random Mix
Questions from all 34 anime including Bungo Stray Dogs. The ultimate challenge.
Characters
Atsushi Nakajima
Osamu Dazai
Ryunosuke Akutagawa
Chuya Nakahara
Doppo Kunikida
Bungo Stray Dogs Fun Facts
- Each ability is named after its owner's real-life writing. Atsushi's tiger comes from Atsushi Nakajima's story 'The Moon Over the Mountain', in which a man turns into a tiger.
- Kafka Asagiri made Dazai a central character after reading Osamu Dazai's novel No Longer Human; he has said he found the writer's embarrassment about his own life relatable.
- The Book, the reality-rewriting object everyone in the series is chasing, was modelled on the wish-granting items in Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball.
- In real life Dazai, Ango Sakaguchi and Sakunosuke Oda were the leading figures of the postwar Buraiha, or Decadent School. Bar Lupin, where the three meet in the Dark Era episodes, is a real Tokyo bar that Dazai and Sakaguchi frequented.
- The real relationship ran the other way round: Osamu Dazai idolised Ryunosuke Akutagawa, whereas in the series it is Akutagawa who is desperate for Dazai's approval.
- The film Dead Apple won the theatrical film category of the Newtype Anime Awards in 2018, and season 5 was named Anime of the Year for 2023 by Anime Corner.
Bungo Stray Dogs Quiz — Frequently Asked Questions
How many seasons and episodes of Bungo Stray Dogs are there?
Five seasons, broadcast between April 2016 and September 2023, with sixty-one episodes in total. Seasons 1 and 3 have twelve episodes each, season 2 has twelve plus an OVA, 'Hitori Ayumu', that is officially counted as episode 25, season 4 has thirteen and season 5 has eleven. The two 2016 seasons were made as the two halves of one split run.
What order should I watch Bungo Stray Dogs in, and where does Dead Apple fit?
Watch seasons 1 and 2 (including the OVA), then the film Dead Apple, then seasons 3, 4 and 5. Dead Apple came out in March 2018 and is set after the second season, before the third aired in 2019. Bungo Stray Dogs Wan! is a separate spin-off series and is not part of that sequence.
Is the Bungo Stray Dogs manga finished?
No. It has been running in Kadokawa's Young Ace since December 2012, with twenty-eight volumes out in Japan by March 2026; Yen Press publishes it in English. The anime has caught up with it — the season 5 finale aired before the manga had reached the same point, and the two tell the end of that arc differently.
What does Bungo Stray Dogs mean, and what does BSD stand for?
BSD is simply the fans' abbreviation of Bungo Stray Dogs. 'Bungo' is the Japanese word for a classic author, so the title translates roughly as 'Literary Stray Dogs' — fitting, since almost every character is named after a real writer.
Where can I watch Bungo Stray Dogs?
In North America the anime is licensed by Crunchyroll (it was previously released under the Funimation name), and it has also been listed on Prime Video and Apple TV. Availability differs by country and changes over time, so check your local services.
