Tatsuki Fujimoto never ceases to amaze me. When it was announced that another long one-shot manga was coming from him, I couldn’t help but be excited as Look Back was my favorite manga of 2021. I also think Chainsaw Man is absolutely phenomenal.
Goodbye, Eri is a fascinating 202-page look at what I think is our tendency to not confront our mortality and forgetting how relationships matter. Huge spoilers incoming.
Goodbye, Eri starts off by focusing on a young man named Yuta Ito. Yuta’s mother is diagnosed with a terminal illness and wants him to record whatever she has left of her life until her death. Yuta decides to do this after receiving a smartphone for his 12th birthday. Over time, he starts to avoid the subject of his mother dying. When the time finally comes, Yuta runs away from the hospital his mother is staying at. An explosion then happens while he’s running away in cinematic fashion. It turns out Yuta was using footage of his mother for a school documentary project called“Dead Mother Explosion.” Many of his school peers criticize him for being tasteless and not understanding of what it means to lose someone important in your life. Believing that he’s being made fun of, Yuta then films himself saying that he will kill himself. He goes to the roof of the same hospital where his mother died as his chosen spot. That’s where he meets Eri, the heroine of our story.
Eri tells Yuta not to jump and drags him to watch a 9-hour movie marathon with her. It’s later revealed that Eri is the only fan of the“Dead Mother Explosion” doc at school. She demands that Yuta make another movie for next year’s school festival. Yuta then films himself saying that suicide isn’t worth it since Eri saved him. After much research and movie-watching, Yuta decides to make a movie about himself and Eri in a way that’s based off of their time with one another and Yuta’s inability to deal with his mother’s death. In this movie, Eri’s a vampire who tries to convince Yuta’s character to make movies. The catch is Eri is dying from an illness. So they spend all the time in the world together as much as possible. There’s no happy ending, but Yuta’s character is moving forward. Reality and fiction start to intersect as Eri was actually dying herself. Yuta decides to do what he couldn’t do for his mother - film Eri’s death. The movie happens, Eri dies, and Yuta grows up to become somewhat of an emotional husk in adulthood.
While Yuta ends up starting a family on his own, he couldn’t help but think about his“Goodbye, Eri” project. Yuta always felt something was off. And then he and his family (including his father) get into a car accident. Yuta is the only survivor and resorts to suicide again. He chooses to go back to where he and Eri watched movies as his resting place, only to find a very-much alive Eri watching “Goodbye, Eri.” Eri explains that she really is a vampire, but with blank memories after she died. However, she remembers her past self througha letter that the previous Eri wrote to her and the movie itself. Yuta asks how Eri will cope with living longer than anyone else in her life and Eri replies that“Goodbye, Eri” will help her remember those close to her and the beauty of human relationships. Yuta leaves Eri for good and realizes what was missing in“Goodbye, Eri.” He believes it was a“pinch of fantasy” and leaves the building with it exploding in the background a la his“Dead Mother Explosion” project.
I don’t know where to start with this because Goodbye, Eri was a LOT to take in. I can’t really talk about the cinema aspects, but I can talk about Yuta and his inability to face his mother’s death. When you’re a healthy adolescent, you have this feeling of immortality. Plus your parents may look healthy. They’re able to take care of you. Death doesn’t appear to be in the forefront any time soon. When everything goes well, it’s hard not to take things for granted.
That“Dead Mother Explosion” part shook me a bit because much like the students that criticized Yuta, I was appalled myself. A parent’s death isn’t something you can just go and sensationalize for a public audience. However, I do realize that Yuta wasn’t sure how to confront reality. Plus I know how easy it is for youth to feel suicide is an answer when all their peers seem to be against them.
There’s a harsher truth revealed later in the manga in a scene where Yuta’s mother was wondering where Yuta was as she was dying. When the father tells her that Yuta isn’t coming, Yuta’s mother said that was he was useless until the very end. This happens after Eri’s death and Yuta’s father decides to tell Yuta the truth about his mother - she was a TV producer who was trying to use Yuta to sell herself to TV studios as a brave soul who managed to overcome her illness. The mother would resort to physical abuse on Yuta if needed and the father stayed silent about it.
I now wondered if the inability to confront reality applied to not just Yuta as his parents were unwilling to come to terms with circumstances that they didn’t foresee. But Yuta’s father talked about the complications of remembering someone who has done great harm and provided warmth. He said that Yuta had the power to decide how to remember someone and that’s what Eri probably would have wanted.
Yuta did have the power to choose, but he also notes that he has a bad habit - looking at things right in front of him from an outside perspective. When Yuta made the decision to truly end it all after the car accident, Yuta said it’s the reason why he was unable to process all the death around him. He was looking at the deaths of his mother and Eri through the view of a camera. Only through a camera he was able to face facts.
But isn’t this a good thing? I know people talk about having some outside perspective in life because we’re so caught up in our bias. We’re taught to hate ourselves or think we’re in the right all the time. We’re taught that empathy is a way to help get in-between those extremes. Mental health wise, perspective taking is noted to be a huge factor in helping people move forward.
At the same time, I do think that even with all the outside perspectives you get through media and other people, your experiences are still your own and you are the one who still has to make the decision in how to process them. Plus, too much empathy is a thing and that ironically can make you feel more miserable. A good example I can give is doom-scrolling through social media while not dealing with more important matters at hand.
It’s important to ask if outside perspectives are actually helping you learn something meaningful instead of being used as ways to cloud over any insecurities you may have. This sounds like what Yuta was doing with making movies until his last encounter with Eri. He was able to finally narrow his perspective down enough with focus and re-channeled it with a sense of self-compassion to finally have some closure over his lifelong inability to deal with loss.
Speaking of the last encounter between Yuta and Eri, it was very touching.
I realized that when we talk about the dead, conversations tend to go towards“What happened? How did they die?” Why can’t we instead be like“What were they like? Tell me about them.” Eri wants to feel that way. She wants to remember how they lived and everything about them. I think we all need chances to hear the personal stories of those living with grief and those they lost because so much of our humanity is stripped when the subject of death/loss is avoided. I know losing someone is bad, but in a way, it reminds us that we need meaningful connection in our lives. People really make our lives matter. Our nature to be cooperative beings in order to move forward isn’t something we can ignore just like that.
After reading the one-shot a few more times, I can’t help but think about fandom and consumption of geek stuff. It’s nice and all to have wonderful perspectives from anime, manga and what not. But I wonder if we’re using those perspectives in ways to make other fans’ lives meaningful. Despite how he perceived it, Yuta’s filmmaking gave meaning to someone close to him. I do think we don’t consider the bad effects of too much imagination and creativity as they can lead someone to believing things like outlandish conspiracies and hateful beliefs about themselves/certain people. Is it possible that Fujimoto is using this work as a way to process his own thoughts of being a creator who’s often isolated from reality?
Goodbye, Eri is similar to Look Back as they’re both works focused on how to process the loss of those we love. We will eventually die, one way or another. This work is just another reminder that despite the goodbyes, at the very least, we should try and make each other thrive as best we can with the right pinch of fantasy along the way.
