“Goodbye, Eri” About Coping With Loss and Playing With Reality

Tatsumi Fujimoto, the author of Fire Punch and Chainsaw Man, is back with another volume-sized one shot, this time, about a middle schooler who gets a smartphone in the wake of his mother’s terminal illness and records her until her last breath.

SPOILERS AHEAD, you should go read this before continuing, not only is it free right now but so was the author’s previous one-shot — Look Back — before it got moved to Viz, requiring payment. So better act fast before that (likely) happens here as well.

Art

It’s a bit hard to explain the role the art plays here, as far as the style it’s decidedly Fujimoto, and he tries to incorporate the camera factor into this, showing the effect of handshake into the final picture, a handshake that can come from him running — or being distressed and unable to maintain a steady pulse.

Due to the kind of story we have here, the art that doesn’t exist is, perhaps, as important as the one that exists. This might sound like an incoherent rambling, but this is something that ties up with the story.

Story

Yuta, a middle schooler, receives a smartphone for his birthday and starts using it and recording right away, in fact, the majority — and possibly the whole — manga is seen through the lens of the camera. But mom has a request — she’s fighting against a terminal illness, and she might die soon, so she requests that her son records her so that he has something to remember her by.

Yuta accepts and starts filming all the time, mom at home, family outings, random cats, dad crying in secret — the one who appears the least being him due to being the cameraman. We can see the hints throughout, mom’s condition is worsening and she doesn’t have long to live, but just as his dad requests that he films his mother’s last moments Yuta decides to run away from the hospital, with explosions occurring moments later — we just saw a movie.

But it’s no normal movie, he did record his family as his mom’s condition deteriorated, but the ending was indeed edited by him, the response from his peers and teachers being of shock and disgust — who could you do that to your mother’s last moments?

So Yuta decides to kill himself and record the whole thing, with his last wish being to have the video shown to those who mocked him, so they can live with this for the rest of their life. But just as he reaches the roof of the hospital where his mom died, he’s stopped by a girl who promptly drags him off to watch movies — truth is, despite its flaws, she enjoyed his movie and wants to train him to make a better movie in the future, to blow away all those who scorned him.

Now, this manga isn’t as straightforward as I paint it to be, after all, we’ve been thrown for a loop once during the original movie reveal, and this will happen again as the second movie gets filmed. We know the plan of the movie, but we don’t know where the plan ends and where the movie starts because what we see is mostly through the lens of the camera, we have no way to know what’s a cut for the movie and what isn’t.

What’s being intentionally left behind in order to portray a new reality, this is why what isn’t drawn isn’t important — if something exists, but isn’t shown, how do we know it exists? If you only film the truth, but carefully select what you show, you’re creating a new reality — a falsehood made from reality. You’re showing truths, without showing the truth.

This way you can alter your memories over time. This might be seen as some sort of escapism — but could be another expression of love, by choosing to immortalize them in the best light possible.

Conclusion

Eri manages to talk about how the screen can lie to you — at the same time it lies to you — it’s about our desire to remember those close to us, and our desire to not be forgotten, about what’s said and what remains to be said.

Fujimoto plays with the reader, and after we’re invested in the reality painted for us, we’re pulled back, forced to re-evaluate our position and what is happening.

While this isn’t an action manga, I can’t help but be reminded of Fire Punch, as it feels like a roller coaster of emotion — but this is the ride I've enjoyed the most thus far, as new information recontextualizes what we thought we knew.