Goodbye, Eri

My friend recommended this manga to me and it didn't take long to read. It is about a young boy, Yuta, who films his mother until her dying breath, but right at the end, he couldn't bear to film her, and so ran out of the hospital and made it explode in his final edit.

He is then nearly driven to suicide by the backlash to his movie. A woman, Eri, finds him and decides to force him to write lots of screenplays and watch lots of movies, so that he can make a movie about her that represents her in a good light before SHE dies.

Yuta, long after Eri is dead, has his family die in a car crash. He goes to commit suicide again, deciding to visit the place him and Eri watched lots of movies before doing so. She is still there, and speaks to him, and convinces him to not commit suicide.

It ends with him walking away from that place as it explodes around him.

Its a very meta-fictional work, as it never stops commenting on itself literally the whole time. "It had an edge you rarely see, and the surprises outnumbered its faults." "Despite it running for close to 20 minutes, I could watch it all without getting bored." "And the way it blurred the line between fact and fiction—for me that was a good puzzle." All of these statements apply to this work. To me it almost implies a mastery of material that one could create something so markedly self-referential in an obviously amateurish style. Everything about it was amateurish and was designed to trigger certain 'low-quality and campy'-critique from anyone well-versed in shounen manga tropes. It deliberately has him stutter around a beautiful girl, "DWUH?!", just to get us into that kind of headspace about the quality of the work that we're watching.

I think that the fact or fiction aspect of it is the best bit for me. It is genuinely hard to tell what is a lie or not. Here is what I think though - we are shown the mother saying that her son is useless, so I'm labelling that bit true. We are shown Eri being cutely excited to film more kissing scenes 'Hee hee... okay...', and then at the end, in conversation with another character, they label her as a huge bitch. But they don't show any video proof of this. So it seems to me like a character-reversal for continuity's sake. That her story would match his mums. But its actually just there to fuck with us.

The ending has a detail that did make me feel something. The detail is that ending-Eri and ending-Yuta do not share the screen at the same time (except for 5 slides which could be implied to be video edited). Implying that this was old footage of her, filmed for a time when he was much older. Then, at the end, he realises that the reason he never stopped editing her videos was because it was "missing a pinch of fantasy". And that fantasy was that she was still alive.

It then ends with him running away as the building she was in exploded, indicating his final closure with her story. And completing the arc, because I did feel emotions. BUT I THINK it really only works if you cry. You have to cry. If you don't cry, then you miss the true denouement that the story wants out of you. That you went in and thought it was a stupid story, you even made fun of it to yourself. And then, at the end, you see what Eri saw in Yuta's initial video. Something rough, and strange, but that you could sit through without being bored, and that you cried at at the end.

I did not cry. But I felt something. And so I think I enjoyed it.