Goodbye Eri

 Goodbye, Eri (さよなら絵梨) is a one-shot manga by Fujimoto Tatsuki.  The manga was originally published in 2022.

    On his 12th birthday Yuta is given a smartphone as a present but also as the catalyst for a daunting assignment.  His mother is dying and she wants him to record as much of her as he can while she is still living.  He goes about capturing hour upon hour of his families lives, saving candid moments of posterity.  As his mother approaches her end she asks him to make sure he films her death.  On their way to the hospital he refuses to enter let along capture her passing forever.  The scene cuts to him running away from special effects of the hospital exploding and we learn that the images so far have been part of a movie her edited and submitted for his schools talent show.  The reaction from fellow students and staff is one of revulsion and disgust.  They laugh at it and call him strange for dishonoring his mother with the film, unable to understand his grief over her loss.  He decides to record one final moment on his camera phone, his good bye message as he plans on jumping off of the roof of the hospital his mother died in.  But someone stops him while hes on the roof, a girl who tells him not to kill himself here, as it will ruin the places reputation.  Suggesting that he should do it at another hospital in town, where she feels the staff are ass holes.

    Instead of killing himself he follows the girl to an abandoned warehouse and she forces him to watch movies with her.  When he presents her enough about her motivation she tells him that she wants him to make a better movie than the one he showed to the school.  She tells him that he needs to understand film first before he can write a new movie and demands him watch movie after movie with her in what ends up being a year long process.  Once she feels his grasp of cinema and story telling is strong enough she tasks him with beginning to write the new film that he will present again to the school, with the goal of moving everyone to tears instead of ridicule.  Through the girls encouragement and prodding he concocts a new tale, one he hopes will have the ability to elicit the response they both want.

    This manga has been on my want list for quite a while now and I finally picked it up after I watched an anime adaption of another Fujimoto one-shot, Look Back.  On top of my original interest in the manga I was motivated to see if Goodbye Eri was able to impact me in the way that Look Back did.  Chainsaw Man did little to interest me and the first episode offered nothing interesting or new.  Look Back was a phenomenal and powerful story and Goodbye Eri falls in the middle.  I may have expected more out of it than it was able to deliver and set myself up for failure.  That's not to say it isn't a bad story, but there is a weird meta about it that I am not sure if he did intentionally.  The entire manga is presented as if everything is only coming from Yuta's recordings.  The first part, the initial concept of the birthday present to record his mothers last days takes a turn as it ends to reveal that we have been seeing the movie he edited together to present to the school.  We are seeing her peers reactions to it from the point of what his cellphone captured.  The moments he spends afterwards with Eri, sorry, the girls name is Eri, are from the perspective of what he records.  The movie idea he comes up with is the entire make up of the manga up to that point.  The movie is about a boy who fails to move his classmates with a movie he was forced to make about his mothers slow death and then how he is saved from suicide by a weird girl who tasks him with making a movie.  Eri goes a long with the idea that he presents but stresses that something is missing from it, some weird twist that would mark it as something he makes.  In the end...the manga its self deals with the exact same issue...and I don't know if it was good or not.

    Again, its very hard to tell how much of the art copying life aspect that unfolds in the story is on purpose...I suspect it all is.  But the story literally ends in a way that doesn't seem satisfying, which is the dilemma that Yuta faces when trying to make his second film.  I think I need to read it again, it took my less than 30 minutes the first time and I may have artificially rushed the story just to knock it out and get another review out.  I think I need to return to it in a few months and go through it more slowly, digesting it with the knowledge of what transpires in its pages and the fact its layer upon layer upon layer of the same thing through out, its...difficult to really get into detail about how the story truly unfolds without spoiling some twists.  Aside form the writing its self, I am not a fan of his art style, but I can appreciate it the design choices he makes.  I should really just pick up the manga for Look Back to see if the movie had another peoples influences to make it what it was...but I suspect that isn't the case.  Either way...I am interested in other shorter stories that Fuyimoto comes up with.  There is some interesting creativity lurking in his process that may just need to be unleashed more by his editors.

The manga is being published in English by Viz.