Goodbye, Eri

“I guess my mom might not have long now…I…I still can’t wrap my head around it…So I’m not even sad about it…No…I’m sad. I am.”

Yuta records himself in a mirror speaking about his mother’s impending death. He has spent considerable time filming her life and declining health and knows she will be gone soon. This moment demonstrates Yuta’s impulse to confront his problems and pain through the camera rather than head-on, thus establishing the symbolic importance of the camera as his shield and a representation of his vulnerability. The broken rhythm of Yuta’s speech reflects his emotional fragmentation, using ellipsis and self-correction as a literary device to convey the tension between numbness and sorrow.

“You should know better than to make a movie like that! It’s making a mockery of your mother’s death!”

After Yuta shows his movie, “Dead Explosion Mother,” at a school festival, his classmates and teachers criticize and mock him. In this dialogue, a teacher berates him and accuses him of disrespecting his mother’s death, particularly by concluding the movie with an image of the hospital exploding. Yuta defends this decision and does not seem to understand his teacher’s ire. The teacher’s outrage also reveals a generational gap in how grief and memory are expressed, emphasizing the clash between traditional mourning and Yuta’s curated, artistic approach.

“My mom died too. Last year. That’s why I can’t forgive you. But not for turning it into a movie. That’s not the problem. Why’d you add the explosion at the end?”

Like Yuta’s teacher, several classmates object to his decision to edit an explosion into the end of his movie. Here, Yuta is recording student reactions to his movie. This student is particularly upset because she too recently lost her mother. This moment highlights the fact that no one understands Yuta’s motives for editing the film the way he did, which makes Eri’s later understanding more poignant. This moment underscores the discussion of subjective grief, as the student’s critique is driven by personal loss, reinforcing that audience interpretation is shaped as much by their wounds as by the content of the story.

“Show this video to the jerks who made fun of me. Make them remember me for the rest of their lives. This world is filled with death. Memento mori.”

Yuta contemplates death by suicide following the mockery and derision he faces for his movie. Yuta asks his father to make sure his bullies see his video, which he intends as a suicide note, and remember him forever, thus ensuring that he controls his narrative about the incident and contributes to the theme of memory as it relates to curated content. His final line, “Memento mori,” a Latin phrase meaning “remember you must die,” is a deliberate literary allusion that both dramatizes and intellectualizes his despair, signaling Yuta’s desire to be remembered with depth, not pity.

“[I]t had an edge you rarely see, and the surprises outnumbered its faults. […] And the way it blurred the line between fact and fiction—for me, that was a good puzzle.”

Yuta meets Eri, who stops him from attempting death by suicide and instead drags him away to watch films and discuss his movie about his mother. In acknowledging his storytelling techniques, she demonstrates a better understanding than any other viewer. Her comment about blurring the line between fact and fiction relates to the metafictional nature of the manga. She also praises his work, which no one has before. This motivates Yuta to keep living and try again.

“Starting tomorrow, for the next year, you’re going to increase your input by watching loads of movies. Then, next year, you’re going to shoot a new movie and show it at the school festival. Next time, don’t you want to make them all bawl their eyes out?”

Eri takes it upon herself to educate Yuta in better filmmaking and storytelling techniques so that he can make a better movie next time. She shows great support for Yuta’s creative vision and reveals her passion for films, over which the two slowly bond. Her determination to make their classmates “bawl their eyes out” (56) also indicates the intentionality and manipulation of film and storytelling to evoke specific emotional responses.

“‘You actually like cliche stuff, don’t you? You cried during the heroine’s death scene.’

‘I cried because the story resonated with my own life.’”

This conversation between Yuta and Eri is important because it reveals the camaraderie and teasing they share in their growing friendship. That friendship develops entirely through their time watching movies and discussing them together, contributing to the theme of Friendship Forged Through Shared Passions. However, Eri’s comment is also a moment of subtle foreshadowing, hinting that she, like the film heroine, will soon die. The scene uses dramatic irony, as Eri’s empathy for the fictional heroine doubles as an unconscious (or veiled) admission of her own condition, making her vulnerability visible only in hindsight.

“In your movie, the plot progressed like a touching story…but seriously, asking your middle school-aged son to record his own mother’s death? Isn’t that just cruel? So when you ran away from the hospital as it exploded, it felt cathartic to me.”

Eri’s remark is the first time anyone acknowledges the inherent cruelty of Yuta’s mother’s request that he record her death. Yuta’s classmates and teachers all focused on the perceived disrespect he showed to his mother in his movie. Only Eri sees or understands the pain and grief Yuta has hidden beneath the layers of his carefully curated images, meant to show his mother in the best possible light. She therefore understands the explosion for the cathartic moment of defiance it is intended to be. Her insight introduces readerly reevaluation: It reframes the earlier explosion as catharsis, not immaturity, which invites the audience to reconsider how emotion can be encoded in visual metaphor.

“Ever since you were little, you’ve always sprinkled a pinch of fantasy into everything.”

Yuta asks his father what he associates with Yuta’s movies. Yuta’s father responds with this introduction of an important motif in the narrative, explaining that throughout his life, Yuta always includes a bit of fantasy in everything he creates. This is a crucial aspect of the way Yuta uses Storytelling as a Coping Mechanism to deal with his problems in life. The “pinch of fantasy” (83) helps him to face and process difficult aspects while still maintaining some distance from them.

“That’s it! The truth is, the protagonist regrets running away! And then! And then! Yeah! The vampire actually doesn’t have long to live! She’s lived for a thousand years, but she’s about to die from an illness or something. Despite living for a thousand years, she’s afraid of being forgotten! So the vampire wants the protagonist to shoot a movie for her to be in!”

As Yuta brainstorms his new movie idea, which combines real-life elements of his experiences and his friendship with Eri with fantastical elements, he also reveals something about himself. Despite his efforts to distance himself from his pain through storytelling and using his camera as a shield, his story still contains authentic pieces of his life, specifically his sense of guilt for running away from his mother’s death. Yuta’s frantic brainstorming mimics stream-of-consciousness narration, conveying his creative process as both instinctive and emotionally raw—a sign that fantasy and confession coexist in his storytelling.

“This time it might damage beyond repair his ability to move forward! I once aimed to be a creator myself, so I know how it goes! When you create a work you’re confident in, and others take your creation and mock it and treat it like a plaything it…it messes you up!”

Yuta and Eri enlist Yuta’s father to help them make their new movie. In this scene, the manga once again blurs the line between Yuta’s movie and reality, as it first appears Yuta’s father is genuinely angry with Eri, rather than playing a part. However, just as Yuta’s story contains his guilt, the dialogue he has written for his father also contains an element of truth. Though Yuta’s father speaks the line about being hurt by mockery, it is a reference to Yuta’s pain following the criticism of his first movie. This dialogue also functions as meta-commentary on the risks of creative vulnerability and how the desire for recognition can be weaponized by audiences who misread or mock honest work.

“Creation is all about getting into the audience’s problems to make them laugh and cry, right? Well, it wouldn’t be fair if creators didn’t get hurt too, would it?”

Yuta’s father demonstrates a clear understanding of the power and impact of storytelling. He argues that stories, like Yuta’s movies, are intended to manipulate and emotionally impact their audience. To do so, they should also emotionally impact their creator, thus implying that even when the content is curated or fictionalized it should still contain an element of authenticity and truth.

“When I saw your movie…the truth is, I related to your mom. I get wanting someone to film your death. In a movie, you could keep living…I envied her for that.”

After Eri faints and Yuta discovers that she, like his mother, has a terminal illness, Eri envies Yuta’s mother, who will live forever in his movie. She then asks him to fulfill the plot of his fictional story and record her death as he could not for his mother. This moment shifts the tone of the narrative from one of friendship as Yuta must now face a second loss. Moreover, Eri reveals that she, like Yuta’s mother, wishes to control her own story and the memory left behind in her death. Eri’s comment introduces the idea that cinema provides emotional immortality, showing how art can elevate ordinary pain into something enduring and meaningful.

“That boy was useless to the very end.”

Yuta’s father shows the video he recorded of Yuta’s mother’s final moments. When he explains that Yuta could not face her death and film it as she requested, her comment that he is useless reveals for the first time her true feelings about and treatment of her son. This revelation is important not only for Yuta but for the audience as well, to properly understand the ambivalence and pain of his movie.

“She’d planned to make a tv documentary about her brave battle against illness after she recovered…Since I was working during the day, she had you shoot the videos.”

Yuta’s father further confesses that Yuta’s mother intended to use Yuta’s footage to make a documentary, believing that she would survive her illness. Despite her claims that she wanted Yuta to record her for his benefit, to have something to remember her by, the truth is that her motives were entirely self-centered. She made her cruel request for self-aggrandizement. This revelation reframes Yuta’s role in the filming as a kind of emotional labor demanded without consent and performed in service of a self-serving narrative.

“When mom was in a bad mood, she’d give me the silent treatment. And she never praised me for anything, but…I wanted my memories of her to be beautiful.”

Following his father’s confession, Yuta acknowledges his mother’s emotional abuse for the first time and his conscious effort to make her memory beautiful. This casts the images from his first movie in a new light, demonstrating how carefully he curated and edited the content to create a fictional version of his mother. Yuta’s movie about his mother actively tries to obfuscate and conceal the truth, which makes it even more compelling that Eri could detect his authenticity beneath the fiction. This confession also illustrates unreliable narration, since Yuta deliberately edits his memories to create a version of the past that he can live with, even if it means distorting reality.

“Yuta, you have the power to decide for yourself how you’ll remember someone. That’s an incredible thing. I think maybe Eri wants you…to choose how she’ll be remembered.”

As Yuta’s father points out, it is precisely Yuta’s ability to influence, even control, the memory of his mother that motivates Eri to ask him to film her. She, like Yuta’s mother, fears dying and being forgotten and understands better than most the way Yuta’s movie can not only keep her alive but make her story more beautiful, demonstrating that she relies on Yuta’s storytelling to help her cope with her death.

“‘Movie Eri was a little overidealized.’

‘Yup.’

‘But…I’ll always remember her like that. Thanks.’”

After Yuta shows his movie about Eri to the school, Eri’s only other friend points out the many ways his version of her is inaccurate. She wore glasses and a retainer that he never shows in his videos. Moreover, the real Eri was more self-centered and even, at times, mean. Yuta does not deny that his version of Eri is idealized, at her request. Rather than be angry, Eri’s friend thanks him, proving that in the face of loss sometimes the feeling of the memory is more important than the accuracy.

“Having filmed a death, the thing he couldn’t do for his mother…The protagonist regains the will to live and the confidence to make movies. The end. That was the character in the movie. In the real world, it didn’t work out so smoothly for me.”

Despite Yuta’s and the narrative’s many attempts to erase the boundaries between truth and reality, between Yuta’s life and his movies, Yuta’s life does not follow the plot he wrote for himself in his movie. Rather than emerge from Eri’s death with renewed confidence to face life, he retreats and isolates instead. This contrast crucially reveals the limits of storytelling and the ways reality intrudes on fantasy. This contrast between fictional resolution and lived despair illustrates the limits of narrative closure, highlighting that stories may provide structure but not necessarily healing.

“I have this bad habit of viewing the problems right in front of me from an outside perspective. My mother’s death. Eri’s. I watched them both through a camera. […] I could only face the facts from behind a camera. […] As a result, I’ve realized I no longer have enough soul left to endure any more deaths.”

Having lost his family, Yuta contemplates suicide for a second time. He acknowledges to himself that he has always used his camera like a shield. Rather than face his problems, he filters them through his camera and processes them through the stories he creates in his movies. This statement contributes to both the themes of Storytelling as a Coping Mechanism and Memory and Authenticity in an Age of Curated Content.

“Films that end with a love interest’s death are a dime a dozen. I think the second half could use a leap. It’s missing a pinch of fantasy, don’t you think?”

The final scene, in which Yuta finds Eri, alive and still a teenager, in the abandoned building where he intends to die, is a culmination of the many thematic elements of the manga, including Yuta’s penchant for fantasy. Eri’s comment that his movie is missing that element of fantasy calls into question the reality of this very scene and also inspires the final image of the story. Her statement is also a metatextual critique of formulaic storytelling, encouraging both Yuta and the reader to consider how genre expectations can limit emotional resonance.

“After 200 years of life, a human’s brain would fill to bursting and kill them. Like the Eri in this movie. But the real me is a vampire, not a human. As long as my heart’s intact, I’ll never die. I revived three days later…with all my memories gone.”

Eri claims that the fictional backstory he created for her as a vampire girl is the truth. She really is a vampire who has lived for hundreds of years, and therefore did not die. Her claim once again blurs the line between fact and fiction, reinforcing the metafictional nature of the manga, which resists efforts to separate the two. Eri’s line treats fantasy exposition as emotional truth and further collapses the line between narrative logic and character psychology.

“‘Won’t living like that drive you to despair?’

‘I think the last Eri must have been in despair, yes…But I’ll be fine. Because I have this movie. I’ll get to see you every time I watch it. No matter how many times I forget you…I’ll remember you again and again. Isn’t that beautiful?’”

Eri’s comment here showcases the power of Yuta’s movies to not only preserve memory but create it. For Eri, it does not matter that the movie is inaccurate and idealized. What matters is that through it, she can remember both herself and Yuta in the best possible way. Moreover, if she is truly a vampire who must reconstruct herself from Yuta’s movie, then the beautiful version of her he has crafted can become the real one.