48 pages • 1-hour read
Goodbye, Eri
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Character Analysis
Yuta Ito
Content Warning: This section discusses illness and death, suicidal ideation, child abuse, child death, and bullying.
Yuta Ito is the protagonist of the manga and the protagonist in the film he is making for Eri. This distinction is important because the version of himself he presents in the film is a kind of wish fulfillment that also contributes to the metanarrative aspects of the manga. Yuta is a Japanese middle-school student, celebrating his 12th birthday at the beginning of the story. In the first section of the manga, Yuta is tasked with filming his mother’s life as she dies from an unspecified illness. He later films his friend, Eri, as she too dies of an unspecified illness.
Yuta is creative, sensitive, and anxious, prone to isolating himself in the face of pain and difficulty. He is sensitive to rejection and criticism, as seen in his reaction to his classmates’ mockery. And he has difficulty dealing with loss. He feels things strongly and uses his camera as a mediator between himself and the pain in his life. It is only through the camera lens that he can face and process his mother’s and Eri’s deaths, as well as his other life difficulties.
Additionally, he processes his own experiences through storytelling and heavy curation of his video content, thus contributing significantly to the themes of Storytelling as a Coping Mechanism and Memory and Authenticity in an Age of Curated Content. This is particularly significant in the case of his mother, who is emotionally and occasionally physically abusive. Curating and editing the movie about his mother allows him to process his mother’s mistreatment and her death. The explosion he edits at the end of the movie represents his efforts to resist his mother’s cruelty. However, he still suffers from guilt for running away from his mother’s dying moments.
Yuta twice contemplates death by suicide. The first incident occurs directly after he shows his film, “Dead Explosion Mother,” and faces the harsh criticism and mockery of his classmates. This demonstrates his vulnerability and instinct to retreat and withdraw from pain. The second time Yuta contemplates suicide is following the loss of his entire family as an adult, which demonstrates again his inability to face death and loss. However, in both situations, Eri’s support motivates Yuta to choose life instead, highlighting the power and importance of their friendship, even after Eri’s death.
Eri
Eri is the second major character of the manga and Yuta’s only friend. Over the course of the narrative, little about her life is revealed. She is viewed only through Yuta’s perspective and primarily through the mediating perspective of his camera and filmmaking. Though little is known about her past or her life, she is the single most important influence on Yuta’s story. She stops Yuta from attempting suicide both as a teenager and again as an adult (at least metaphorically, if not literally). She encourages Yuta’s filmmaking and educates him about storytelling techniques to make his work better.
However, Yuta’s portrayal of Eri is idealized, as revealed when her other friend speaks with Yuta after showing his second movie. Eri is self-centered and somewhat manipulative. She says that it was cruel of Yuta’s mother to make him film her illness and death, and yet she requests that he do the very same thing for her. Though she is supportive of Yuta’s creativity, she has ulterior motives, wishing to be immortalized on video before her death. She thus mirrors Yuta’s mother despite criticizing her.
Eri’s appearance in the final scene of the manga highlights the metafictional aspects of the manga, further blurring the boundaries between reality and Yuta’s stories. Eri claims she is in fact the vampire that Yuta’s fictionalized her to be. Yet, the explosion on the final page implies that the final scene is more footage for the movie, rather than objective reality. The ending remains ambiguous, leaving it to the audience to decide if Eri is truly a vampire returned from the dead or a figment of Yuta’s imagination.
Yuta’s Mother
Yuta’s mother is a secondary but crucial character in the manga. She gives Yuta the new smartphone for his 12th birthday and requests that he record her life so that he will have something to remember her by when she dies of her unspecified terminal illness. In Yuta’s videos, she is portrayed as sweet, kind, and loving. Their relationship appears to be close and warm, which underscores the tragedy of her death. After Yuta shows his first film to the school, he is criticized for insulting his mother’s memory by concluding with the explosion. Only Eri seems to notice the inappropriateness and cruelty inherent in her demand that Yuta film her death in the first place. She understands that the explosion is cathartic, representing Yuta’s effort to resist this cruelty.
Later, Yuta’s father reveals the truth about his mother, which Yuta intentionally obfuscates in his film. In reality, Yuta’s mother is self-centered, demanding, and emotionally abusive. She does not care about Yuta’s feelings but rather envisions herself as the heroine of a heart-wrenching documentary about her bravery in facing her illness and death. She wishes to control her own story through Yuta’s videos, for self-aggrandizement. She treats Yuta with derision and callousness, never praising him for anything he did, and even strikes him at least once. Even in her dying moment, she spends energy complaining about and demeaning Yuta. And yet, Yuta makes the conscious decision to portray only the good moments in his movie, crafting a beautiful version of his mother to remember, which highlights the interaction between curated content and memory.
Yuta’s Father
Yuta’s father is quiet and unassuming. He passively allowed his wife’s emotional abuse and cruel demands of Yuta. Though the narrative offers little explanation or context, his passivity is likely due to a combination of fear and a cultural emphasis—common in many traditional Japanese contexts—on enduring hardship quietly and with stoicism rather than openly expressing distress. He dies in the last section of the manga, in the car crash that also takes Yuta’s wife and daughter. This moment is the final blow for Yuta, triggering his second time contemplating suicide.
Yuta’s father is a relatively minor character in the narrative. However, he is significant in two scenes within the manga that shift the audience’s understanding of the narrative, and the characters involved. First, he expresses a clear understanding of the inherently personal nature of creative work. His argument that a creator should, to some extent, be hurt by one’s work if they wish the audience to feel something as well, is central to the complex interactions between storytelling, content creation, and authenticity. Second, he reveals Yuta’s mother’s true nature to both Yuta and the audience, explaining her motives for making Yuta film her life and exposing her cruelty. This moment is crucial for the audience to understand Yuta’s true feelings about his movie while also inspiring Yuta to face Eri’s death in a way he could not with his mother.
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