Goodbye, Eri

Japanese middle-schooler Yuta Ito receives a new smartphone for his 12th birthday. His terminally ill mother asks him to use the phone to record videos of her so that when she dies, he will have something to remember her by. Yuta’s father looks at her in surprise, but Yuta readily agrees.

Yuta records every possible moment with his mother and father. Portraying the perspective of Yuta’s phone camera, four-panel pages show the family visiting an aquarium, cooking dinner, watching television, Yuta’s parents asleep in bed, and his father secretly crying in a corner. Yuta even tries to record his mother going to the restroom, though she does not allow it. Eventually, Yuta runs out of storage on his phone, and his parents buy him a computer to upload his videos and edit them. He keeps recording. His mother spends time in the hospital. Yuta records himself speaking to a mirror. He has over 100 hours of video now, and his mother believes she will be gone soon. He claims he is not even sad because he cannot “wrap [his] head around it” (14).

Still viewed through Yuta’s phone camera, Yuta’s father says it is time to return to the hospital because his mother is dying.