Goodbye, Eri

Following the scene with Yuta’s father, Yuta and Eri continue shooting their new movie on a beach. This entire scene is viewed through the perspective of Yuta’s camera, once again functioning as a mediator between Yuta and his life. This is indicated by the consistent close-up of Eri’s face and the shaky, blurry line art. Within the context of Yuta’s film, this scene is important for establishing the fictional backstory of Eri’s vampire girl character, which also proves significant in the final moments of the manga when it is revealed that Eri is actually a vampire. However, the real importance of the scene comes when Eri falls backward into the water in a dramatic sequence of panels ending with a full splash page. The splash page—visually distinct and emotionally jarring—marks a tonal turning point that signals the increasing collapse between Yuta’s fictional narrative and his real emotional stakes. It also foreshadows the looming loss of his friendship with Eri through her death, a symbolic drowning that mirrors the emotional weight he will soon carry. The moment deepens the manga’s meditation on death and legacy, underscoring how storytelling becomes the only way to preserve fleeting human connection.

Due to the metafictional nature of the manga, which constantly blurs the lines between reality and the fictionalized story of Yuta’s movies, it is not apparent if this is part of the story or if Eri has genuinely fainted. However, the next scene shows Eri sitting in a hospital bed, which resolves the ambiguous nature of the previous page. The moment of Eri’s collapse and the conversation between Yuta and Eri in the hospital significantly alter the tone of the narrative and the dynamic of their relationship. The reality of Eri’s illness begins to pierce the fantasy, complicating Yuta’s attempts to maintain emotional distance through film.

The previous section focused on the growing friendship between Yuta and Eri, implying a bond between the two that would eventually help Yuta overcome his grief and the guilt he feels for not fulfilling his mother’s dying wish. Now, despite being the only person who understands the cruelty of his mother’s wish, Eri asks Yuta for the same thing. Thus, Eri comes to mirror Yuta’s mother. They both wish not only to be immortalized in Yuta’s movies but cast in the best possible light because they understand the way carefully curated content can interact with memory and truth. Moreover, the supportive bonds they each share with Yuta, one as his mother and the other as his only friend, are now complicated by their self-centered demands that he idealize their memories after their deaths. This recursion of request—film me, remember me—reveals the way even loving relationships are vulnerable to manipulation when filtered through the lens of legacy.

Crucially, Yuta himself is not entirely aware of the self-centered cruelty of his mother’s demand until the conversation with his father on pages 123-31. This moment alters Yuta’s understanding of his mother, demonstrates that Yuta’s father (like Eri) realized his mother’s request was cruel, and reveals another layer of fiction to the audience. Yuta’s movie about his mother is far more fictionalized than he previously thought. In reality, Yuta’s mother was unsupportive and emotionally abusive. The irony is especially stark given that she was a television producer herself—someone trained in constructing narratives—who used her son to film her idealized legacy for her own posthumous image-making. Yuta made a conscious decision to create a beautiful version of his mother that alters the way he and others will remember her. This decision, though painful, also reveals Yuta’s deep compassion and growing maturity. His father affirms this by not condemning the curated version but honoring it, thus validating both Yuta’s pain and his artistry. In doing so, their relationship becomes a quiet source of strength, contrasting the manipulation Yuta endured from his mother. This is also an example of the way he uses storytelling to cope with both her abuse and her death and demonstrates the way curation can hide the truth as well as reveal it. 

The scene also creates a thematic bridge between Yuta’s mother and Eri—two people who asked him to frame their lives and deaths through film. Eri, like the friend in the crowd points out, was imperfect too. Yet having seen Yuta’s first film, she knowingly invited the same idealization. This selective memory highlights the theme of Memory and Authenticity in an Age of Curated Content—what is remembered and how it is remembered becomes more about emotional survival than historical accuracy. In this world, resolution is elusive. Characters do not find peace so much as they find ways to move forward by swallowing challenges and contradictions—grief and love, truth and illusion—whole.

After Yuta’s conversation with his father, he agrees to make a movie about her death. What follows is a sequence of two-panel pages that beautifully showcase Eri’s life, or at least Yuta’s idealized version of her life. As before, these panels contain no dialogue and, while visually focused on Eri alone, implicitly reveal the depth of the friendship between the two, who share every moment together. These scenes echo the earlier montage panels from their first weeks of movie-watching, now charged with the melancholy of impending loss. The friendship forged in their shared passion for film has become a sacred space that Yuta now preserves through cinematic ritual.

Finally, the manga shifts again to an image of students watching Yuta’s film in an auditorium. Without explicitly stating that Eri has now died, the shift indicates this fact. The reception of Yuta’s second film underscores the intentionality of the storytelling process. Eri’s last recorded dialogue is her wish that the movie makes their classmates “bawl their eyes out” (152), which again points to the inherently emotionally manipulative nature of storytelling. The point is to make the audience feel something. Moreover, Eri’s other friend remarks that Yuta’s version is inaccurate and idealized, which highlights the way he has curated the video content to create a fictionalized version of Eri. Yet, the friend thanks him for this version and decides that this is how she will remember Eri from now on, indicating a layer of authenticity beneath the fiction. This moment synthesizes the manga’s central paradox that curation, even when fictionalized, can still be emotionally honest, and the stories people choose to tell about the dead may reveal more about us than about them.

In this section, all three major themes converge. Yuta’s process of filmmaking becomes both a coping mechanism and a vehicle for emotional authenticity, even as it blurs the line between memory and invention. Eri’s death reaffirms the emotional weight of their friendship, and her final wish ensures that storytelling remains central to how she will be remembered. In crafting a narrative that manipulates, soothes, and ultimately preserves, Yuta begins to accept that no story can be fully true, but some stories, even the imagined ones, can still be meaningful.