Goodbye, Eri

Visually, four pages of all-black panels separate the final section of the manga from the previous sections. The black panels function like a fade-to-black transition in film, signaling a major scene shift in time and location. Before the panels resolve into concrete images again, dialogue cuts across the final black panel like a film’s voice-over. Finally, the concrete visuals take over again in the same four-panel layout containing images of the school, the city, and a CD titled “Goodbye, Eri” (166) as Yuta summarizes his life since Eri’s death. The structure of these pages mirrors the grammar of cinema itself, reinforcing the idea that Yuta’s life is now permanently narrated through the logic of film.

Yuta juxtaposes the ending of his movie, in which the protagonist successfully films his friend’s death, thereby resolving his guilt and finding the confidence to live his life, with his real life, in which he isolates himself and drops out of college, all the while still tinkering with Eri’s movie. This contrast points to the separation between Yuta’s stories and reality. Previously, the boundaries between the two have been consistently blurred, but now, Yuta sees at least one clear way in which the two do not converge. Yuta’s need to keep cutting and recutting his movie about Eri also shows his dissatisfaction with the movie’s role in helping him process Eri’s death. Though he cannot determine why, something about the way he crafted and presented Eri’s story does not ring true. His obsessive editing reveals the limits of storytelling as a coping mechanism—at some point, it begins to stall healing rather than facilitate it.

Yuta’s decision to return to the abandoned building is not simply about Eri—it is about the accumulation of loss that has quietly hollowed out his life. In the time since Eri’s death, Yuta has also lost his father, his wife, and his child in a car accident. These losses are mentioned in passing, without elaboration, but the brevity is part of the bleakness: Death in Goodbye, Eri is constant, unceremonious, and unrelenting. The manga does not offer traditional emotional catharsis for these events; instead, it presents loss as a shadow that grows heavier with time. Yuta no longer dreams of becoming a filmmaker, yet his narrative voice and continued editing of the Eri film show how storytelling remains his primary way of making meaning. Even when untethered from career or ambition, the impulse to narrativize persists. Art becomes indistinguishable from thought itself—a way of continuing to live with, and through, the impossible. Though the manga resists a tidy interpretation, it invites reflection on the presence of death in life, and how memory, myth, and story are tools that the living use to make unbearable things endurable.

Then, at the bottom of page 167, another single black panel signals a second, though shorter, scene shift. This time, the visuals appear again with an adult Yuta sitting on the floor and speaking into his camera. This scene closely mirrors the scene on pages 33-35, when Yuta considered death by suicide for the first time. Once again, Yuta explains and defends his motivations, which stem from a tragic loss he cannot face or process. Crucially, he states that he can only “face the facts from behind a camera” (170), which he uses to distance himself from his problems, which contributes to the symbolism of the camera and the theme of Storytelling as a Coping Mechanism. This is the first time Yuta displays enough self-awareness to acknowledge his impulse to shield himself from his pain through storytelling and filmmaking, indicating significant character growth. However, rather than use this chance to face his problems, he concludes that he “no longer [has] enough soul left to endure any more deaths” (171). In this moment, the camera becomes less a tool and more a cage that isolates as much as it protects.

A sequence of shaky images depicts Yuta walking through the city to the abandoned building where he and Eri used to watch movies together, where he intends to die. The surprising moment of Eri’s appearance is then depicted in a large two-page splash image, with the adult Yuta standing on one side, and the teenage Eri seated on the sofa on the other side. The moment is drawn out across the next page. Finally, Eri explains her presence.

This final scene is a culmination of the plot and thematic elements that lead up to it, drawing together the fictional backstory of the vampire girl, Yuta’s obsession with fixing Eri’s movie, the metafictional aspects, and the motif of a “pinch of fantasy” (182) into a single revelatory moment. Yuta’s stories now forcefully intrude into the real world. The manga focuses attention on the interplay between fact and fiction by actively resisting efforts to determine if the fantasy elements of Yuta’s film have truly broken through into the real world, or if he is imagining this reunion in some way. Whether Eri is really there or not, her dialogue reinforces the value and power of Yuta’s movie by claiming that it allows her to recall not only her own life but his as well. For Eri, whether she is a vampire with a lost memory or a figment of Yuta’s imagination, the idealism or accuracy of the movie is less important than the remembrance itself. Eri argues that the beauty of memory lies in its persistence, which Yuta has access to through his movies no matter how curated or fictionalized they are. This argument reframes the theme of Memory and Authenticity in an Age of Curated Content—authenticity is about emotional resonance. If the memory comforts or empowers, then it is real enough.

Yuta’s obsession with his movie about Eri underscores the significance of her friendship in his life. As always, their friendship is grounded by their shared passion for movies. Yuta clings to Eri by clinging to the movie he made for her. The implication here is that so long as he keeps editing the movie, cutting and recutting the content, the movie will never truly be finished, and Eri will never truly be gone. This movie is the entire extent of their relationship. Now, however, Yuta encounters Eri the vampire, whose friendship was so important that it endures past her death and helps him choose to live again just as she did the first time. Whether real or imagined, this moment provides him with the opportunity for proper closure. This final act of friendship—returning in vampire or fantastical form to give Yuta meaning—cements the theme of Friendship Forged Through Shared Passions as a source of salvation. Eri’s presence is both a narrative device and a final act of care.

The last image of the manga shows Yuta walking away from the building as it explodes behind him, explicitly mirroring the image of the hospital exploding in his first movie, “Dead Explosion Mother.” This image may imply that the entire scene between Yuta and Eri is yet another edited addition to his movie. Despite his growth, Yuta still mediates and processes his experiences through film. By including one last bit of a fantasy, the final explosion, he fixes his movie about Eri. The manga does not distinguish between which parts are real and which are not. Instead, the manga focuses on Yuta, who uses this moment (whether real or imagined) to say goodbye to Eri in a way he was not able to before. The image of Yuta walking away from the explosion implies that he is at last ready to move on with his life. Importantly, the explosion is no longer an act of defiance to be ridiculed but one of closure and finality—it is the final flourish in a story that allows Yuta to keep going. He went there with the intention of dying, but in seeing Eri, he is restored enough to walk away and end his connection with her in the only way he knows how—by blowing up his memory of her just as he did with his mother’s film.

This final section delivers the emotional climax of Goodbye, Eri by completing the arcs of all three major themes. Yuta’s relationship to memory evolves as he comes to accept its curated nature; storytelling, while not a perfect tool for healing, becomes the ritual that enables him to say goodbye; and the friendship he formed through shared passion endures, even beyond death. The manga ends not with a definitive truth but with an emotional release—an explosion that blurs reality and fantasy one last time, so that Yuta can finally begin living again.