Goodbye, Eri

Visually, this section of the manga maintains the same four-panel layout begun in the first section. The shaky, blurred line art indicates when Yuta is recording, while some panels with clean line art also reveal Yuta’s perspective through his camera. Crucially, the panels that consist only of Yuta and Eri seated on the sofa in the abandoned building, watching movies are not from the point-of-view of the camera, but rather that of the omniscient viewer. These moments in which the separation between the camera and the outside view is explicit are rare. Their rarity emphasizes how fully the manga commits to subjectivity, and how infrequent it is that Yuta truly steps outside of his curated lens.

Many of these panels contain no dialogue. They reveal the passage of time through different clothing, sitting positions, and facial expressions. These panels function like a montage sequence in a film, which enhances the thematic importance of movies in the narrative. These moments reveal the enormous amount of time Yuta and Eri spend together watching movies and the closeness this activity fosters. For instance, some early panels show them seated far apart, leaning against opposite arms of the sofa. Later panels show them seated closely together, one with Eri’s head on Yuta’s shoulder. These images contribute significantly to the third theme, Friendship Forged Through Shared Passions. Yuta and Eri bond over their shared love of movies and the time they spend watching and analyzing them. The intimacy of these silent panels conveys a type of emotional trust that words would only flatten.

In addition to these image-only panels, this section is broken up by a handful of conversations between Yuta and Eri that likewise contribute to the theme of Friendship Forged Through Shared Passions. They tease each other about their feelings and reactions to different movies. For instance, in one conversation, Yuta teases Eri about liking cliches like a heroine’s dramatic death, while Eri points out his juvenile reaction to seeing bare breasts on screen. This exchange lends humor to the otherwise serious narrative and demonstrates the way movie-viewing leads to increased bonding and understanding. This moment also foreshadows Eri’s eventual fate when she explains that she sees elements of her own life in the film heroine’s death. The foreshadowing reflects how fictional stories often mirror real emotional truths, demonstrating the power of stories in processing life and death. 

Other conversations reveal Eri’s thoughts about storytelling and Yuta’s filmmaking. In their first conversation after meeting, Eri instructs Yuta to analyze the films they watched together. She discusses the primary plot components of a story that Yuta needs to better understand if he wishes to make a movie that will impact his audience, further highlighting the power and intentionality of storytelling as a medium. Later, when Eri rejects each of Yuta’s new script drafts with criticisms that they are normal or boring, she explains why she liked his first film. This moment is crucial in demonstrating the depth of Eri’s understanding. She understands the point of Yuta’s film, especially the explosion at the end, in a way that none of his other classmates could comprehend. She is the only person who realizes how cruel it was for Yuta’s mother to make him record her decline and death in the first place. She therefore understands why the explosion at the end is cathartic—a moment of defiance and an attempt to control the narrative. While Yuta’s classmates and teachers berate him for the film, Eri understands his need to use his camera and storytelling like a shield. Her feedback gives Yuta permission to tell his story on his own terms, even if those terms are uncomfortable or strange to others. Ironically, Eri will later ask Yuta to do the very thing she criticized—record the end of her life. But unlike his mother, she treats Yuta with kindness, forming a relationship built on mutual respect and shared artistic vision. In this way, her request feels like a gift rather than a burden. Still, both women ultimately want the same thing: to be remembered. Eri’s deep empathy for Yuta is matched by her own desire to control her legacy through the lens of someone who can make her story beautiful.

Eri encourages Yuta to make his second film for and about himself, which inspires him to fictionalize his experiences with the first film’s criticism and his friendship with Eri. This decision is crucial to the theme of Memory and Authenticity in an Age of Curated Content. Just as his movie “Dead Explosion Mother” allowed him to confront his mother’s death from an outside perspective, he again hopes to process his problems and feelings through the mediating barrier of his camera and creative expression. It is thus significant that, even when he heavily fictionalizes the narrative by turning Eri into a vampire girl, Yuta’s efforts to control the story still reveal his authentic feelings of grief, guilt, and vulnerability. In this way, fiction enhances truth, making emotional reality more legible through metaphor.

Though Eri’s encouragement is Yuta’s primary motivation for his second film, his father is also an important influence in his decisions. Yuta’s father first introduces the motif of “a pinch of fantasy” (83), referring to Yuta’s impulse to add a fantastical element into everything he creates, whether that be explosions or drawing his father with a dragon’s face. Yuta’s father thus inspires his decision to add that “pinch of fantasy” to his second film and make Eri’s character a vampire, which proves increasingly significant to Yuta’s perceptions of reality later in the narrative. Yuta’s father also recognizes the power and significance of storytelling, just as Eri does. He argues that any kind of creative expression is intended to emotionally impact, perhaps even hurt, the audience, and it is only fair that creative expression should also hurt its creator. This comment implies a complex connection between the themes of Storytelling as a Coping Mechanism and Memory and Authenticity in an Age of Curated Content. Though Yuta uses his storytelling as a coping mechanism to distance himself from his own problems and pain, his efforts to create a story that will emotionally impact his audience will only be effective if it impacts him as well. It only impacts him if it is emotionally authentic beneath the layers of fiction and heavily curated content. In other words, storytelling becomes not just a form of self-expression but an emotional contract between creator and audience—one that requires vulnerability to be meaningful. At the same time, storytelling becomes a space where Yuta can process the very feelings he struggles to face directly. The act of constructing narrative—however fictionalized—allows him to name, contain, and slowly work through experiences of grief, regret, and loss.

This section marks a turning point in Yuta’s journey as a filmmaker and as a person. Through Eri’s mentorship and his father’s nuanced understanding of art, Yuta begins to grasp that storytelling is also about emotional risk. By blending fantasy and autobiography, and by choosing to tell a story that hurts, he edges closer to an authentic self he can live with and that others might finally understand.