Goodbye, Eri

Goodbye, Eri is a one-shot manga by Japanese manga writer and artist Tatsuki Fujimoto, best known for his popular manga series Chainsaw Man. Goodbye, Eri follows middle school student Yuta, who is ridiculed by his classmates for a film he made about his mother’s death. The only person who likes and understands his film is a mysterious girl named Eri, who offers to educate Yuta in the elements of good filmmaking and storytelling and help him make a new film. As they grow closer, Eri reveals a painful secret that changes the direction of Yuta’s project. Goodbye, Eri is a metafictional exploration of grief and friendship that tackles issues of Memory and Authenticity in an Age of Curated Content, Friendship Forged Through Shared Passions, and the power of Storytelling as a Coping Mechanism.

This guide is based on the 2024 English translation edition published by VIZ Media and translated by Amanda Haley.

Content Warning: The source material and this guide feature discussion of illness and death, death by suicide, suicidal ideation, mental illness, child abuse, child death, and bullying.

Plot Summary

Middle-schooler Yuta Ito receives a new smartphone for his 12th birthday. His terminally ill mother asks him to record every moment of her life so he can remember her when she is gone. Yuta takes this task seriously, recording everything, even the most innocuous and random moments. In the hospital, she asks him to film right up to her death, but he refuses and runs away.

After her death, Yuta compiles his footage into a movie that he shows to his school at the student talent festival. But the film is ridiculed and criticized, especially Yuta’s decision to edit in an image of the hospital exploding as he runs from it. Hurt and angry, Yuta decides to die by suicide by jumping from the hospital’s roof. A girl named Eri stops him, saying that she loves his film.

Eri leads him to an abandoned building where she has set up a sofa and a film projector. She offers to teach Yuta more about filmmaking so that he can make a better film next time. They agree to watch and analyze movies together every afternoon. After a year, they will make a new film and show it at the student festival. They grow close. Soon, it is time to make their own movie. Yuta writes a script based on his experiences making the first film and meeting Eri, but they decide to add “a pinch of fantasy” (83) by making Eri’s character a vampire who dies at the end.

Yuta and Eri make the film together, growing even closer in the process. They recruit Yuta’s father to play a part in the film, and he thanks Eri for befriending Yuta. However, while filming, Eri falls unconscious and is hospitalized. She reveals that she, like Yuta’s mother, is dying and hopes that Yuta will record her life so that she will not be forgotten. Yuta becomes depressed and gives up on the movie until his father encourages him to continue. His father explains that Yuta’s mother was cruel to ask him to film her death. He remarks on Yuta’s decision to show only the good parts of his mother though she was emotionally abusive.

Yuta agrees to film every moment with Eri. After her death, Yuta shows his new movie to the school. This time, it is well-received and praised. However, one of Eri’s friends says that Yuta idealized Eri in the movie, claiming instead that she was self-absorbed and had few friends. The friend says she prefers to remember this idealized version of Eri.

Time passes. Yuta attends college, gets a job, marries, and has a daughter. However, he never stops thinking about Eri’s movie, which he feels is incomplete. He edits and re-edits the footage, never satisfied. Then, his father, wife, and daughter die in a car accident while Yuta is driving, leading him to contemplate death by suicide again.

Yuta decides to die in a place of importance to him. He breaks into the abandoned building where he used to watch movies with Eri. There, he finds Eri sitting on the sofa, the same age she was when she died. He thinks he is hallucinating. Eri explains that she really is a vampire and cannot die. However, brains cannot contain the memories of so many lives, so every 200 years her brain dies, and she revives with no memories and must start over.

This time, she had Yuta’s film to remind her who she was before. She will also have this movie long after Yuta is dead, to remember him. Yuta says goodbye to Eri and leaves the building. As he walks away, he recalls Eri saying that the film is “missing a pinch of fantasy” (199), and then the building explodes behind him, leaving the ending ambiguous.