Goodbye, Eri

Movies are another important symbol within the narrative. Movies, like Yuta’s camera, allow the characters to distance themselves from their lives and process their pain and problems in a safe way. The movies that Yuta and Eri watch together inspire and symbolize the growth of their friendship. Movies also symbolize Yuta’s engagement with his life and feelings, becoming one facet of the theme of using Storytelling as a Coping Mechanism. They are also emotional mirrors—tools for identifying with others, and for escaping or reinterpreting one’s own reality. Additionally, movies hold value for other characters as well. Yuta’s mother views herself as a heroine in a movie battling against illness. She envisions a story in which she recovers and shares her story with the world, gaining praise for her bravery in the face of pain and possible death. This is not, of course, the story she sells to Yuta. For Yuta, she claims the movie is meant to be a memory for him to hold on to after she is gone. Similarly, Eri wishes Yuta to make a movie about her that will keep her memory alive after her death. She and Yuta’s mother have similar motives. Both women seek narrative immortality and an idealized story that will outlive their physical decline.

In every case, the movie is a story that a character wishes to tell about themselves, and thus also contributes to the theme of Memory and Authenticity in an Age of Curated Content. Moreover, a movie is not only a story one tells about oneself within their head, but one that requires an audience to have any value or impact. This is true even for Yuta, who records a message before his two suicide attempts. In the first video, he explicitly states that he wants his father to show the video to his classmates so that they remember him “for the rest of their lives” (35). In both cases, he is presenting a curated version of himself to explain his decision in a way that he believes will be sympathetic and impactful.

Additionally, movies as a form of storytelling are constructed with careful planning and intention. Eri highlights this aspect when she instructs Yuta to analyze each film they watch to better understand the way they are constructed, including the rising action, climax, and so forth. Yuta’s father reiterates this when he argues that the movie’s emotional impact is intentional, even manipulative. This likewise contributes to the theme of curation and authenticity, particularly the way fictionalized content can contain or hide emotional truth. A film may be false in detail but true in feeling—an idea the manga repeatedly returns to through both visual and narrative structure.

The phrase “a pinch of fantasy” (83) is a motif first introduced by Yuta’s father. Both Eri and Yuta repeat the phrase several times, reinforcing its importance. The phrase refers to Yuta’s impulse since early childhood to inject a bit of fantasy or whimsy into everything he creates, from giving his father a dragon’s face in a kindergarten drawing, to the explosion at the end of his movie about his mother. Yuta is not aware he does this until after his father points it out. After that conversation, Yuta realizes that this “pinch of fantasy” is the thing missing from the story he is trying to write for his second movie. Once he adds that touch of fantasy—by making Eri’s character a vampire—the story comes to life and both he and Eri are satisfied with the direction.

This phrase appears again in the last section of the manga when Yuta arrives at the abandoned building intending to die and encounter Eri again instead. He has spent the intervening years continually trying to cut and recut Eri’s movie, unsatisfied with the project and feeling that something is missing. Eri, or perhaps his hallucination of Eri, claims it is “missing a pinch of fantasy” (182), his signature element. This inspires him to end the film, and the manga, with another explosion. Fantasy, here, is a stylistic signature and emotional punctuation, allowing Yuta to process unbearable truths in digestible ways.

These bits of fantasy contribute to Yuta’s use of Storytelling as a Coping Mechanism as they simultaneously allow him to process his pain while distancing himself from his life by turning it into a fantasy. In his first film, the explosion at the end of “Dead Explosion Mother” is a cathartic release meant to help him process his mother’s death and her cruelty and absolve him of the guilt he feels for running away. The explosion on the final page implies that everything, including the final section and Eri’s revelation that she really is a vampire, is simply part of the movie, another fiction mixed in with the reality of Eri’s death. Imagining that Eri is truly a vampire and therefore did not die allows Yuta the chance to say goodbye properly. The final explosion may thus signify his attempt to at last close that chapter of his life and start again.