Goodbye, Eri

Content Warning: This section discusses illness and death, suicidal ideation, child abuse, child death, and bullying.

The first major theme is Memory and Authenticity in an Age of Curated Content. Everything from the characters and the plot, the symbolism of Yuta’s camera, and the visual layout of the manga itself all contribute to this theme in some way. The story of the manga takes place in a contemporary context, which includes the internet and social media. This suggests that memory itself is becoming increasingly tied to the digital tools used to capture and revise it. Though the characters never explicitly mention the internet or social media, Yuta’s smartphone and his computer are physical reminders of the existence of the internet and its impact on people’s lives, especially students like Yuta. These physical reminders underscore a connection between Yuta’s videos of his mother, recorded on his smartphone, and downloaded to his computer for editing, to the heavy curation prevalent in social media. Moreover, the visuals of the manga, such as the shaky/blurred line art and the camera’s perspective, contribute to the sense that everything is curated and edited by Yuta for the express purpose of obfuscating reality and authenticity and crafting a carefully controlled story. This creates a haunting visual metaphor for the instability of memory and the erasure of painful truths.

The plot centers on Yuta’s attempts to make movies, first about his mother and then about Eri, endeavors that likewise highlight the way he curates his video content and interweaves fact and fiction to conceal the reality of his mother’s emotional abuse and distance himself from his grief and pain. The manga thus demonstrates the way careful curation of content can hide the truth. And yet, crucially, his many efforts to avoid reality still reveal aspects of his authentic self. This is especially true in the case of the explosion he edits at the end of his movie. Though his classmates do not understand its meaning, Eri understands the grief, anger, and defiance the explosion represents. The image becomes a visual shorthand for emotional overwhelm—too big to be explained with words, yet instantly understood by someone who recognizes the pain behind it.

Like Yuta’s movies, the metafictional aspects of the manga create a blurred boundary between fact and fiction, reality and fantasy. The manga actively resists efforts to delineate between what is real and what is Yuta’s fictionalized version. For example, the narrative does not reveal the true extent of Yuta’s mother’s abusive behavior until over halfway through the manga, demonstrating the way Yuta’s story has hidden the truth from the reader as well as his classmates. He has actively controlled the version of his mother that exists in the movie and explicitly states that he wanted to craft a beautiful memory of her for his own needs. This narrative choice not only reinforces the central tension between truth and performance but implicates the reader in the act of misremembering, asking readers to reflect on the stories we construct about others.

This is not the only discussion of the way memory can be manipulated, even altered. Eri and Yuta’s mother both know this as well, which is why they each ask Yuta to record them. Yuta’s mother wants to create a version of herself as a brave survivor of illness. Likewise, Eri wishes for Yuta to craft a curated and idealized version of her life and death. While Yuta’s mother seems primarily motivated by self-aggrandizement, however, Eri’s motivations are similar to Yuta’s own. They each use these movies, and the storytelling inherent within them, to cope with their fear, vulnerability, and grief, ultimately tying this theme to Storytelling as a Coping Mechanism. In this way, curated memory becomes a shared language of survival—a method by which characters rewrite their narratives into something livable.

The final scene of the manga reinforces this in several ways. First, it is the best example of the metafictional aspects of the narrative. This scene pulls the fantastical story of a vampire girl out of Yuta’s movie and into the real world while simultaneously calling into question the reality of everything Yuta experiences here by concluding with another explosion. Additionally, Eri the vampire claims that his movie about her not only preserves her memory but can now create it as well. If Eri is in fact a vampire, then the beautiful, idealized version of Eri Yuta crafted in his movie will now become the real, authentic version, bringing the cycle of memory, curation, and authenticity full circle.