Manga / Goodbye, Eri

One boy's tale of an explosive romance, filmed from a humble smartphone.

Your movie... was super awesome!

Goodbye, Eri is a one-shot, 200 page manga by Tatsuki Fujimoto published in Jump+ in April 2022.

Yuta Ito is a highschooler who just got his hands on a new smartphone for his birthday. While he's pleased to play around with it, his mother makes an odd request- to record her final days before she passes away. Despite his hangups, Yuta does so, turning his experience into a film screening for his school. Due to the rather strange ending where Yuta runs away from the hospital as it explodes, his school relentlessly bullies him for it.

All except for one girl named Eri. She decides to enlist Yuta in creating another film, since unlike her peers, she actually loved Yuta's documentary. As they grow closer, the lines between fiction and reality slowly break down...

Due to the length of this oneshot, all spoilers are untagged. Please read the story before continuing!

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Goodbye, Eri has examples of:

• Abusive Parents:
  • Yuta's mom is revealed to have been abusive to her son and husband late into the story. This helps tie into the theme of perspective, as Yuta's mom only wanted to be remembered for her good qualities, hence her intent for Yuta to record the final days of her life. Then, in her last filmed moments in the hospital, she calls her son "useless to the end" for not being there. Eri rightfully points out how horribly selfish this is.
  • Subverted with Yuta's father. He initially seems like he's going to reject Eri and Yuta's relationship, but in reality he's supportive of it and views their relationship positively. His initial rejection is also actually him playing a fictionalized version of himself for their movie. He even pushes for the two of them to reconcile after Eri reveals she's Secretly Dying, telling his son that unlike his domineering mother who only wanted her good side shown, Eri wants Yuta to remember her however he wants to.
• All Men Are Perverts: Yuta unconsciously says "aww, yeah..." whenever nipples appear in the movies he and Eri watch. Eri is oddly irritable over it.
• Amateur Filmmaking Plot: The whole story is Yuta making different films with his smartphone as an integral part of his life.
• Ambiguous Ending:
  • Whether or not Eri really was a vampire and really was there at the abandoned building forms the crux of the ending. It's either Yuta realizing that he still has things to live for and can't give up on life, or the "touch of fantasy" that Yuta loves to inject into his films really is reflective of reality. This isn't even mentioning the third possibility of all this being a film with Eri being alive and well.
  • For that matter, the entire Distant Finale is itself up for interpretation. Did Yuta truly grow up, unable to forget Eri, and suffer another tragedy, or like the beginning, is it another film, this time about his completion of the process of grief, one in which the character of Yuta and creator Yuta are no longer the same person?
  • Hell, we don't even know if it's Yuta in the final scene, or just Yuta's dad albeit clean-shaven and with a different hairstyle.
• Arc Words: The fictionalized element that adds to Yuta's movies is repeatedly described as "a pinch of fantasy", representing his ability to use his movies for catharsis by adding a personal, intentionally fantastical touch. It's even the very last words that are spoken in the story, on the penultimate panel, right before we see an adult Yuta calmly striding away from the abandoned building as it explodes for no reason, calling into question whether any part of what we just saw was real.
• Author Avatar: Yuta is a cinephile who wants to create art, but his life is rather chaotic and his tastes and standards invite extremely mixed receptions, primarily due to juxtaposition between realistic tragedy and weird, off-kilter fantasy. It's not hard to read him as a stand-in for Fujimoto much like Fujino and Kyomoto were previously.
• Author Appeal:
  • A Tatsuki Fujimoto work about movies? Shocking.
  • There's not one but two domineering and manipulative women who the male lead loves regardless (albeit with one being the familial sort of love while the other is implied to have romantic elements).
  • In-Universe, Yuta clearly has a love for cats and explosions.
• Bittersweet Ending: Eri dies from her disease, but Yuta screens the film they made to the acclaim of his classmates. Much later in life, Yuta goes through a serious tragedy and decides to end his life, before a conversation with Eri (whether real or imaginary) gives him the strength to move on and find peace. The story ends with Yuta confidently striding away from an explosion, showing how he's finally found closure in his and Eri's relationship the only way he knows how- by adding a touch of fantasy.
• Bait-and-Switch: During dinner with Eri at Yuta's house, his dad sullenly eats dinner in silence before bursting out in an angry diatribe forbidding her from hanging out with his son. There's a lengthy pause, then Yuta calls out "Cut!" and his dad breaks character, nervously asking how his acting was as a mean, Fantasy-Forbidding Father fictionalized version of himself.
• Book Ends:
  • The first part of the story ends with Yuta running away from his mother's hospital as it explodes, rejecting her fantasy as he sprints away crying. The final part of the story ends with Yuta calmly walking away from the screening room he shared with Eri as it explodes, but this time with a look of confidence and acceptance.
  • During their initial friendship, Yuta points out that Eri gives a small "peace" sign whenever the main characters "score a win" in the films they watch. When Yuta screens "Goodbye Eri" for his class and they begin to cry at the ending, he gives a small peace sign to underscore his own emotional victory.
• Central Theme: Memories and perception. Almost the whole work is a series of video recording that deliberately confuses fiction and reality, all while emphasizing how their editing and presentation affect how the audience will see the characters and reflect how Yuta does (or wishes to) remember them.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: While Eri denies loving Yuta romantically, she does seem oddly annoyed whenever he goes "aww, yeah" whenever nudity appeared in the movies they watch together.
• Creative Sterility: Eri refuses to make her own films, and instead acts as a producer to Yuta, because she's only interested in movies other people would make.
• Creator Thumbprint: Once again, Tatsuki Fujimoto has written a story where film plays a central role in the emotional development of the cast.
• Death of Personality: Vampire Eri claims she has an immortal body that's lived over a thousand years, but every century or two her brain overloads, causing her to lose all her memories. Eri speaks of previous personalities as being different people.
• Didn't See That Coming: Yuuta's mother seemed to think she was going to survive her illness, wanting to use his film to boost her job as a producer. When she is filmed for the last time in the hospital, her face is blank as if she finds it unbelievable she is actually dying.
• Domestic Abuse: We don't see it as prominently, but Yuta's mom pushed her selfish wants on her husband just as much as her son.
• Driven to Suicide: Yuta gets so bullied for his movie that he decides to jump off of the roof of the school. Meeting Eri stops him from going through with it. In his adult years, he tries to hang himself after he survives a car crash that kills his family. Once again, Eri stops him.
• Fake Video Camera View:
  • The vast majority of pages are four equally-sized, rectangular panels, representing the camera of Yuta's smartphone.
  • Many panels are blurry to show Yuta isn't holding the phone steady or is trying to film something too close to be in focus.
• Foil: Eri to Yuta's mother. Both are making Yuto film their lives up to their deaths to have idealized versions of them to be immortalized into a movie, and both are shown to have a manipulative side to them with own goals. But while the mother was entirely self-centered Control Freak who wasn't above physical abuse to get the film the way she envisions it, Eri leaves all creative input to Yuta and the fun they have together serves as his personal growth. It's also implied that while Yuta's mother strongly disliked her son, Eri genuinely loved him, even if not romantically.
• Foreshadowing: There's a lot of hints that Yuta's mom was abusive before it was confirmed.
  • At the very beginning of the story, Yuta's mom drops a fairly big bombshell onto her son and saddles him with an emotionally arresting task in the middle of his birthday, even ignoring his requests not to talk about it. Sure enough, her emotional manipulation of him becomes more apparent later.
    • In a montage of Yuta's daily life, there are several clips of his dad crying in secret. It's later revealed that his wife was just as abusive to him as she was their son, and he felt immense guilt over how she treated Yuta.
  • The ending of Dead Explosion Mother initially reads like Yuta running away from confronting his mother's death, but Eri later points out that filming his own mother's death is a horrible burden to put on Yuta. On reread, the ending appears more like Yuta rejecting his mother's task in her final moments rather than him running away from his responsibilities.
  • Despite Yuta saying he has one-hundred hours of film on his phone, we don't see much of it in his actual movie. The reveal that his mother made him do several alternate takes to show her in the best possible light is an explanation of this, as many of those clips are likely examples of her abusive behaviour.
• Found Footage: The manga is mostly shown from the perspective of Yuta's smartphone.
• Gainax Ending:
  • In-Universe, Yuta ends his film with him running away from the hospital his mother is staying at... which spontaneously explodes. Everyone derides Yuta for this decision and calls him out for doing such a thing for such a sensitive subject.
  • The actual manga ends with the reveal that Eri really is a vampire, one who loses all memories whenever she dies but this time is given instructions on how to remember the good times she's had with Yuta forever. With a new lease on life, Yuta decides not to go through with his suicide at the screening room and heads out... at which point the building explodes behind him just like in his movie about his mother.
• Gilligan Cut: Yuta excitedly invites Eri over to meet his dad, telling her that his dad's going to love her and he's a "total chatterbox" who will talk her ear off. The next page is six consecutive panels of Yuta's dad and Eri eating dinner in total silence, before he has an angry outburst out of nowhere and forbids her from hanging out with his son. Then it's immediately subverted when Yuta calls out "....Aaaand, cut!" before his dad breaks character and nervously asks how his "mean dad" acting was.
• The Glasses Gotta Go: As part of Eri controlling her narrative, despite normally wearing glasses, Yuta reveals that she insisted on not having them in any of the shots so that she comes across as someone wh odoesn't need them.
• Happy Ending Override: Yuta's movie ends with him "scoring a win" with the school festival praising his new movie, allowing the boy to make more movies and move on with confidence. Unfortunately, that did not pan out in real life: convinced that something was missing from the film, Yuta obsessed over editing his footage with Eri to the detriment of his academic and social life. While he was able to find a new relationship, he tragically lost his entire family in a car accident as the only survivor, which drove him to suicide. Fortunately, a chance encounter with Eri, who turned out to actually be a vampire (maybe), actually inspires him to keep living.
• Hidden Depths: While he seems to feign ignorance at first, Yuta is implied to have picked up on the real intent behind his mother and Eri wanting him to film them long before they asked him to do so. The Gainax Ending of Dead Explosion Mother is Yuta rebelling against his mother's selfish desire to make the film a monument to her good qualities, while the initial plot pitch of the film that will become Goodbye Eri hints that he's subtly aware Eri doesn't have long to live.
• Historical Villain Upgrade: In-Universe, Yuta's father plays himself as a Fantasy-Forbidding Father who wants Eri to leave Yuta alone. In reality, he's quite supportive of the two.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Eri is blunt, demanding, rude, and fairly direct with people. However, she can also be extremely nice and considerate to other people, and her relationship with Yuta shows much of her good side. Eri's friend confronts Yuta after the screening and sums this trope up with the following line:
  Eri's Friend: Your Eri was a little overidealized. But... I'll always remember her like that. Thanks.
• Kissing Discretion Shot: While Eri's in the hospital, she asks Yuta if they shot any scenes of them kissing. He tells her they did, but asks if they should shoot one more "just to be safe." Yuta's camera is focused on the ceiling during this entire exchange, so we never see any of the kisses in question.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Yuta's mother only wanted the public to see her good side in the film. While most people who see it do think she's a good person, Yuta's ending made them all into a laughingstock. Her husband also had to cut her death scene out because she's bitterly insulting her son.
• Like Parent, Like Spouse: After Yuta's mother dies, he falls in love with Eri. Both are rather domineering and compel Yuta to make films they'd star in. Eri even considers herself Yuta's producer, which turns out to have been his mother's professional career. The difference is that while Yuta's mother wanted to make the film for purely selfish reasons, Eri very clearly loves Yuta and wants him to portray his honest feelings about her.
• Magical Realism: Yuta loves to inject a small amount of fantasy into his depictions of real life. His father notes that he did this even when he was a small boy. The ending also ties into this, with the idea that Eri may have really been a vampire all along.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: While there's a degree of Magical Realism, it should be noted that much of the surrealness is in the final pages of the manga. So it's not known if Eri really was a vampire after all, or if Yuta is simply using his established tendency to mix reality with fiction to come to terms with his melancholic life and embrace who he is.
• Mayfly–December Romance: Defied, as one of the reasons the immortal Eri rejects Yuta when he asks her out is specifically to prevent this happening to him.
• Mean Character, Nice Actor: Yuta's father gets emotional when he meets Eri and tells her to stay away from their family... then Eri calls "cut" and Yuta's dad turns out to have been playing a fictionalized version of himself and actually supports Yuta and Eri's filmmaking endeavors.
• Mind Screw: There's generally no telling what is incidental footage of people being their true selves or edited performances. Even the above mentions of Yuta's dad turning out to be merely playing a fictionalized version of himself get muddied by him asking if they could do another take of something he says out of seeming sincerity.
• Nameless Narrative: The two leads, Yuta and Eri, are the only named characters in the story.
• Nested Story: The manga is Yuta making films, all of which are Mockumentaries. Since Yuta has all the actors play versions of themselves, there's no way to be sure if a given scene is being staged in-universe or not.
• Never Recycle a Building: The building Eri showed Yuta her movies in was still abandoned years later.
• Nice Character, Mean Actor:
  • It turns out that Yuta's mother wanted herself to be filmed in the best possible light and was actually abusive towards Yuta and his father.
  • Yuta admits to Eri's friend that she had many abusive and controlling moments that were deliberately edited out of the film, and thus made invisible to the readers.
• No Fourth Wall: A huge element of the story is the overlap between fiction and reality. Since we see everything from the perspective of Yuta's phone, there's the very real possibility that the entire story is a narrative Yuta himself is making. Notably, the manga pulls a Proscenium Reveal of Yuta's class watching his film twice, with the second time revealing the entire story with Eri we saw was the film he ended up making. The final panel of the story is potentially a third one of these, with the real-world audience taking the place of the school.
• No Sympathy: Despite his mother's passing, most of Yuta's class are hostile about Dead Explosion Mother. They either say its strange ending disrespected his mother's memory or openly laugh and call it terrible.
• Nostalgia Ain't Like It Used to Be: Yuta's father deluded himself into thinking his wife was as kind as the film portrayed, only relenting when he fears Yuta would do the same and be unable to move on.
• The Not-Love Interest: Despite a similar structure to a love story, Eri claims she only loves Yuta's movies, not him personally (in a romantic way), though Yuta may have had unrequited feelings. However, the fictional vampire Eri is Promoted to Love Interest in the film Yuta makes about them. As well, the "real" vampire Eri points out that the film itself is a monument to Eri's love for him and vice versa, so even if they never officially dated and weren't romantically involved, their love for each other was real.
• Our Vampires Are Different: Eri is revealed to actually be a vampire (maybe). She hates garlic, but can survive in sunlight. She's immortal and ageless, but she appears to have phases of rebirth where upon she loses all memory of her previous life. Her being a bloodsucker seems to be more symbolic than literal as it's later revealed that she could be just as abusive towards Yuta as his mother was.
  Yuta: I thought, even if she sucks me dry and kills me... If it'd mean I become sustenance for someone this beautiful, I'm okay with that.
• Postmodernism: Because of the framing device of an amateur movie stitched up off-screen, the line of fiction and reality is incredibly blurry. How much of the revelations in later parts of the book are actually the truth and how much of it is the script of the movie being edited in post?
• Prefers the Illusion: Yuta and Eri's friend agree that Eri was not as nice as Yuta's movie made her out to be, but regardless they want to remember her as it portrayed her.
• Production Throwback:
  • Tatsuki Fujimoto's pre-serialization oneshot Shikaku was about a romance between a mortal and thousand-year-old vampire. In this story, Yuta writes such a relationship between him and Eri for his film.
  • Yuta's mother has a hairstyle similar to Makima's.
• Promoted to Love Interest: In-Universe, the real Eri rejects Yuta when he asks her out, but the Eri within Yuta's documentary is played as a love interest, and even when they're in her hospital room Eri asks Yuta if they made sure to get footage of their characters kissing. The ending leaves it ambiguous whether Eri really didn't have feelings for Yuta romantically, or if she just wanted to spare both of them the pain of her inevitable death and forgetting about him the next time she's reborn.
• Proscenium Reveal: The story's general ambiguity about where the Show Within a Show begins and ends is emphasized in a scene of Eri and Yuta's father after Yuta says they should meet. The father has a lengthy diatribe telling Eri to go away because the movie she wants Yuta to make will just hurt him in the long run... then awkwardly pauses and asks how his acting was. To make things extra confusing, the same scene ends with him making the completely opposite statement and making it seem that may also have been scripted.
• Reused Character Design: Yuta's mother looks like a middle-aged Makima. Considering that in the case of both women, she presents a loving, maternal presence who secretly turns out to be a huge bitch, this is arguably foreshadowing.
• Ship Sinking: Yuta admits that he tried to ask Eri out at one point, but she rejected him. This was possibly an attempt to spare him the heartbreak of her imminent death, and regardless of whether or not they "officially" dated, they very clearly loved each other. That said, if her being a vampire is real, she genuinely cares for him enough to want to remember him for the rest of her eternal life.
• Soap Opera Disease: Whatever illnesses Yuta's mother and Eri suffer from are unspecified and lack any visible side effects until causing each person to die.
• Take That, Audience!: With how similar Yuta and Fujimoto are, it's difficult to not see the first chunk of the manga where Yuta's schoolmates mock and berate him for his Gainax Ending as Fujimoto admitting to not caring for his reputation as a controversial but quirky weirdo that his readership had saddled him with.
• Tomato Surprise: The fact that Yuta's mother was a verbally and physically abusive mother and wife was obviously well known by Yuta and his father, which were her victims, but was deliberately kept away from the reader, since they only meet the version of her that is shown in the overly idealized documentary. It is not until his father reveals that he recorded the final moments of his mother that the reader sees that she spent most of her time berating her son for being useless to her.
• Useless Bystander Parent: Yuta's father didn't protect him from his mother's emotional abuse because she'd already browbeaten him into submission, probably before Yuta was ever even born.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Yuta's mother is able to get Yuta to edit all the footage of her to make her seem kind and tragic, hoping to boost her career as a producer if she managed to survive her illness. It cut many filmed moments of her berating Yuta and demanding he focus on her more. End result, Yuta is considered a pariah who brought shame on his mother for adding his own ending to the film.
• Wham Line:
  • When Yuta's father shows him the recording of his mother's final moments, she turns to the camera and says this:
    Yuta's mom: That boy was useless to the very end...
  • And later, after the screening of Goodbye Eri for the school, Eri's friend comes up to Yuta and talks to him about the film. One detail she notes throws the entire thing into question and layers on some serious Mind Screw:
    Eri's Friend: Didn't Eri wear glasses?
• Wham Shot: Whenever something significant happens in the story, the story devotes an entire page or two to portraying a single huge panel. These are notable in that the manga usually depicts the story in 1/4th, Yonkoma style panel layouts, which represent Yuta's phone. These particular shots breaking that format gives them more dramatic weight, while also showing that they are not being distorted by Yuta's editing.
  • Eri collapsing into the ocean.
  • Yuta returning to the abandoned building, only to find Eri, having not aged a single day, waiting for him.
• Worked Shoot: Yuta's forte are films that appear autobiographical (to the point the characters play themselves), though with significant unseen liberties, that take a turn into the outright bizarre and impossible.
• Writer Revolt: In-universe, the bizarre ending of Dead Explosion Mother, where Yuta runs away from the hospital as it explodes, was his rebellion against his mother manipulating the rest of film to make her look better. More subtly, he also included some of the random footage of cats she told him to get rid of.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: Years after Eri's death, Yuta still obsesses over his footage of her, but has moved on enough to have a wife and child of his own. Then both are Killed Offscreen along with Yuta's father in a car accident.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: Reactions to his first movie drives Yuta to the brink of suicide, but he's stopped by Eri, who reveals she's one of the few people who actually liked his movie and wants him to make more. Even years later when Yuta has grown to become a jaded adult and once again contemplates suicide, Eri's immortality reminds him of how much she cared about him which makes him reconsider.

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*KABOOM*