Steven, James and Will group up to talk about the latest one-shot manga from Tatsuki Fujimoto. Most famous for Chainsaw Man, Fujimoto flexes his storytelling muscles by occasional doing shorter stories. Perhaps this is the key to him being a good storyteller overall. In 'Goodbye, Eri' we get a meditation on how stories are powerful and reality defining. Fujimoto also experiments with a meta-narrative as we see the main character Yuta make his own story up through the course of the pages. Skip synopsis @ 6:46
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125: Goodbye, Eri
By Tatsuki Fujimoto
Translation by Amanda Healy
Lettering by Snir Aharon
Synopsis:
The story starts with 12 years old Yuta receiving a smart phone for his birthday. His mom makes a request towards him, that he must use his smartphone to record her through her sickness, so that he may have something to remember her by when she is gone. The days go by and his mom's health declines as Yuta keeps a cool detachment towards his assignment. But in her last moments, Yuta breaks, running away from the hospital and choosing not to film his mom's final moments. As he runs away, the hospital behind him blows up like an action movie setpiece.
Yuta edited his video footage of his mom into a short film, and after presenting it to his school he gets a class clown reputation and is condemned for mocking his mother. Feeling suicidal, Yuta goes to the hospital his mother died in and thinks of jumping off the roof. He is in terrupted by a school mate, a girl who after seeing the film thinks highly of Yuta's talents and considers the film as something awe inspiring, Eri. Eri decides to show her film collection off to Yuta and school him on how to make a good movie. After a lot of movie watching, the two decide to make one togeather with Eri playing as a terminally ill vampire.
The lines between the two narratives begin to blur, Eri does become terminally ill, just like Yuta's mother and the planned story of the film. But Yuta again gets cold feet, and instead of going to school and facing Eri he hides in his room all day. Yuta's father speaks to him, he reveals that he recorded his mom's final moments and decides to show Yuta the video. In the video, unlike Yuta's film, where we saw a saintly and good mother, we see a side of her that was narcissistic, ungreatful, unloving and abusive. Only wanting Yuta to film her as part of a documentary she wanted to produce, in the hopes that she would survive her illness. Yuta's dad, tells him that he has a gift. That he can choose how to remember someone and portray the goodness in people.
Yuta finishes the film, and it proves a sucess with his school, moving them to tears. But years go by and Yuta dissastified with his film ceaselessly re edits and re cuts it. A much older and once again suicidal Yuta, returns to Eri's den / make-shift theatre after losing his wife and child in a car crash. A familiar voice speaks to him and Yuta finally gets some satisfaction. He finds a way to film a new ending but first he has to say goodbye to Eri.
Topics:
· Zoe thorogood's 'It's Lonely at the Center of the Earth' and meta-narrative storytelling.
· Fujimoto and dominant women.
· Similarities to 'Sundome' and 'Your Lie in April'.
· Fujimoto's way of dividing panels to convey the passage of time.
· Foreshadowing the ending, the unreliable narrator.
· the message, the importancee in story telling, andd how it shapes reality or becomes and how it can be a coping mechanism towards making sense and understanding a senseless world. sometimes escapism. e.g. neil gaiman's death.
· Who out of our hosts is the most like Eri or Yuta?
· Character pastime activity as an excuse to find love and or a driving force for character
Cultural References:
· David fincher's 'Fight Club' (1996), based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuck.
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