Goodbye Erithe most recent work by Tatsuki Fujimoto in the Shōnen Jumpis a one shot that quickly aroused the attention of both critics and the manga reading community and it is not for less, we are perhaps facing the confirmation of the best mangaka of today, who since chainsaw man has not stopped surprising.
Tatsuki Fujimoto is one of the few current manga authors who know how to mix the frenetic and carefree pace for the masses, while at the same time telling deep stories full of intense emotions that are often stamped against the painful barrier of absurdity.
this is how it starts Goodbye Eriin which Yuta, a young high school teenager, receives the news that his mother will die. This she, knowing she is evicted, asks him to record her until the moment of her death… and she does so. From trivial moments like eating, to hospital visits, he starts recording every moment, hoping for the day his mother won’t wake up again.
Of all these clips, Yuta made a film that he presented at the school festival. However, in the end, saying goodbye to her mother, she decides to blow up the hospital where she was waiting for her last moment.
This unexpected brutality is part of Fujimoto’s hallmark and also what guides Goodbye Eri. That style full of surprises and absurdities that contrast reality and the sobriety of his themes, is the constant of this one shot, which of course recreates large parts of his previous works, but which takes him further in almost all aspects.
Death, as a cultural sign, is the most complicated part of life. Modernity has made us aware of our own mortalitybut it also allows us to see it on the horizon and convince ourselves that in this warning there is a hope of avoiding it, but as we can see from Epicurus, death is nothing and nothing swims.
Behind her, only the crosses and traumas experienced by those who remain are looming. Those who relive the absurd in every memory that passes them like a movie in front of their eyes. A tape that fades and challenges his memory, his interpretation of life every second; his faults not healed and now stagnant; her unheard cries; his unresolved dilemmas; his life chopped up and destroyed by the inevitable human expiration date.
For Fujimoto, Yuta’s drama is only expressible with that explosion that he patents at the end of his movie. Profaning death, removing that solemn veil that frames it and questioning the reader, who can imagine this only as the raunchy fervor of superhero movies or western action that didn’t know how to respond after 9/11.
After this new traumatic scene, Yuta meets Eri, a classmate who has a hobby of watching movies in abandoned places.who entrusts our protagonist to watch three movies every day and then make a second film.
It is curious the form that cinema takes here and the mere passive act of watching a film. In many ways, this is a solitary act despite being done in company. In the first movie session they have, Eri reminds Yuta that he has to keep quiet so he can admire the cinema with her.. The introspection that comes with sitting in a dark space, seated and devoid of any interference with the result, has almost dreamlike characteristics.
This is how every step of Yuta’s life feels: like a dream. Even he admits it himself.. He has dedicated himself to observing his life, to being just a spectator, someone who watches in the background and gloats over everything that happens around him.
Eri’s irruption in his life was, at the same time, a way to get out of the frustration generated by the death of his mother, but little by little it turned into the same pain, since he fell prey to the movie that Yuta wrote for his life; she, Shortly after finishing Yuta’s new tape, he dies… but this time he was able to record his life until his death.
From this moment on, Yuta enters a limbo from which it is impossible for him to get out. Despite making a film that he was able to present at school, redeeming himself both from profaning the death of his mother and from the guilt that he felt he had not been able to record the moment of her death, the result was the same: Eri died and he was left with the same burden on his shoulders.
The involuntary portrait: Death for Fujimoto
Fujimoto poses an involuntary portrait (as Marina Azahua explains in her essay of the same name) in the way in which the idea of cinema is presented in Goodbye Eri. What Yuta records in the first instance is casual and everyday footage, one that is assumed to be natural and part of a documentary that only ends with fiction.
In his second experience, builds a script and a narrative that uses that first documentary experience to achieve fiction. Only this time the parallelism is that the ending is realistic and surpasses fiction.
The dissolution of the barrier between fiction and reality is the central point of the cinema and of the video shot as an involuntary portrait exercise. What we see behind a slow motion and on the screen is a deliberate, cropped, reduced sample of the world. One that only the author knows to which order it is directed.
It was important for Yuta not to show his mother harassing him by recording her., as well as not revealing that the recording was only part of a possible future documentary if it could be recovered. In the same way, with Eri it was only possible to know what he saw of her and was able to capture on film.
The life we see and the one we give meaning to is the one we can only see with our eyes. The perception of the world that we have is only what we have and only what we see; outside of it, all that spreads is just background noise that will be lost the moment someone forgets it… or rather, the moment someone doesn’t remember it.
What is worth living? The question should rather be what is worth remembering. What repeats itself in a loop and torments the memory like a gray cloud? Or what hurts and disarms the soul every time a date is recycled on the calendar? Is a beautiful but clipped memory more valuable or a cruel and vivid one?
The answer is to dynamite everything and explode before oblivion arrives. Goodbye, Eri.
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