Four and a half stars.

I’ll get to see you every time I watch it. No matter how many times I forget you, I’ll remember you again and again.

This is a one-shot manga created by the deranged author of Fire Punch and Chainsaw Man, as well as plenty of other one-shots. Regarding Fujimoto, as it pertains to this story, you should know that the guy is a cinephile who would have rather been an animator than a manga author. In fact, when he got around to coming up with Chainsaw Man, he had become so disillusioned that he intended it to be his last tale, one in which he would go nuts and give zero shits about whether others enjoyed it. Turns out that Chainsaw Man became a worldwide sensation, which has chained Fujimoto into making more manga, starting with a sequel of sorts to his megahit (which may have been a bad idea; I’m not enamoured with it so far).

Anyway, the protagonist of this one-shot I’m reviewing is a middle school kid who is tasked by his mother with the grim duty of recording the last stage of her illness, right up until the moment of her death. The author depicts most of the panels as stills from the videos the kid is recording. As his mother’s condition worsens, we understand that our protagonist hasn’t grasped the enormity of what’s happening to the woman, and when the day comes that he has to walk into that hospital and record his mother’s last moments, he runs away.

As someone who has a terrible time processing his emotions unless he’s recording himself (in a similar way as many writers can’t understand what they’re feeling unless they write it out), and as an aspiring filmmaker, he edits the footage into a movie. He intends to present it at school and get more people to know his late mother.

However, that movie lacked an ending, and the protagonist’s absurd way of concluding it (won’t specify because it’s a spoiler) causes him to get mocked by his classmates. His teachers consider the movie a disgrace to the memory of his mother, and a schoolmate whose mother also died tells him that how he treated her demise was unforgivable.

Despairing, unable to process both his mother’s death as well as having his heartfelt movie mocked savagely, he heads to the roof of the hospital where his mother died, intending to record his suicide. There he meets a female schoolmate named Eri.

She praises his film despite its many faults, and prevents his suicide by dragging him to an abandoned building to watch a series of movies. She intends for him to grow as a filmmaker, so he can ultimately make the movie that represents his true self.

Mr. Fujimoto, master of levitation, just how many twists did you cram in this one-shot? Most of what we witness through the manga is depicted as stills from recorded footage, so we are never sure of our footing. Are we experiencing a recreation of events as the protagonist would have wanted them to happen? Are we watching the elaborate fantasy that he created to cope with the losses in his life? Did any of it happen? Does it matter?

A masterful tale by one of my favorite manga artists, whose taste for the absurd is right up my alley. Sayonara Eri is an ode to the power of art to remake our lives, to allow us to endure the cosmic absurdity for another day.