Debunking the Artist: Fujimoto’s Look Back and Goodbye, Eri

Debunking the Artist:
Fujimoto’s Look Back and Goodbye, Eri.

Cici Zhang

25/03/24

Editor's note: Major spoilers for Look Back, Goodbye, Eri, and Chainsaw Man

Trigger warnings: mild references to graphic violence

Artists are driven to serve themselves, and only ever themselves. To consider their motivations to be anything other than pure egocentrism or upholding false ideals—such as the nobility of creation and the desire to maintain an archetypal beauty to the world—would be to disregard the perversity of art as a tool through which we can make peace within ourselves.

Tatsuki Fujimoto’s manga one-shots, Look Back and Goodbye, Eri, examine why creators are driven to make art. Both works serve as valuable vessels for the ways in which Fujimoto is able to deconstruct the preconceptions and visions associated with the figure of the artist. In Fujimoto’s work, the supposed façade of the uniqueness of the artist is debunked in favour of an exploration of their selfish nature and fallibility. It is rather their selfishness that emphasises their humanity.

Look Back, follows the life of Ayumu Fujino, an aspiring manga-artist. After months of artistic rivalry with a mysterious Kyomoto in the school newspaper, Fujino draws a mocking yonkoma and slips it under her rival’s bedroom door. Her attempt at provocation, ironically, prompts Kyomoto to finally break free from social isolation, and profess that Fujino is an artist whom she worships – a friendship blossoms. As the years pass, Fujino continues drawing solely to preserve the image of herself as a prodigy in Kyomoto’s eyes. Their partnership serves as a haven and a consolation for both friends until Kyomoto’s death is at the hands of an axe-murderer, causing Fujino’s world to spin off its axis.

Goodbye, Eri tells the story of Yuta Ito, a teenage filmmaker set on delivering a cinematic masterpiece. His debut work, Dead Explosion Mother, is a documentary produced at his mother’s request to film every moment of her life before she succumbs to cancer. Disturbed by the fact that he never actually managed to capture his mother’s death on camera, a dying girl named Eri offers Yuta a second chance: to film every second of her own remaining days. The manga’s narrative details Yuta’s attempt to grapple with the emotional abuse he suffered at the request of a terminally ill mother, and the twisted catharsis he finds in the hands of an enigmatic girl who encourages his craft. Yuta’s passion for cinema, however, is nothing but a façade for his desire to cinematize—and thus rewrite—his own life.

Etymology of the term debunk originates from American journalist William Woodward (‘to take the bunk out of things’). Its synonyms include words such as ‘deflate’, ‘puncture’, or ‘explode’. Both Yuta’s film and his actual narrative quite literally end in explosion. The moment of detonation, spluttering ash and fracturing scaffolding, plays into cinema’s normalization of violence. It parodies the ways in which violence is often sensationalised in cinema for the sake of evoking a reaction from the audience. For Yuta, the explosions are modes of escape, aimed to defy and distract, to spit in the face of realities he would rather not confront.

Manga panels emulate the shaky perspective of a hand-held camera. In Goodbye, Eri there is no fact, only film: the panorama we revere, the truths we mold and warp to suit our heart’s content. Yuta attempts to capture every moment of his mother’s—and subsequently Eri’s—life on camera, only to go on to change every detail, obsessively editing every possible clip. The lens of the camera is tainted by the turbulent colours of his own mind. His joys and sorrows bleed across the screen, infecting every pixel with his own longing. We tread the shorelines between fact and imagination all the while looking out towards a vast ocean.

Fujimoto’s Eri—or rather, Yuta’s Eri—is a wild thing. She possesses an ethereal loveliness accentuated by her capricious nature. She is insolent. She is petulant and demanding. She is whimsical and incandescent. Her manifestation as a vampire in Yuta’s film—that Eri herself came up with—marks her as a creature of infinite wisdom and knowledge. We follow her everywhere. We see her on the subway; at the aquarium; on the steps of the jinja. The coziest scene of all is to see Eri curled up on the basement sofa, her face bathing in the luminescence of a TV screen. The most beautiful shot of all is the sun in her hair as she stumbles in the ocean froth, reaching a hand to pull you into the shallows. The most agonizing sight of all is a still-shot: thirty-two immobile panels focused on the tip of an IV-drip silhouetted against the hospital window. When we finally see Eri’s emaciated face, we are taken out of the movie to see it imprinted on the screen of an auditorium. The only way we may confront the tangibility of death is to watch it on a big screen. Yuta’s filmmaking is thus equal parts confrontation and denial.

Tatsuki Fujimoto razes the ideal of the artist in our very faces, spitting on visions of eloquence, leaving behind only clouds of dust and bloodied shrapnel, a handful of empty artillery shells like pencil shavings in your palm. The desire to make art is affiliated with little diplomacy, little finesse. It is crude and single-minded. The artist is self-serving and dismal. In their work, they search only for short-lived moments of relief, for ways to navigate their own insecurities and self-loathing. They are governed by their vanities. They stoke their fragile egos and feed their own ambitions.

In Look Back, Fujino draws because she enjoys the respect it earns from her cohort. She enjoys the agonised pleasure of being in competition with another artist. She enjoys not art itself but rather, the act of being good at it. As she ages, her disposition does not change – she values not the process of artmaking but the act of drawing manga in tandem with Kyomoto. It is the desire for companionship and love that drives Fujino to create manga. Fujino’s artistic motivations have never been pure, but they are raw and deeply personal.

Both Fujino and Yuta entertain possibilities of remaking and distorting their own realities. Upon learning of Kyomoto’s death, Fujino fantasises about never drawing the yonkoma that lead her to meet Kyomoto. Such a fantasy spirals into a page-after-page scenario whereby she envisions meeting Kyomoto, years later, and developing their partnership anew. Kyomoto’s bedroom door becomes an illusory portal to the past. Two alternate realities interact, united by the paper-thin wisps of two yonkoma. It leaves Fujino’s life split in between separate temporalities.

For Yuta Ito, the act of filmmaking is inherently a form of self-perpetrated psychotherapy, a mechanism for reorienting and readjusting memory. He is enticed by the idea that his own work can, and will, embody a set of memories: for a future generation of vampiric Eris whose memories will be uniquely directed by him. Yuta makes films not to confront pain but in order to distance himself from it, contributing to an eventual decline of real experience where he can no longer separate the tangible world from the fictions he has created. The artistry of his film is not designed for the consumption of the masses, but for those who are closest to him—above all, for himself—whose memories he seeks to manipulate.

Aesthetic approaches to ‘perfecting’ reality are a recurring theme across the scope of Fujimoto’s work. In his serialized shounen-jump series, Chainsaw Man, dubious antihero Denji confronts Makima, the Control Devil, about the future that the latter envisions for humanity. With the ruthlessness of a film director, Makima exhibits a desire to orchestrate aspects of Denji’s life to design the arc of his maturity and subsequent downfall. Questions of authority and ‘authorship’ come into play in the terror of a supernatural being whose craftsmanship extends to crafting existence. The inhuman Makima shows a human-like pleasure as she luxuriates in the aesthetic satisfaction surrounding the reality that she has ‘pre-written’ for Denji.

Yet, in response to Makima’s vision, Denji asks whether there will ‘still be bad movies in the perfect world you create’. In his partiality for miscellaneous experience, for multiplex forms of art, Denji debunks Makima’s aesthetic ideal in favor of his own faith in bad art. (Once again, the ‘debunking’ is literal: firestorms and explosions end with Makima in tiny little pieces.)

As we grapple with the disintegration of a romanticised aesthetic fulfilment, we come to accept the value imparted from imperfect, self-serving art—that which possesses both ugliness and beauty. Indeed, it is such imperfect art that serves as a source of fascination to Tatsuki Fujimoto.

With spray-paint, excrement, and blood, Fujimoto defaces the image of an idealised artist in his manga. It is a form of desecration as satisfying as peeling a scab from unhealed skin, for art is never meant to be sacred. Art is a faulty rifle, an ungainly weapon. Those who wield it do so only because they are drawn to the possibility that it might somehow improve their own disposition, and perhaps make the sad, polluted mundanity of their own lives more bearable.

There is no grand purpose, no blaze of inspiration. The only things that matter are the things we stand to gain from making, and from creating: whether that be the respect of those who surround us, a sense of self-worth, or a fleeting escape from life’s desolation. We long for our own visions of happiness. We long to light a match and drop the flame, mid-air.

We long to make a mark, to tear a scab—to leave the world, however temporarily, suspended on the savage cusp of an explosion.