Hm… unless I miss my mark, there’s some kind of festival going on right now. Usually, I give everyone a present by cracking into some of the worst stuff (or at least the stuff that ticks me off) and digging into it, but this year, I think I’ll give people looking for good anime to watch a present and review Erased.
Erased (or, as it’s known in the Japanese, Boku dake ga Inai Machi – literally “A town where I’m the only one missing”. Pretty extreme title localization there.) is another in the long line and surprisingly fine pedigree of shows that mess with time travel and its related subjects. I won’t retread too much of my reviews of Orange or Summertime Render but suffice to say that’s here.
Erased features Satoru Fujinuma. He’s a washed-up 29-year-old would-be manga artist in 2006, working as a pizza delivery boy with pretty much his only positive bond being with his high school aged coworker, Airi Katagiri.
Satoru also experiences a phenomenon that he calls “Revival”, in which he will mentally travel back in time, generally somewhere between a few seconds and a few minutes, with the opportunity to stop something terrible from happening. We see this happen when he passes a truck while on his pizza delivery scooter and then, a moment later, Revivals back to just before he did. With the clarity of the experience he notices the driver incapacitated, and manages to chase after the out of control truck and bring it to a stop just before it causes a fatal accident it otherwise would have, getting himself pretty hurt in the process.
While Satoru is in the hospital, his mom comes to town to look after him. They chat, she bonds with Airi (who also visits Satoru in the hospital), and so on and so forth until Satoru experiences a Revival while with his mom in a supermarket parking lot. He panics about what he’s supposed to find, during which she catches sight of a shady figure approaching a kid. Her eyes lock with the figure’s and the figure runs off, leading Satoru’s mother to believe she just interrupted an abduction. She’s spot on, as she’s the kind of character where her perception often gets her called a Yokai by others who think that can’t possibly be natural, and she contacts a reporter friend looking for details from the past that might confirm where she knew that guy from.
Later, while Satoru is out, the shady figure drops by and murders his mother. When Satoru finds the scene he ends up in a situation where it’s clear he’ll be framed for his mother’s murder, and as he runs, he experiences Revival… launching him all the way back 18 years to 1988, when Satoru was eleven: a time period that he had been talking about (since there was a string of child murders then, for which a friend of his was framed) and which would by the laws of Revival seem to be somehow related to his mother’s death in the future. Thus, Satoru, on understanding his situation, takes it on himself to stop the murders that happen in his childhood. The rub is, while he clearly has some of his adult train of thought and cognition, he is also his kid self, with a kid’s perception and a kid’s resources. Stopping a killer is going to be easier said than done, especially when his memories of the first go around are hazy at best.
Satoru begins with what he does know: the first victim was Kayo Hinazuki. She’s a bit of a strange and aloof little girl, who the audience can pick up on fairly quickly (and Satoru only a little slower) has an abusive home life. Since she was presumably nabbed while alone after school in a park, Satoru’s main plan is to get close to her and not let her be alone, hoping that preventing her abduction (the date of which he has to work to pin down with his memories and the facts before him) will stop the chain of deaths and resolve the incident. He gets closer to her, and even find out both that they share a birthday and that, because of the ages listed in obituaries, that narrows down the days on which she could have been abducted. However, while the exact circumstances of Hinazuki’s abduction are averted, the killer still gets a golden opportunity and she’s abducted and murdered. He may have altered events somewhat, but the future refused to change, snapping Satoru back to 2006 where he’s on the run from the cops.
Satoru follows some notes his mom left behind to get in touch with that reporter friend of hers, who believes his story and provides more critical information about the murders back in his hometown, but the majority of this visit to the story’s initial timeframe really belongs to Airi.
The technical events are fairly simple: Airi aids and abets Satoru’s flight, even hiding him in her room for a bit. Satoru pushes on to limit the degree to which he might be endangering her, but the mystery killer seems to have a good nose for the trail and even enlists the aid of the manager of the pizza place, who has the kind of creepy hots for Airi. This results in Airi being pulled back to her house and getting a text purporting to be from Satoru (with a phone he doesn’t have) to stay put. Being a smart cookie, Airi starts to check things out, but her house is already on fire. Satoru breaks in to save her, and is fairly successful at that. He hands the semiconscious Airi off to pizza manager at the last second so pizza manager can take all the glory and Satoru can slip away, but Airi’s not fooled. In the hospital, she tries to shift the cops and reporters away, and even slips out of the hospital to meet up with Satoru.
During that meeting, Airi gives Satoru the will he needs to carry on, offering to believe in him even if no one else in the world will. It’s a great scene that really picks Satoru up when he’s at his absolute lowest, but unfortunately for Airi her attempts to make the meeting without the authorities noticing weren’t perfect, and the cops arrive to arrest Satoru (and possibly Airi as an accomplice). As he’s being given the perp walk and gets some last words from Airi, Satoru once again hits Revival and returns to 1988.
During this sequence, I had a few thoughts. One was that I thought the show was going the route where, her being the right age, Airi might have been the reincarnation of Kayo. The show didn’t go that way, but they do show off some fairly similar mannerisms. The other was that it was weird how okay I was with the idea of an Airi-Satoru ship.
Because Satoru is 29 and Airi is something like 17. That’s an age gap that would normally be pretty creepy. In fact, a similar one is creepy when it comes to the pizza manager wanting a piece of Airi. However, their chemistry actually works really well. Part of it is that Satoru doesn’t really seem to be romantically or sexually attracted to Airi. They certainly click on a pretty deep level, a fact Satoru’s mom even noticed before she was killed, pretty much telling him to go for it. Another part is that Airi, the younger of the set, really holds her own here. Through most of the arc she’s the one giving Satoru advice and support, and relating to him as a peer rather than any sort of superior. She is put in danger, when the killer tries to burn her alive to frame Satoru for more crimes, but it doesn’t feel like she did anything wrong or even failed to do anything to get there. She sees the suspicious “stay put” message and immediately snoops, which was the smart thing to do in that circumstance; being taken out by a backdraft from a fire she didn’t know about wasn’t really a reasonable expectation.
This does make things a little weird, though, as it gives an investment point in the “dead end” timeline, but that’s common and resolvable.
So, we’re back in 1988 with one more chance to save Kayo and stop the cycle of killing. Armed with more clues and the knowledge of the last failure, Satoru actually enlists his friends in the effort (not that he tells them the whole story) and they do their best to make sure Kayo isn’t alone. This comes to a head on the day that Kayo disappeared on the previous loop, which is her and Satoru’s birthday. While walking her home, Satoru asks if, instead, he can kidnap Kayo, and she agrees to this plan. The result is that she seems to the world to disappear, but is actually being kept nice and safe by Satoru and his friends in a derelict school bus on the grounds of the other elementary school in town. Satoru’s mom catches on pretty quick, but doesn’t let him know the jig is up because she also caught on to the abusive parents dodging child protective services.
With Kayo missing, the situation with her mother boils over. Child Protective services manages to get involved (after several false starts) and Kayo and the friends treat this as pretty much a little camping excursion, until they get a scare when an adult enters the bus in the middle of the night. This figure fails to find Kayo, but Satoru’s inspection of the scene reveals that the tools for kidnapping and murdering her were stashed in that very same bus, meaning that it’s not as safe a place as they thought it was.
After a few days, Kayo is returned, but not without the authorities being on scene, meaning that mom and her boyfriend are going to have to answer a lot of very awkward questions and Kayo is going to leave town to live with her nice grandmother. Thus, she’s out of the woods.
The problem is there were two more victims, one of Satoru’s friends and a girl from the other elementary school. Satoru tries to get close to the girl while keeping his friend close, but then notices that the killer might have changed pattern with this. Thus, he becomes interested in a girl from his class who, on the original timeline, was fairly popular, but who on this timeline has become an outcast after Satoru called her out for bullying Kayo.
While trying to make nice with he also gets closer to his homeroom teacher. Said teacher was seen previously, and even helped out with Kayo’s situation. He seemed, perhaps a bit odd, but also like someone Satoru would trust. So one could forgive Satoru for taking the excuse of “quit smoking, need a fix” when he finds the teacher’s glove compartment full of candy while riding with him, and for being lured into another car by the teacher while trying to watch over the girl at a sporting event.
However, said homeroom teacher is actually the killer. After revealing this to Satoru, he monologues quite a bit, going on about his past as a sick kid, and how his crimes make him feel as well as the fact that he’s always gotten away with it because he’s part of a political family and has influence that way, to an extent explaining the degree of power he seems to wield in 2006. He more or less declares his rivalry with an eleven-year-old kid. To be fair, a kid who has foiled him at every turn on this timeline, seemingly one step ahead, and then prepares to kill Satoru and make it look like an accident, locking him in the car and pushing it into freezing water.
As he sinks, struggling to escape, Satoru calls out to the teacher that he knows the future, which seems to shake him greatly.
Cut, more or less, back to the 2000s. The killings are prevented, but Satoru has to go back to the future via the slow route, spending the intervening years in a coma with little hope of recovery until, by some medical miracle, he finally wakes up. His mom took good care of him all those years, though, so he’s looking at a still present but comparatively merciful period of physical therapy.
Mentally, though, it’s not quite so hot, as Satoru seems to have lost many of his memories of his school days as well as of his first time around. He meets his old friends and reconnects, even finding that Kayo eventually married the boy out of the friends who was going to be killed, and they have a child of their own. The former teacher, of course, begins snooping around, either because of the obsession he’s developed or to ensure his dark secrets are safe. Some paparazzi try to mess with him, he befriends a little girl in the hospital for treatment, but most of this final arc is, of course, dedicated to the rivalry with the teacher.
This ends when the teacher brings the still wheelchair-bound Satoru up to the roof, clearly intending to throw him off and make it look like a suicide. Satoru reveals that he got his memories back and knows what’s up, and they have a battle of words around Satoru psychoanalyzing the teacher and the teacher pretty much holding the little girl hostage for Satoru’s death. At the end, Satoru wins the game of cat and mouse and psychological warfare, getting to the point where the teacher realizes he can’t kill the only person who understands him… and said person, Satoru, understands him well enough to successfully out his old and attempted crimes here.
Thus, we come to the end of the show. Time passes, Satoru becomes a successful manga artist this time around, and doesn’t experience Revival all the way until, in truly new territory of 2008, we see him meet Airi again in a place very similar to where they parted in the previous timeline, suggesting that everything might be okay or on track there. The End.
Now, I did look up details regarding the adaptation here, because it felt like there was a place where this show took a hit… and sure enough, that seems to be generally agreed to be where it diverges from the source material. The Kayo arc is brilliant, but once she’s saved things go downhill. Now, when I say “go downhill” be aware that downhill from the Kayo arc is still above the roof level of many other shows… but it does finish weaker than it started. Evidently, the source is eight volumes long, and it’s 6-8 that are fairly compressed or altered, including further scenes with Airi, aside from the very last one, being dropped.
But, whatever the adaptation, what I have is what was put on screen: A stunningly brilliant initial 8ish episodes and a final arc that’s… merely quite good.
As you can guess from that, my overall grade for Erased is pretty high. Specifically, I’m going to give it an A, and highly recommend going ahead and watching.