Erased
Boku dake ga inai machi (The Town Where Only I Am Missing)
Series Directed by Ten Shimoyama
Series Writing Credits Kei Sambe
Cast
Yûki Furukawa Satoru Fujinuma
Tomoka Kurotani Sachiko Fujinuma
Reo Uchikawa Satoru Fujinuma – Age 10
Brenda Joan Wong Airi Katagiri
Shigeyuki Totsugi Gaku Yashiro
Jyo Kairi Hiromi Sugita – Age 10
Rinka Kakihara Kayo Hinazuki – Age 10
Kelly Jean Badgley Young Hiromi
RiRia Satoru Fujinuma (10-year-old)
Stacy Allen Young Kayo
Mio Yûki Airi Katagiri
When Erased appeared in the Netflix queue, I figured that it was the 2006 anime of the same name. I had seen it back around 2008, and found it to be a truly superior story, well-crafted and peopled with some of the most human and interesting characters of any anime series. It also had an intellectually demanding plot, something that isn’t exactly a given in anime.
So I decided it was worth a second viewing. The plot is convoluted, as you might expect in a story that features time travel, a murder mystery and different time lines, and I was sure I missed some nuances the first time around.
This version of Erased is not the anime. It’s live action, but the dialogue, characters and even the settings are essentially identical. (All three versions take place in Tomokamai, a Hokkaido city some 40 kilometers south of Sapporu, and home to series creator Kei Sambe, who doubtlessly drew most of his backgrounds based upon his home town, and which turned up in the two other versions being real places.) That’s all to the good just by itself, but powerful acting makes this live action vehicle truly stellar. Yûki Furukawa and Reo Uchikawa play the central character, Satoru, at ages 25-29 and 10 respectively (this is a time travel tale, after all.) Satoru is a pizza delivery boy and wannabe manga artist who has a peculiar trait; he gets sent back in time about 2 to 5 minutes to relive certain crucial moments to spot and avoid a tragedy. On the particular day in question, he has one of those episodes, which he calls “revivals” and sees a fatally incapacitated truck driver who will strike and kill a child at a street crossing unless he can prevent it. He succeeds, but in so doing collides with a vehicle and suffers enough injuries to require a two-day stay at the hospital. The results in his striking up a friendship with Airi, a co-worker who witnessed the event, and a visit from his estranged mother to tend to him.
In the second episode, his mother is stabbed to death in his apartment, and he is discovered crouching over her body, murder weapon in hand, and covered in blood. Realizing he would be considered the prime suspect, he flees, wondering why a revival didn’t prevent this horror. The revival then does occur, only it isn’t the two-to-five minute event which he is almost used to: he is sent back 18 years to a mostly forgotten childhood haunted by the spectre of a serial child killer who takes three children in his fifth-grade year. Stopping the killer and saving his victims is, in some way, key to preventing his mother’s murder 18 years later.
The first child he must try to save is Kayo (played by Rinka Kakihara), a withdrawn child who is hideously abused at home.
The plot is complicated, as mentioned, and goes in many unexpected and sometimes confusing directions, but pay attention; it all makes sense in the end.
It was a great anime. It’s now a superb live-action television series.
Now on Netflix.