Erased Vol 4 by Kei Sanbe

Satoru has woken from his 15 year coma and doesn’t remember a thing about the attempt on his life. While outside the hospital where he is receiving care, he find Airi-kun once again, although he can’t remember why he knows her and she certainly doesn’t know him. Then, a jolt of memory slips him back into a coma for another year where his mind works out all the jumbled memories he has from living life before revival. Meanwhile, the killer learns of Satoru’s second recovery, and he plots one last thrill of a lifetime to challenge Satoru and potentially murder more people. It’s up to Satoru to work it all out and save everyone, including himself again.

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This startling conclusion is not the storyline I ever thought I wanted but it was immensely satisfying. At the end of the last volume with Satoru comes out of his coma, I was immensely dissatisfied that there wasn’t a clean ending to his time revisiting his childhood and that he couldn’t “revive” back to his adult self. However, after reading this volume, I am convinced that my ending would have been utter garbage. There could have been many different ways of ending the story before Satoru became an adult again through coma, but this final gasp of an arc to Satoru’s life was the cherry on top of a fabulous series. There are moments that seem to stretch just a bit in this last volume (like realizing you have about 100 pages left AFTER the final confrontation with the murderer), but Sanbe is a master storyteller who absolutely did need all of those pages. His characters are so rich and so well developed, which is refreshing in a medium that often rushes to conclusions and relies heavily on major action sequences to further plot.

​There is one more volume to this series, but as Sanbe points out in his end note, it’s a side-story he wanted to tell but didn’t know how to at the time it fit in, so it got cut. Sanbe revisited this in volume five, so technically, the series main story has concluded with volume four.

Sara’s Rating: 10/10
Suitability Level: Grades 9-12

Reviews of previous volumes in the series: vol 1, vol 2, vol 3

Publisher: Yen Press
Publication Date: February 27th 2018
ISBN: 9780316468466 (Hardcover)

Tags: Rating: 10/10, Suitability: High School, Manga, Surrealism, Mystery, Fantasy, School Life, Yen Press