ERASED is about a solitary man trapped in anguish while being shunted across time. That it also is a murder mystery comes second. The hero Satoru is desperately trying to clear his name and catch an elusive figure from his past, yes, but the murders he is trying to prevent are barely relevant. What they represent is a catalyst to his own personal change, and yet also a barrier. His life is at a standstill until a murder case from his childhood resurfaces and his mother winds up dead in his home, with the blood on his hands and the police waiting in the wings. In an instant he loses the one person closest to him, leaving him isolated and moments from capture and subsequent summary execution. This could have been the dead end to his menial life, ending with his and his mother’s deaths. But somehow it was not to be; he wakes up in the body of his childhood self, days before the incidents that would ripple to claim his future life.
The atmosphere and sense of solitude that ERASED conveys is through its masterful camerawork, more reminiscent of a cinematic piece than an anime. Satoru always appears separated from other in the camera frame, rarely centered. The scenes are composed of mostly empty space, often done at a distance and with a slightly wider angle. The comparison to film is intentional; many scenes represent his internal thoughts and timeline via jumbled strips of film, and when he is in the past the screen is cut on the top and bottom by bars, as if he himself were watching a widescreen movie of his own past rather than actually reliving it. He is not only trapped by time, but also trapped watching the tragedy unfold as a helpless spectator, lending to the show a true sense of futility.
And thus if I have a central complaint for the show, it is that the content runs almost completely antiparallel to this motif. The first murder victim he seeks to protect is the equally lonely Kayo, who isolates herself from the rest of the class in tandem with withdrawing from her abusive negligent parents (the low-hanging fruit of school-age backstories, but I digress), and much of the show is spent on his efforts to save her by becoming her friend, her boyfriend, and her guardian angel. Yet while his mind continues to pop in and remind us that everything he does is solely for the sake of saving her, there wind up being very few moments where we think he may fail, that he is actually helpless to change the future. Steins;Gate and Higurashi no Naku Koroni both succeed in this particular point by showing countless iterations of failure and bitter resignation; Satoru only fails once, and his only adjustment is keep an even closer eye on Hinazuki, hardly a statement on his own growth.
The process by which he grows closer to the people around him is also perhaps too swift and easy. Upon going to the past, he instantly begins to act more outgoing and bold in an attempt to bring Hinazuki, a strategy which instantly puts him at the center of attention in his group of friends. It must be a large statement on the value he places on his mother that he overcome 29 years of social ineptitude and the incredible shock of his new surroundings, and with instant effect. His monologues about being a hero complement his friends monologuing about wanting to help him in that none of them fully fit what real kids would ever say with a straight face. The process of saving the other two murder victims in the past is fairly glossed over, as they did less to bring Satoru to the center of social attention. The agenda of Satoru blossoming into a social butterfly gets pushed a little too fast and a little too hard.
Scenes in the future by contrast are well-structured. When Satoru winds up back from his journey to the past, his coworker Airi comes to hide and aid him in light of being accused of his mother’s murder. Their dialogue is much more crisp and natural, and the camera angles once again reinforce the way in which he struggles between relying on her and maintaining distance to keep her from danger. Here he attempts to dig up clues to help him in his task, but being isolated and on the run, this constantly feels like a useless endeavor, and indeed it draws to a close with him outsmarted, captured, and in the pits of despair.
This all still begs the question: who is the murderer? From the first few episodes there is an obvious guess, though it seems irrational or overly reliant on tropes about murder mysteries. Whether or not you arrive at this guess before the end, I will not spoil whether or not it ends up being correct, but the point is that with a firm guess in hand, the actual mystery aspect becomes all but irrelevant. Just as Satoru spends relatively little time actually fishing for the killer’s identity, we too have less to care about in the killer’s identity and more to care about whether things will turn out alright. The killer has a believable but weakly motivated driving force, and like the murders themselves the killer acts more as an abstract concept to force Satoru to grow rather than a complex human. Their defeat is swift, and has little to do with the themes of being a hero or working together that the show has worked towards, but in some sense it matters relatively little: the children were saved, the mother is saved, and Satoru is a new man, and thus by extension peace reigns.
So I cannot recommend ERASED as a mystery, and with it peddling tried-and-true philosophies in a pushy and straightforward manner I can do little to recommend it as a character study, but what I can recommend it for are its uses of framing and composition, and for its ability to shift the focus away from the horrors of murder and the suspense of mystery to the horrors of isolation and the suspense of futility. Despite its strong technical aspects and clever manipulation of our senses of engagement and detachment from the different periods of time to match the protagonist, the ultimate story is slightly underwhelming, and for those looking for a grand detective story payoff it is downright unfulfilling. Turning this around, despite falling short of its genre and the paradigm of bringing us in touch with the main character, it is thoroughly engaging and worthwhile on its visual experience alone. I would like to see more shows take notes from it from here on out.