Satoru’s journey has ended; he has spent years of his life pursuing a gruesome murderer who he finally brought to justice and Satoru is likely to lose the memories of the life where he didn’t do this. He is at peace now, but let’s look at some of the other characters who were with him the whole way.
Erased may have wrapped up in the fourth omnibus volume last year, but Kei Sanbe briefly returns to the world with a series of short stories that provide alternate viewpoints to Satoru’s quest. We have chapters for Kayo, Kenya, and Sachiko which all cover a similar time period. Kayo’s story begins soon after Satoru enters a coma and shows how all through middle school and beyond she remained involved in his life; she took time out of her own life to visit him in the hospital and even helped with fundraising efforts to help with his medical care and treatments. We get to see how Kayo’s interactions with Satoru and his circle of friends have already shaped her so much, while still quiet Kayo is able to put on a brave face when she visits Satoru and is able to remain determined and hopeful in the face of the grave odds against Satoru.
Much like Kayo’s story, Kenya and Sachiko’s stories don’t reveal anything unexpected or new about the characters but are still satisfying confirmations to what the readers suspected all along. Kenya always came off as oddly mature in the series, naturally mature for his age unlike Satoru’s supernatural-induced matureness, so it’s no surprise that this mindset led to him being rather isolated himself until just before Satoru came along. Satoru didn’t melt Kenya’s heart in the same way he melted Kayo’s but he still left an incredible impact on how Kenya viewed the world and his own drive to succeed. It’s no surprise then that Satoru’s coma crushed Kenya and what was ultimately what drove him to become a lawyer and team up with Sawada to work on the case (who, in Satoru’s original timeline, had been working on it alone for all those years).
As for Sachiko, we already know what she must have been feeling when she suddenly had to care for her comatose, elementary-school-aged son, so her story actually occurs earlier and overlaps with the Kayo arc of the main story. Yes she figured out quickly what Satoru was doing with Kayo, as I think all readers expected, but she also has a small flashback to when Satoru was even younger that I found much more interesting. There we see that Satoru has long been a deeply empathetic person and I think this explains why Sachiko was never too suspicious of her newly mature son, and if anything she seems much more proud that he was able to deeply care about something (Kayo) and then protect it.
The last story is the most interesting however and it resolves my one quibble with Erased‘s ending. I was always sad that Airi, Satoru’s teenaged co-worker from his original timeline, wasn’t really a part of his life in the second part of the story but her absence did make sense. Without having Satoru in a position where he needed to work a part-time job there was no way the two of them would have encountered each other, or so you’d think. Airi made a surprising appearance at the hospital one time in the main story, an event that was changed in the anime, and here we finally know why — she’s actually the cousin to the girl Satoru befriends in the hospital! And with that detail Sanbe weaves her back into the story, not as a teenager but as a young adult who herself is struggling with merging her artistic dreams into her working reality, a clear parallel to Satoru’s struggles when the story first began. It’s also the most insight we’ve ever gotten into her mindset and it’s much less cheerful than you would imagine from the girl we saw last as a bright, smiling teen. Airi is in a slump but it’s not an inescapable one, as the end of the volume hints at.
Our glimpse into Airi’s life is very brief and, while this side story remains untied from the main story, for me Airi’s story was worth reading the entire volume for. Which isn’t to say that the other three short stories are bad, they are perfectly fine and are among some of the most heart-breaking moments in the series. But with Airi’s story I felt like Erased was finally “done.” The world has righted itself and it is on a better path now. Horrible things happened in the past but so many people have worked hard to save the present and to create a new, clean future for everyone.