Disclaimer: this is a review, and as such it contains spoilers of the whole series. Please proceed to read at your own risk if you still plan on watching this show or if you haven’t finished it yet. You have been warned.

Erased
( 僕だけがいない街 / Boku Dake ga Inai Machi)
MyDramaList rating: 7.5/10

Hello! My apologies for the radio silence, I’ve been hooked on Netflix and I only recently found the motivation to get back to Asian dramas. It doesn’t help when you’ve gotten hooked on the Arrowverse and everything is on Netflix (my apologies). However, I am in the middle of a very slow-paced Chinese series so that didn’t always grab my attention as much, and instead I decided to quickly watch something in between which was next on my list anyway.
(By the way, just like with Good Morning Call there was no existing page of this drama on dramawiki so I created it myself again. You can find the link here: https://wiki.d-addicts.com/Erased.)

I wanted to watch the drama adaptation since I saw there was one, I really like Boku Dake ga Inai Machi. I watched the anime two years ago and then the 2016 movie not long after and I loved the complexity of the story. And of course, I’m always in for time travel. I also like to see how every adaptation deals with the ending, because as I remember it, all three versions end differently. The anime is too long ago for me, but I can at least make some comparisons between the movie and this drama.
I was eager to watch this version because of Furukawa Yuki as the main lead. I don’t find him particularly handsome or anything like that, but I was impressed with his acting in Itazura na Kiss and it made me want to see more of his acting. The rest of the cast was relatively unknown to me, but especially the children’s casting impressed me.

So, the story is as follows. Fujinuma Satoru (played by Furukawa Yuki) is a 29-year old aspiring manga artist who lives in Tokyo, but he can’t really seem to make his breakthrough. Other than that he’s really isolated, doesn’t have any friends. He works parttime at a pizza delivery service, but he’s awkward at socializing with his co-workers as well. The only person he’s close to is his mother, Fujinuma Sachiko (played by Kurotani Tomoka).
However, there is one thing that’s special about Satoru. He has an ability that allows him to go back in time to stop accidents from happening. He will only go back to a few minutes earlier and in that time he has to figure out what’s wrong and what’s going to happen. He calls this ability ‘Revival’.
When one time he is hurt in one of these accidents, his mother moves in with him for a short time, much to his own dismay. Sachiko then witnesses an attempted kidnapping, but isn’t honest to Satoru about it, brushing it off as a joke. Satoru, however, knows she only jokes when she’s serious, and keeps his guard up.
A few days later when he comes home, he finds his mother on the ground in a puddle of blood, stabbed with a knife in the back. As he runs out to chase a suspicious figure, he is cornered by the police and has another ‘Revival’.
However, this time he travels back eighteen years ago to when he was still in elementary school in Hokkaido. He suspects that the murder of his mother has something to do with a serial kidnapping and murder case that was active when he was young and which took two kids from his class as victims. Now 11-year old Satoru (played by Uchikawa Reo) has to figure out who the real culprit is and tries to stop his classmates from being taken, starting with loner Hinazuki Kayo (played by Kakihara Rinka).

Another important character in the series is Katagiri Airi (played by Yuuki Mio). She is Satoru’s co-worker at the pizza delivery store and ultimately the only person who really trusts him after everyone suspects him of killing his own mother.
In-between his adventures back in 1988, there are short moments where Satoru ‘Revivals’ back to the future, and finds traces of parts of history that he has been able to change. Airi helps him escape from the police and lets him stay at her place for a while. However, the culprit is watching them closely and assualts Airi when she’s alone at home.
Fun fact: I remember that in the movie, the culprit set Airi’s house on fire. I think in the anime it was something like this as well. In this drama adaptation he pushes her off her second-floor balcony. Although she lives and still trusts Satoru, she does report him to the police for his own safety.
Being escorted back by the police, Satoru ‘Revivals’ back to 1988 again and continues his mission.
In his original past, a man named Shiratori Jun (played by Yano Masato) was held responsible for the kidnappings, but he was a friend to Satoru and he was only trying to reach out a helping hand to children who seemed lonely, so Satoru is convinced he’s innocent.

The story describes Satoru’s journey and his attempts of fixing history in order to save not only his mother in the future, but also his friends in the past. Of course, it doesn’t all go well in one try, one time he manages to get Hinazuki through the day of her estimated murder but as it turns outit is only postponed one day. His determination is clearly visible to his friends, who get a little suspicious of him and why he’s suddenly so interested in Hinazuki. Naturally he can’t tell them the truth but they seem confident enough that his determination is legit and follow him in his plans.

The reason I am so intrigued by this story is because it has a darkness in it but also a very hopeful message. Satoru tries to save his classmates by befriending them, but he also becomes a better person because of his efforts. Before he couldn’t really be bothered by other people’s business, but now he puts everything on the line to save others, even though the limitations that being 11 years old may cause him.
Also, I have to mention that in both the movie and the drama series, the child actors were amazing. Especially young Satoru actor Uchikawa Reo, because he has to act like he has the mind of a 29-year old. I also thought Kakihara Rinka’s way of depicting the damaged and abused Hinazuki was really mature. When she first started talking, it was like hearing an adult speak and I had to check if she was really just a child or if she was actually older than I thought. I think Hinazuki is a very intense character to play, all the more for a child. She is a victim of domestic violence and often doesn’t come to school. Because of her home situation she isn’t quick to trust people, and that’s why she doesn’t have any friends, barely talks with her classmates and is an easy target for the culprit who targets kids who are alone most of the time. She isn’t quick to trust Satoru either when he suddenly approaches her, but the way in which they treat her and the things she then experiences (having Satoru’s mother cook her a warm meal, celebrating a birthday party together) means so much to her that it’s heart-tightening. I say heart-tightening because it’s both heart-warming and heart-wrenching at the same time. For a child so young to grow up without warmth from her family is never easy to watch, even in fiction.
In the end, with the help of his friends and his mother Satoru manages to save Kayo from her abusive mother. She is sent to child support and ends up living with her grandma.

The culprit, who in the end turns out to be their elementary school homeroom teacher Yashiro Gaku-sensei (played by Totsugi Shigeyuki), is your typical sociopath. Pretending to be a well-doing teacher and good civilian by day, at night he’s busy laying traps for lonely children.
One thing that I noticed again in comparison with the other versions: I remember in the anime there was this whole theory involving a hamster in a hamster wheel. I don’t really remember it very well, but I remember this hamster wheel was a returning element and that it had something to do with him being able to see threads above particular children’s heads that he felt like he needed to sever. For some reason, none of this appeared in either the movie or the drama adaptation. In every version Yashiro has another story to explain his actions. In this drama adaptation, it was a story about his brother who used to abuse him and later turned to sexually abusing young girls. I didn’t really get this story, especially because ultimately it didn’t make Yashiro a warrior for justice but he actually found that piece of his brother inside of him. Anyway, to me it didn’t really explain anything. But maybe it doesn’t need to, because he’s just a warped person and his actions don’t have a logic to them, they’re just wrong and inexplicable. He seems to get some sort of thrill out of approaching these children and killing them. It frightens me that there are people like this in the real world.
Another thing was that I have the feeling that Yashiro’s confrontation with 11-year old Satoru in the car also varied. Or at least, how Satoru learned something was off. I remember that he noticed that something was off when Yashiro promised him he’d call child support for Kayo and he discovers that he actually didn’t. Or something.
And in the movie (and the anime I think), Yashiro throws Satoru off a bridge. In this drama adaptation he drugs him and lets the car he’s in drive into a creek (in ice cold water because it’s winter season in Hokkaido).
Satoru is rescued a while later, and slips into a coma. He only wakes up fifteen years later.

One of the most beautiful moments of the series, in any version, is when Satoru wakes up from his coma and is greeted by an adult Kayo holding a baby in her arms. It turns out she married Hiromi (Satoru’s other friend who was also kidnapped and murdered in the original past). Seeing them as grown-ups and seeing that they were able to give life themselves genuinely touches Satoru. However, this course of events means that he has rewritten his own history – his past of working as a pizza delivery guy and meeting Airi is gone – now, he has been in a coma since he was 11 and has woken up in a 26-year old body. He has to revalidate and learn how to use his body strength from scratch. While revalidating, he coincidentally meets Airi again, and a sudden surge of memories of his original life knocks him unconscious for another year. However, when he wakes up the next time, he remembers everything and asks his friend Kenya, who is now a lawyer, for help to once and for all end Yashiro. Yashiro is now a councilmen living under the name of Nishizono Manabu.

The last part of the series takes place on a camping trip initiated by the revalidation center. This is also exclusive for this adaptation. The final confrontation between Satoru and Yashiro in the anime and movie were both somewhere on the street, I think. In this version they visibly dramatized the final confrontation with the two of them standing opposite each other on a rope bridge and all.
In the movie, Yashiro stabs Satoru before he is arrested and Satoru dies after accepting that at least he has fulfilled his mission and saved his mother and his friends. I was surprised by this ending because the anime had such a hopeful one. I’m glad this drama adaptation followed the manga and gave it a happy ending after all, where he re-encounters Airi by chance and states that the future is a blank slate again.

I liked this adaptation. It was short (12 episodes) and clear, it didn’t drag and it didn’t include any confusing additional storylines (sometimes with short series the writers try to include as much content into the storyline as possible, making it rushed). Furukawa Yuki did a good job, although I still would like to see a more energetic role of him some time. This series will probably be one of those few that I will watch any version and adaptation of because the story is that good.

I think that it’s important that even in the darkest times, it’s good to remember the warm moments and focus on the good. Sometimes it takes us a while to notice that something isn’t right with someone, someone might be hiding bruises, either on the inside or outside. In this whole process of initially saving his mother, Satoru found himself discovering a lot of new things about the people around him and himself, and they made him the new version of Satoru that he became after waking up from that coma. He suddenly had more hope and a stronger sense of justice to help and protect the people he cared about and genuinely felt grateful when he learned that they turned out well. Although we aren’t able to travel back in time, it’s good to sometimes look back and reflect upon how you were, in order to go on as you are. We tend to forget or suppress things and that’s okay. But I think it’s important to be the best version of ourselves that we can be and make sure we do everything we can to live up to the good in the world.

I will now continue with my slow-paced Chinese series and go on with my list 🙂 I hope my reviews will keep being interesting to you. Until next time!