by Gaby
Boku Dake Ga Inai Machi, known as, Erased in English, is a newly released thriller anime with sci-fi elements. I had heard about it so I decided to go ahead and check out the first episode when I was told there would be time travel involved.
How this starts is we meet our front character Satoru Fujinuma, a 29 year old part timer living on his own, however, he has a weird special ability. He randomly has weird flashbacks that basically let him re-do a part of life he just lived. He doesn't know when or how far he will jump back to so he is always looking out for details to make sure that something doesn't seem odd.
One day he is on a pizza delivery on the work motorcycle and he skips back about a minute back in time in order to avoid a little boy getting run over by a truck, in this chaos he ends up in the hospital with some minor injuries.
Satoru's mom pays him a visit and decides to stay with him for a while. While his mom is there with him, we learn that there is a part of his past as a child that has to do with an abduction of a little girl that Satoru feels guilty about, he feels that he could have helped the little girl and its his fault she was abducted.
While Satoru and his mom are at a supermarket, he has a flashback to a few minutes back and he can't figure out why he flashed so he asks his mom if she feels strange or if she notices anything weird, his mom says that he would say things like that in the past before too, just then his mom notices a guy walking with a little girl towards a creepy van, the creeper suddenly connects eyes with the mom and decides not to abduct the little girl. Mom can't get this out of mind so she does some digging around the next day and connects the dots that this guy might be the same creeper from before. She goes to Satoru's apartment to wait for him, and when she thinks Satoru got home....it wasn't him...the creeper had followed her home.
Just watch it! I'm serious it is a really good anime, its suspenseful, it has a good sci-fi element, and the character seems legit.
Another thing that totally got me hooked was that as the ending credits rolled, I heard the wonderful sounds of one of my favorite Japanese bands, Asian Kung-Fu Generation with their song RE: RE:.
I will definitively be watching more of this when I can, right now the first episode is available subtitled on Funimation.
Check it out!