In Naoki Urasawa's masterpiece, nobody dies until everyone forgets.
Most of us were once the kid who was going to do everything. Then we grew up, and at some point we stopped remembering what that was. Not in one moment. We let it go, one reasonable choice at a time.
20th Century Boys opens exactly there. As a boy, Kenji wrote a notebook of prophecies about saving the world. In his late thirties he runs a convenience store, his guitar put away, the notebook forgotten. Urasawa is almost the same age as his characters: the generation that grew up with the 1970 Osaka Expo and the promise of a shining 21st century.
But the story is not about nostalgia. It's about what forgetting does, to the people we forget and to ourselves, and about the fact that it is never too late to remember.
"We don't lose who we are. We forget it. And what we forget doesn't disappear: it waits for someone to remember it"
— We are what others remember of us —
We like to think identity is something we carry inside, but 20th Century Boys suggests it also lives outside us, in the memory of the people who knew us.
In a simulation of 1971, Kanna meets Donkey as a child. Donkey, the boy who loves science, believes that when you die there is nothing left. Kanna disagrees and tells him people go on existing in the memories of others. They only truly die when everyone has forgotten them.
The line lands harder because of who hears it. In Kanna's present, Donkey is already dead, and it is the memory of him that drags Kenji back into the fight.
If that is true, forgetting is never neutral. Every time we forget someone, a part of them dies. And every time we forget who we were, so does a part of us.
— Letting yourself go —
Nobody decides to stop being who they were. We let it go, one reasonable choice at a time.
Kenji never quits music in a big scene. There is the family shop, then the bills, then his sister's baby, and one day the boy with the guitar is simply gone. Otcho, the freest of them all, goes further: a good university, a job at a big trading company, until he isn't present even for his own son. He loses him, and loses himself with him. Looking back as an old man, he puts it plainly: "I just didn't care. It didn't really affect me. That's how I lived my whole life."
What's striking is that none of this looks like failure from the inside. It looks like growing up. The most common way to lose yourself isn't a tragedy, but a long run of sensible decisions, until the adult you became has nothing left to say to the child you were.
— Buried, not gone —
But forgetting is not the same as erasing. What we let go of doesn't vanish. It stays buried, waiting.
That is why the series keeps cutting back to 1969, 1970, 1971. The flashbacks aren't nostalgia. They are where everything the characters forgot has been kept, where the underlying issues arose and where they must be solved.
Broken, Otcho asks an old monk in the jungle how to overcome his despair. The answer is not a technique but a memory: "Remember... those you love." And Shota, his son, appears in front of him. The memories he was supressing, made him miserable because they reminded him of all his mistakes, but they also erased part of himself, including his kid.
Sadakiyo was a shy kid who only wanted a friend, manipulated for decades until he no longer knew good from bad. When he finally confronts The Friend and screams "I am... a good guy" he isn't becoming someone new. He is remembering the boy he was before anyone told him otherwise.
We don't find ourselves by becoming someone else. We find ourselves by digging up who we truly were.
— What's left when nobody remembers you —
Spoiler warning: this section discusses the ending of 21st Century Boys.
Friend is not one forgotten boy. He is two.
Fukubei spent his childhood begging to be seen. He faked a whole summer at the Osaka Expo and staged a miracle in the science room, anything to be at the centre. Then he died during spring break after elementary school, and, as Kenji puts it, “hardly anyone even knew.” The boy who most feared being forgotten was replaced by someone else, and nobody noticed that either.
That someone was Katsumata. The day he took the blame for a badge Kenji stole, Fukubei told him “Today, you died,” and from then on nobody looked at him. With no life of his own left, he took the name of the boy who had erased him, and “became more Fukube than Fukube was himself.”
One wanted to be remembered and vanished without a trace. The other was forgotten and survived only as a copy. Behind the mask that terrified the world, there was no one anybody remembered.
Which is why killing Friend doesn’t end the story. The wound was never in the present.
— Sometimes someone has to remind you —
We can't always remember who we are on our own. Sometimes it takes someone else to remind us who we are, and what we are worth.
That is what the ending of 21st Century Boys is about. The present can't be changed, but Kenji gets to go back, in a simulation, and do what he never did. Nothing grand. A goodbye to Sadakiyo, so that someone will remember he was there, proof that he existed. An apology to Katsumata, from a kid who made a mistake to the kid who paid for it. And the sentence nobody ever said to him:
"You were alive. You were alive, just like we were."
The hero and the villain turn out to be almost the same kid: two boys who loved the same music, and who could have been friends all along. In this version of the past, it is Katsumata who comes up with “Gutalala, Sudalala”, the words that in the real story become the battle cry of the people resisting Friend. The anthem against the man he would become was his to begin with.
