“You ain’t the real Hikaru, are ya?”
This is the opening line of The Summer Hikaru Died. It comes at the end of a few quiet pages depicting two high-school boys in a small village hanging out and getting ice cream. They rough house and play like normal boys. They talk to each other like old friends. Then, the black-haired Yoshiki Tsujinaka asks the above question, and the normal slice-of-life beginning falls away to reveal the swirling horror that lies beneath.
Synopsis
This is the tale of two boys. One is human. One is not. It’s not totally clear at first what this fake Hikaru Indo is, exactly, but it appeared six months ago after the real Hikaru went up into the mountains and disappeared for a week. It perfectly mimics Yoshiki’s friend; it even has his memories. But as it is revealed in the first few pages of volume one, this is not Hikaru. Yoshiki, torn between being terrified of the thing that has replaced his friend and wanting to still be close to the boy he harbors a crush on, forms an uneasy friendship with the thing that wears Hikaru’s face.
The Good
It’s strangely innocent the way the entity experiences the world outside of the mountains. Though it maintains it has all of Hikaru’s memories, this Hikaru hasn’t had the experiences itself, so it reacts to each new event (trying pork cutlet, doing a test of courage) with childlike excitement. The art of the first volume lends itself to this atmosphere, highlighting a lonely village in the mountains, away from modern technology and closer than ever to Japan’s old ghosts.
But despite the oddly cute way the entity calling itself Hikaru interacts with the world, Mokumokuren never allows the reader to relax completely around “Hikaru.” Cats and other animals that were originally friendly now run at the sight of it. Older, more religious people in the village get foreboding feelings around it. And though they’re never too obvious, there are differences in the way “Hikaru” acts and carries itself compared to the way the real Hikaru acts in flashbacks.
In fact, the reader never sees the real Hikaru outside of flashbacks, but he haunts the narrative from the first page. He was Yoshiki’s best friend, after all, and more importantly the object of Yoshiki’s secret crush. But it’s clear the crush was one-sided with the real Hikaru, a gap “Hikaru” is now happy to bridge. This is the reason Yoshiki doesn’t run screaming for the hills the first time “Hikaru” does something inhuman; the loneliness that he felt around Hikaru is now filled, even though it’s just a tragic simulacrum of the real boy he fell in love with.
From the beginning, these elements work together to create an atmosphere with an unbeatable sense of suspense and fear; there is no telling how “Hikaru” will act toward any given situation. Despite its obsession with Yoshiki, the entity doesn’t hesitate to act with hostility toward things that might threaten it, and the glimpses that the reader gets of what it can do in the first volume are more than enough to remind us of the monster that lurks beneath the surface.
The Bad
The only element that ruins some of the atmosphere and can take me out of the story is the written accents. Written accents are a dicey choice at the best of times, and while it does help to set the story in a firmly rural atmosphere, it can also be distracting. Not to mention, they might make it difficult to read if English isn’t your first language, or if you have dyslexia. The largely silent moments of quiet horror are a point in the first volume’s favor, but it’s difficult to build tension in other scenes when I have to take a second to figure out what the characters are saying.
The Verdict
With an immaculate setting, sense of tension, and tragic characters, The Summer Hikaru Died is set to be a manga horror giant alongside the stories of Junji Ito. While it isn’t classified as a straightforward boys’ love title, the constant undercurrent of tension between who you are and what you look like makes for an undoubtedly queer story. Since true queer horror stories of this caliber are few and far between, The Summer Hikaru Died is a rare gem.
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The Summer Hikaru Died is available from Bookshop, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble.
Credits
Story and Art: Mokumokuren
Translation: Ajani Oloye
Lettering: Abigail Blackman
Design: Liz Parlett
Published in English by Yen Press
Article editor: Anne Lee
The Good
- Immaculate tension and horror atmosphere
- Inability to understand Hikaru's motivations adds suspense
- Character actions and narrative twists keeps the reader guessing
The Bad
- The written accents are sometimes hard to understand
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