A high school kid goes missing for a week in the mountains near his small rural town - but then reappears, seemingly ok. His best friend notices that something’s wrong with Hikaru - since he’s returned, he’s acting weird. What happened to his friend during that week?
This might sound like a spoiler but the title tells you one half of it and, almost immediately, the characters tell you the other half: Hikaru died and a monster or spirit or something took over his body and is now living his life. It should be a spoiler rather than the premise because the story goes absolutely nowhere after we learn this and really needed some kind of hook, a smidge of narrative intrigue and tension, to slightly interest the reader. As it is, this is one helluva pointless and ever-boring read.
Once Yoshiki finds out Hikaru is really being puppeteered by some supernatural entity right at the beginning, all that happens is that this gets underlined over and over for the rest of the book. “Hikaru” doesn’t do anything except seemingly want to live Hikaru’s life as a regular high school kid. Yoshiki isn’t trying to kill “Hikaru” or tell others about this or do much of anything. What’s the bloody story then?! I have no idea.
I wonder if this is a clumsy attempt at a metaphorical coming-out story. Hikaru “dies” ie. realises he’s gay and comes out to Yoshiki who may also be gay but is still closeted. One random character tells Yoshiki that he can’t be with Hikaru for vague reasons so maybe they’re meant to be symbolic of how Japanese society views homosexuals? I may also be giving Mokumokuren way too much credit though.
And, laughably, it’s a volume 1 even though there’s no real story to continue - reading the premise is the same as reading the book because you get the same amount of information but without having to waste your time. Some books just baffle me as to how they got published - so it goes with The Summer Hikaru Died, Volume 1. Forgettable, directionless rubbish from start to finish.
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