In the tranquil, sun-drenched village of Kubitachi, a Japanese summer unfolds with an almost oppressive stillness. This quiet is shattered when Hikaru Indo, a silver-haired teenager missing for a week, casually reappears from the mountains, a serene smile on his face. His best friend, Yoshiki Tsujinaka, immediately senses the chilling truth: this isn’t Hikaru. Yet, in a terribly human act of desperation, Yoshiki chooses to keep this monstrous secret, unable to bear the thought of truly losing his friend. His choice sets the stage for a story about clinging to the unbearable, because the alternative—accepting complete loss—is far worse.
What immediately strikes viewers about this Netflix adaptation of Mokumokuren’s acclaimed manga is its exquisite attention to atmosphere. Light gently filters over rusty railings, laundry sways in a soft breeze, and heat shimmers over vast rice paddies. These visuals are underscored by the ceaseless hum of cicadas and Taro Umebayashi’s haunting, ethereal score. The landscape itself seems averse to drama, which only amplifies the profound unsettling feeling when something truly inhuman intrudes. Directed by Ryohei Takeshita, known for the Umamusume franchise, CygamesPictures delivers a production unafraid of quiet moments, a stark contrast to their usual high-energy works. Takeshita’s masterful control of perspective, texture, and spatial composition evokes a Twin Peaks-like ability to make the mundane feel subtly corrupted.
This 12-episode Japanese series, directed by Ryohei Takeshita, features a talented cast including Chiaki Kobayashi, Shuichiro Umeda, Yumiri Hanamori, Wakana Kowaka, Chikahiro Kobayashi, and Shion Wakayama. Each episode runs for approximately 25 minutes. The story delves into a chilling premise: six months after Hikaru vanished for a week, his best friend Yoshiki senses an unsettling change, leading to a confrontation that unearths a harrowing truth about Hikaru’s return.
The series resists the common pitfalls of supernatural dramas by refusing to neatly explain its eldritch beings or curses. Instead, the mythology feels inherited, a lingering superstition that the villagers no longer need to articulate. Encounters with the occult cling to the senses like an inescapable, oppressive humidity, drawing freely from Japanese rural ghost stories while hinting at unmistakable Lovecraftian undertones.
At the heart of this narrative are the nuanced performances. Chiaki Kobayashi portrays Yoshiki with a muted ache, his bone-deep grief manifesting in shoulders that never quite straighten and a voice that thins when he whispers Hikaru’s name. Shuichiro Umeda imbues the faux-Hikaru with a slightly-too-bright timbre, an eerie imitation of humanity struggling to recall its own essence.
A captivating still from ‘The Summer Hikaru Died’ provides a glimpse into its unsettling visuals.
The creature inhabiting Hikaru’s form often falters in its human performance, yet it can perfectly mimic a familiar touch or the precise inflection of Yoshiki’s name. The true horror lies in how tenderness itself becomes a snare. Yoshiki, fully aware that this is not his friend, nonetheless carves out a place for it in his life. This human impulse to cherish even a spectral echo of the familiar is neither praised nor judged, but observed with a patient, profound understanding that becomes the series’ defining trait.
The profound tenderness between the two boys saturates every frame, their bond burdened with the weight of youthful longing. Hikaru’s mimic adores Yoshiki with an almost desperate intensity—a craving Yoshiki never seemed to fully receive from the real Hikaru. Their dynamic becomes a poignant study in co-dependency, lingering guilt, and self-erasure. The more Yoshiki refuses to let go, the deeper he becomes ensnared in Hikaru’s malevolent new reality.
A second still from the series further illustrates its evocative atmosphere.
This is not a conventional romance, nor is it strictly horror. It exists in a liminal space where love and dread intertwine. It conjures a specific, doomed tenderness reminiscent of Luca Guadagnino’s work in films like Call Me By Your Name or Bones and All, or even anime such as Banana Fish—a tragic magnetism between two souls perhaps never meant to find solace in each other. The Summer Hikaru Died brilliantly captures how queer adolescence is often lived in the half-light, between the ardent desire to be seen and the profound fear of it. The surrounding forests of Kubitachi echo with a particular queer loneliness that teenagers learn to internalize, while the creature’s unsettlingly perfect imitation of intimacy mirrors the fragile performance of belonging that many young queer individuals master for survival. The ‘impurities’ that seem to follow them through town feel like manifestations of Yoshiki’s unspoken, forbidden desires. Ultimately, the horror blossoms from the dangerous realization that love, in its most desperate form, can make a monster feel like home.
Drawing from a rich literary tradition where terror stems from the erosion of boundaries between intense longing and haunting delusion, much like The Turn of the Screw, this anime masterfully navigates a world made unbearable by the possibility that its horrors are undeniably real.
In its poignant final episode, The Summer Hikaru Died distills desire and dread into an almost mischievous, singular conceit: a boy stands before a monster he loves, daring to ask it to love him back. In this profound subversion, it blossoms into a truly unique and unforgettable experience.
The Summer Hikaru Died is currently streaming on Netflix.