Karen's Anime Blog

It’s getting a little late in the season for “First Look” posts, but I thought I would be remiss not to mention this one. It didn’t originally catch my eye for this season, but I kept seeing people rave about it on social media after the first episode, so I decided to jump in. It’s wonderfully spooky and atmospheric, plus it has a relationship between two boys– well, let’s just call Hikaru a boy for now– that has romantic potential.

Story-wise, the set-up is simple: Yoshiki and Hikaru are two longtime friends who grew up together in a sleepy mountain town. One summer, Hikaru goes on a hike in the mountains and is missing for ten days. Everyone is relieved when Hikaru makes it back, but not long after, his friend Yoshiki begins to wonder: is it really Hikaru that came down the mountain?

The thing about Hikaru that makes it hard to explain is that it’s just really well directed. I could talk about shots of insects devouring each other and long cuts of one person’s eye, but it doesn’t really sound like anything special until you see how it’s all put together. It’s horror-themed, but not in a juvenile jump-scare sort of way– although I do think there were one or two moments in the first two episodes that had that surprising quality. The relationship between Yoshiki and Hikaru is fascinating to watch, and even though it’s never outright sexual, there’s a pull between their two characters that you can feel.

In addition to the two boys, there’s also a paranormal-investigator type person who is looking into the increasingly creepy happenings in town, and he kind of looks like Shizuo from Durarara!!, so that’s practically enough to hook me on the show right there…okay, maybe not, but it’s a nice bonus. I’m really curious to see how the investigator is going to interact with the high school duo, and I really wanna know if the hamster that keeps getting airtime is going to be relevant to the larger story. “Is the hamster a red herring?”, that’s the thought that will be keeping me up tonight.

Unless you absolutely hate anything with a tinge of horror, you should probably check out The Summer Hikaru Died. It’s on Netflix, so it’s available without having to subscribe to an anime site like Crunchyroll or HIDIVE.