A teenage boy discovers his best friend is not his best friend but a mysterious entity that took his friend's place in 2025's The Summer Hikaru Died (光が死んだ夏). I've watched the first two episodes of this intriguing series that conjures a sinister, anxious mood.
Yoshiki (Kobayashi Chiaki) and Hikaru (Umeda Shuichiro) are sitting and chatting one day when Yoshiki casually remarks that Hikaru is not really Hikaru at all. Hikaru laughs sheepishly and admits the real Hikaru died in the woods and that the boy sitting beside Yoshiki is a counterfeit, the creation of an entity that struggles to describe itself. Evidence of its supernatural nature becomes clear when part of Hikaru's face melts into an iridescent fluid mass that begins to reach for Yoshiki's face.
The two remain friends because, with all the normal stresses of teenage life, Yoshiki needs a best friend. I've often observed how important best friends are to students in Japan, which makes sense in Japan's collectivist culture in which self-perception is formed by a continuous feedback loop of perceived impressions from others. This makes the nature of this Hikaru entity all the more intriguing and gives the show a great deal of relevance for the real adolescent experience. As puberty causes the world to seem bigger and stranger, our own identities become as uncertain as those of the people around us. The uncertainty of Hikaru's identity and true nature creates a fundamental uncertainty in Yoshiki's own self-perception.
I can see the influences of Evangelion and a few other things. There's even a touch of Cronenberg in the second episode when Hikaru opens his shirt to reveal a large vertical slit similar to the one James Woods has in Videodrome and the vaginal symbolism is just as apparent and intended. As the relationship between Hikaru and Yoshiki becomes stranger, it seems inevitable somehow that it would become more intimate.
The Summer Hikaru Died is available on Netflix.
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