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Tanaka is a total psycho! Who the hell decapitates something that looks human right in front of a teenager?! Mokumokuren, the mastermind behind ‘The Summer Hikaru Died’, clearly wanted Yoshiki to suffer as much as possible. The poor kid just cannot catch a damn break.
Quick recap of ‘The Summer Hikaru Died’ Episode 9
Kurebayashi Rie saves Yoshiki and Hikaru from a ghostly spirit at the restaurant and tells them about her own tragic experience with the supernatural world. The boys then visit old man Takeda in their village to find out more about ‘Nonuki-sama’, the mountain deity they think Hikaru could be. Takeda however is angry, cryptic and soon twists into something monstrous, and in a shocking crescendo, ghostbuster Tanaka appear out of nowhere, slices through Hikaru’s neck in one brutal stroke. The final seconds leave Yoshiki frozen in horror, shattered by what he’s just witnessed.
Titled ‘Truth’, episode 10 of ‘The Summer Hikaru Died’ opens with a terrified Yoshiki picking up Hikaru’s decapitated head, while the weird greenish-red entity pours out like alien octopi tentacles out of the body. It’s a crazy, horrifying, sad visual scene, where Yoshiki, not too surprisingly, desperately tries to attach the head back to the body.
Both boys end up in the hospital, surviving the violent incident, while Tanaka curiously backs out of the scene. In a stroke of luck, a classmate mentions something about a different deity worshiped by the Kubitachi village in the past, which leads Yoshiki to a breakthrough. He finally comes close to learning more about the mystical Nonuki-sama, and ‘truth’ is dark, twisted, and quite shocking.
In this edition of ‘The Summer Hikaru Died’, Yoshiki is lost in his own thoughts, digging relentlessly into his village’s secrets, but every page he turns only underscores the depth of his unshakable bond with with Hikaru. Dead, alive, deity, ghost, or something far stranger, Yoshiki clings to the entity with a devotion that’s unmatched. It’s tragic, and perhaps even terrifying. To Yoshiki, Hikaru is everything, and losing him is not an option.
The climactic minutes of this episode leads the boys to the village shrine, where the ominous interiors rattle Yoshiki to his core. For Hikaru, however, the place awakens buried memories, and with them, dark secrets long concealed by the village elders.
Overall, it’s another gritty episode, which gets over in a blink.
Watch ‘The Summer Hikaru Died’ on Netflix.
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