Yoshiki and Hikaru are both among the only children of their village in the mountains and grew up close. So it’s unsurprising that it’s only Yoshiki who notices that Hikaru hasn’t been the same since he got lost in the woods last summer. The real Hikaru is dead and something has replaced him.
Author: モクモクれん
Publisher: 角川コミックス・エース
Length: 6 volumes as of spring 2025
This was my second attempt reading this manga. I first got curious early on in 2022 after this series was first published as a tankōbon. I had a look at the first few chapters and unfortunately only read the very first before I gave up. The reason was that 光が死んだ夏 is set in a rural area of Japan and is told almost entirely in dialect, which I didn’t have any experience in back then.
Now that I’m more used to reading various texts in Japanese, I wanted to try reading it once more and found that what was a significant hurdle a few years ago, was now easily manageable and I was able to read the 6 volumes comfortably.
It really is popular for a reason: There’s of course the (eldritch) horror and the grief of losing your best friend paired with the confusion over the thing that replaced him becoming him, but interwoven with that is also the theme of being young in a rural and mostly elderly community steeped in incomprehensible traditions. And both of these themes mesh extremely well!
I would recommend N2 reading abilities, but the manga has furigana on all kanji and the biggest challenge is without a doubt the dialect, which you can look up and also will get used to after a while.
You can read the first few chapters and all new chapters for free on the publisher’s official site.
Affiliate links: If you prefer physical volumes you can also get the series e.g. through Amazon Japan
dokushoclub.com 