The Summer Hikaru Died Episode 10 Review: The Greatest Original Sin, Too Much Exposition

By Elijah Gonzalez | September 16, 2025 | 9:05am

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The Summer Hikaru Died Episode 10 Review: The Greatest Original Sin, Too Much Exposition

After last week’s big-time cliffhanger that involved a beheading, Yoshiki and Hikaru are able to patch things up surprisingly cleanly in The Summer Hikaru Died 10th episode, “Truth.” Despite a decapitation and seemingly witnessing a man transform into an undead samurai, before long, our central pair are back in equilibrium, mending the situation as cleanly as when Yoshiki plopped his companion’s noggin back on his shoulders.

Well, that’s slightly underselling the chaos endured to get there; as kaladoscopic goo gushes from Hikaru’s stump, the camera spastically cuts between the leaking liquid and Tanaka’s unhinged laughter, a nightmarish display of off-kilter madness that both hints at how contemptuous Tanaka is towards spirits and conveys Yoshiki’s disbelief at the horrifying circumstances he keeps finding himself in.

While it’s a bit disappointing that events slide so seamlessly back to normal after this, with Old Man Takeda somehow surviving his full-body makeover into a cartoon ghoul and Hikaru coming away largely unscathed (despite the mark on this neck), it’s clear the narrative isn’t ready to go full-tilt yet: after all, there’s a whole bunch more stuff to explain to us!

In all honesty, the show’s recent emphasis on exposition is becoming a bit overbearing, not because the information provided isn’t interesting, but because it feels like the last two weeks have been an extended town-history lesson. Not only has getting these answers been a bit too mundane (it’s mostly just been finding people in town to explain stuff to them), but this focus on the past has left less time for the relationships between its characters in the present. Maybe it’s a function of Hikaru and Yoshiki’s somewhat “solving” their relationship (until the end of the episode, anyway), but the lack of compelling interpersonal drama is definitely felt.

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Moreover, this lore-bombing would be dramatically more powerful if, instead of receiving this information via lectures, it was communicated via flashbacks from the perspective of those who lived through these times. Being able to see these misdeeds from the viewpoint of those experiencing them would both be more entertaining and pull us further into this place’s history.

All of that said, there is definitely good news here. The actual information we learn is deeply thematically interesting. As it seemed from the start, there is something very wrong with Kubitachi village: we find out that hundreds of years ago, its villagers paid homage to a curse god that they believe demanded human sacrifice, ostensibly feeding it human heads in exchange for protecting this place from calamity. While the villagers mostly offered up the sick and elderly, they also captured and killed travelers unlucky enough to fall into their net. In short, they’re a “murder village” as Yoshiki somewhat hilariously puts it.

It’s easy to see why this place is beset by so many apparitions (many of which are headless, as Yoshiki points out): it’s basically one giant graveyard of wronged spirits. In a very literal sense, this place is haunted by its past.

In this way, it seems that Yoshiki and Hikaru may have a bigger purpose than just protecting themselves or their fellow villagers, and they may be tasked with righting a generational evil that’s been hidden for far too long. While the specifics around the whole “murder village” thing are still a bit vague, it’s easy to imagine a world in which these many killings were born from fear and ignorance instead of from anything justifiable. It’s the type of fear that makes for an inflexible place stuck in its ways, one full of gossip and subtle shaming that keeps kids like Yoshiki feeling thoroughly alienated. It’s an interesting thread, and I’m quite interested in seeing where it leads.

Beyond this, we also get a bit more about Tanaka, specifically that he’s blind without his magical sunglasses (sorry for making fun of you for wearing those inside last week, I didn’t know!) and that his probably Very Evil Company is eagerly awaiting the results of his investigation. That said, it seems possible that Tanaka isn’t doing this for them, but for himself; he implies as much when he says he’s getting closer to “his” objective, specifically. As the mark on Yoshiki’s body from Hikaru continues to grow darker, it seems possible that the splotches on Tanaka’s body are quite similar. He says he wants to destroy Hikaru outright, so perhaps his motivation is to stop what happened to him from happening to anyone else? He is pretty evil-coded, though, hence the maniacal laughter earlier in the episode, but we shall see.

Lastly, there’s the chilling moment at the end where a shadowy Hikaru, depicted as two glowing red eyes in the night, awakens to his original purpose of consuming life to fill a vast emptiness. Perhaps whatever the Indo family did generations ago is the “cause” of this void, which then needed to be filled with countless human sacrifices. As for why Hikaru awakened to this now, it’s possible the only reason this mountain god was to live carefree as Hikaru is because it couldn’t remember the past: it’s only after touching the shrine and seemingly regaining some memories that Hikaru gives Yoshiki a threatening late-night visit. Even with the details still fuzzy, we can see how this small community is positively drowning in its own sordid actions on multiple levels, with future daughters and sons forced to atone for the sins of the past. It’s stifling in the extreme.

All of that said, while these new developments around Hikaru and these discoveries around the history of the town are compelling and tie in nicely with this portrayal of generation sins and trauma, hopefully the next few episodes will lighten up on the map diagrams and lengthy explanations a bit. With only two episodes left in the season, and only a bit more of the source material to adapt before catching up, we’ll need plenty of human drama to suitably tie together this otherwise excellent story.

Elijah Gonzalez is an associate editor for Endless Mode. In addition to playing the latest, he also loves anime, movies, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.