The Summer Hikaru Died Episode 11 Review: An Inescapable Past, Impending Tragedy, and Goo Monster Galore
After an episode that suffered from a bit too many dry digressions, The Summer Hikaru Died Episode 11 “Indo’s Sin” much more elegantly tied this doomed village’s past to those stuck living there in the present. Sure, there was still plenty of exposition, but this time, we saw firsthand the tragedy of a community so tightly bound to its violent history. Also, there was a big goo monster, which is pretty neat.
Events begin as Yoshiki confronts his dad, Toshinori, a character who has largely been absent from the narrative; his lack of screen time feels intentional, because Toshinori seems to have a similarly limited presence in his son’s life. We can immediately feel the strain between the two, a tension setting in as Yoshiki swallows his pride to ask his old man for answers, conveying just how desperate he is to find a way to save Hikaru. Even before we get an explanation, the scene already eclipses last week’s many segments where dudes explained stuff, as this very conversation is a difficult-to-watch act steeped in the complex relationships between these characters.
Moreover, Toshinori isn’t just talking at the camera; instead, we get a flashback of him as a teenager with his best friend Kohei (Hikaru’s dad), as he recounts the bits and pieces of information he gleaned about the town’s curse from his buddy. As Kohei explains it, according to the Indo family, a member of their clan committed a grave sin generations ago when he asked the local deity to bring his wife back from the grave. Consumed by desperation, he was willing to offer up the heads of his neighbors, seemingly resulting in a series of gruesome suicides, freak accidents, and supernatural phenomena that bathed this community in blood.
This Indo’s reward for betraying his community? He gets Monkey’s Pawed. While the deity technically brings the man’s wife back to life, it neglects to reattach her already severed head to her body, so she dies again shortly after.
Taken purely at face value, this tale is a bit thematically unsatisfying in some ways: if this is true, then the villagers have a legitimate reason to despise the Indo clan. Sure, this vitriol shouldn’t have been passed down across generations, but this narrative implies that the evils inflicted on this village stem from one person’s selfish act instead of something more systemic. It also means that the town’s certified Wicker Man behavior had some basis (although they still probably shouldn’t have, you know, killed those people), instead of just being superstition gone way too far. However, there’s a pretty big caveat here: Kohei admits that he has no idea if this tale is actually true.
If that wasn’t enough reason to doubt this version of history, add in the fact that it doesn’t quite square with the glimpses we’ve gotten into the past when Yoshiki sees tiny flashes of this past Indo, whose kind smile comes across quite differently than the selfish man in the story. And frankly, it’s much more interesting if the town’s obsessive reliance on tradition has more to do with a misremembered tale than something real, showcasing how types of imposed norms are often intensely misguided—again, this is very much a story about being a queer person in a conservative community, so it’d be a little odd if said community was correct in its unyielding views. Given how smart this series is, I doubt that this several-generation-old legend is entirely accurate.
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