Review by Ian Keogh

Yoshiki and Hikaru are best buds, and have been for years, but one hell of a foreboding title indicates all is not well. Author Mokumokuren picks up with the friends eating ice cream on a hot day. It’s six months after Hikaru went missing in the mountains for a week, an event he retains no memory of.

Whereas most creators would drag on the mystery for some while, Mokumokuren is different. We’re not even a dozen pages in when Hikaru reveals to Yoshiki that he’s not Hikaru at all, but something else masquerading as Hikaru so well that the giveaways are very small. He has the personality and feelings of Hikaru, and no-one could tell the difference by just looking at them, but this isn’t Hikaru. So what should Yoshiki do? Is it better to have this almost exact copy of a friend who he’s been assured is now dead, or adjust to accepting how things now are? Complicating the options is that people have been turning up dead.

From that set-up Mokumokuren generates a succession of genuinely creepy chapters. Hikaru is happy, although more knowing than previously, and has a lack of inhibitions about anything. Meanwhile Yoshiki becomes contemplative. He also attracts attention. This isn’t in the conventional sense, but by becoming aware of things he didn’t previously see, yet to almost everyone else the world is carrying on as normal.

Normal is how everything is drawn. The strangeness about Hikaru doesn’t extend to surroundings, and a great deal of the overall effect is achieved by there being no deviating from a small country town on a hillside and only gradually introducing stranger elements. When matters come to a head toward the end of this opening volume the art takes a strange turn with it, but Mokumokuren again surprises by drawing a form of decorative chaos, not the descent into madness others might.

The Summer Hikaru Died is a slow experience, reflecting Yoshiki’s process of mulling things over in his head, but it scores for being different and creepy. Bring on Vol. 2.