The Summer Hikaru Died

is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Mokumokuren. It began serialization on Kadokawa Shoten's Young Ace Up website in August 2021. As of June 2023, the series' individual chapters have been collected into three tankōbon volumes. Mokumokuren first conceived of the series while studying for exams and later began posting drawings on Twitter, which led to the Young Ace Up editorial department approaching Mokumokuren to serialize the manga via the Young Ace Up website. Upon release of the first volume, the series became a critical and commercial success, with the first volume selling 200,000 copies in three months, and received critical praise for story, artwork, and characters. Plot Yoshiki and Hikaru are two teenage boys living in a small town in rural Japan. Despite having opposite personalities and different hobbies, the two maintain a close friendship with both harboring potential romantic feelings for each other. However, on one winter day, Hikaru is fatally injured while hiking in the mountains alone. Before dying, a mysterious eldritch being comes across him and consumes him, becoming him physically in the process. This "Hikaru" has all the feelings and memories of the original, yet remains a separate being, something Yoshiki realizes rather quickly. Yoshiki still wants to stay with "Hikaru", however "Hikaru"'s alien nature, along with other eldritch beings and hunters of said beings may make that impossible. Characters