The Summer Hikaru Died

The accents in this show are strange

I’m not a native Japanese speaker, but I can still hear that it’s Kansai dialect. This is genuinely an extra gift that comes from learning Japanese: you get to understand and feel very subtle differences. If you watch it with Chinese subtitles, you’ll never hear it in your whole life

Anyway, everyone in the show talks in a rustic sort of way, yet it’s unexpectedly warm and nice to listen to

If you’ve consumed a fair amount of fiction, the theme of this show isn’t complicated at all. It’s just

偽物

I don’t think this word can be translated into Chinese, but any native Chinese speaker can read it and understand

As for swampmen and the Ship of Theseus and all that, none of it matters. That’s not what this show is about

The early part has a bit of a folk-horror feel to it, especially the summer, the cicadas that never stop

A very good show. There’s nothing to pick at anywhere

But if it were just plain and unremarkable like that, I wouldn’t be writing this

The Hikaru who died and the Hikaru who’s here now are two different people

In episode 12, Asako learns all of it

And what good does knowing do? Learning something sad doesn’t make you happy

Hikaru is simply dead, even if there’s a 偽物 with the exact same face, carrying all the memories from before

So Asako starts to cry, crying for the Hikaru who died. That scene really got to me: the 偽物 who inherited Hikaru’s place wipes the tear from the outer corner of her right eye

You can pretend you don’t know anything

But the tear in the corner of her left eye won’t stop