Between Horror and Desire

MokuMokuren’s coming-of-age manga The Summer Hikaru Died (TSHD), and its 2025 Netflix adaptation, redefines queer adolescent masculinity in rural Japan within the frame of liminal horror. This article evaluates how the incomprehensibility of Eldritch horror articulates queer repression and desire within a socially conservative patriarchal framework. Through a critical literary analysis rooted in Turner’s concept of liminality and Ahmed’s theory of affective alienation, it interprets how queer orientation and desire manifest in the adolescent protagonists, Yoshiki and Hikaru. The Lovecraftian entity that occupies the shell of Hikaru’s body is a queer-liminal conduit symbolizing fluidity of desire, sexuality, and expression. The deceased Hikaru is resurrected in a form that enables Yoshiki to experience the queer emotional intimacy forbidden to him by human heteronormative expectations. TSHD’s queer themes have drawn critical acclaim and fan attention, but sustained academic engagement with the text itself is limited. This article also addresses a gap in the rare intersection of Eldritch horror and queer adolescence within the frame of Japan-specific rural queer studies and manga scholarship. The liminal vastness of the non-human entity acts as a metaphor for the liberating possibilities of queer desire, while its inhabiting of a human vessel facilitates the enactment of these desires within a restrictive, heteronormative social space.