One Great Character: Maki, from The Summer Hikaru Died

Breaking the darkness with a ray of sunshine.

I’m rereading The Summer Hikaru Died… again… because I love this series so much, and this time, I’m paying more attention to the characters around Not Hikaru and Yoshiki, because I always remembered them being fun and all, but I didn’t remember all that much about them specifically.

This time through though, I’m seeing just how well they’re crafted. I’m constantly in awe of Mokumokuren and the comprehensiveness of this series. Even if the focal point is Yoshiki and Not Hikaru and the lore of the mountains, everything that happens around that is so valuable.

Namely, Maki.

It’s no secret that Yoshiki is a bit of a sad character. Or a hard-core gloomy Gus, if you ask Maki. He’s sad in that his best friend is dead and has been replaced by a nether-worldly being who’s probably a god. So Yoshiki cries a lot. And Not Hikaru, who is trying to fill Hikaru’s shoes, but also has his own baggage of being self-aware, has a lot of dark introspection. So he cries a lot.

But then Maki enters with such excitement over flippant things, like fried chicken or a stuffed animal won out of a claw machine, and this is a like a sledgehammer of reminding readers that despite the darkness pervading the series, these are still just kids. Just kids in a small town trying to find a meaning in this thing called life.

One of the great themes of The Summer Hikaru Died is this notion of childhood innocence, individuality and authenticity. It’s a dense subject, and something that Yoshiki doesn’t understand much, but is eager to learn more about. That is so worth the space it takes up in the series, but it’s almost like a glass of water to the face when Maki barges in with an appearance that shows what a “normal” child should be like. Normal in that, in an ideal world, a kid his age wouldn’t have to worry about his dead best friend being inhabited by a potentially evil deity.

And then there’s Asano, another kid in their friend circle, plagued with a sense of hearing that transcends our realm, so she can pick up the presence of the deceased, like Hikaru, and other ghosts and non-human entities.

Maki’s biggest stress is having broken his arm and thus being ruled out of a baseball tournament. That is a childhood stress—one I’m way too acquainted with myself, sadly—and even that point of stress feels refreshing in the face of the existential threat facing this entire cast. Maki is completely ignorant to these existential threats. At least thus far, and that’s another value he adds—he still has that innocence of not really being affected by the pervading darkness. Like he’s the last bastion of hope.

Maki is the beacon of light that balances out the amorphous darkness swirling around Not Hikaru, Yoshiki and the rest of the cast and town. And it’s such a valuable role to the series, because, at a bare minimum, he provides comedic relief in the face of encroaching darkness that threatens to remove all semblance of childhood innocence.

That being the case, if the major themes are to hit home, there needs to be representation of as many forms of childhood as possible, and Maki playing the role of “idyllic childhood” becomes elevated because it works in contrast to everyone else’s troubled childhood.