Literature / Yumi and the Nightmare Painter

The star was particularly bright when the nightmare painter started his rounds.
The star. Singular. No, not a sun. Just one star. A bullet hole in the midnight sky, bleeding pale light.
The nightmare painter lingered outside his apartment building, locking his eyes on the star. He'd always found it strange, that sentry in the sky. Still, he was fond of it. Many nights it was his sole companion. Unless you counted the nightmares.

Painter (Nikaro) is a lonely man making his living by trapping nightmares in paintings. He considers himself a lone warrior protecting the city, nevermind the fraternity of fellow painters who work with him. He is not a particularly fortunate man, but he makes his life more difficult by brooding. All he wants is to be important, not realizing that he is the biggest obstacle in his own way.

Yumi is a yoki-hijo, a sacred caller of spirits who binds them to a task. Her life is regimented to exacting detail, every step ritualized to protect her position. Her gift sets her apart from normal people, and her skill sets her apart from the gifted. All she wants is to live a normal life, for just one day, but her duty binds her too tightly even when she has the opportunity.

One day, Yumi is offered a gift by a spirit—freedom, adventure. Despite her wishes, she declines, knowing her duty. Instead, the spirit begs her for help, and she finds herself in a very strange situation. She is now invisible and intangible in her own world, while Painter has seemingly taken her place. He can see her, but no one else can, and everyone else sees him as Yumi. When they go to sleep, they wake up in his world, where she appears as herself and he is a ghost.

Yumi and Painter have to struggle to live each other's lives, lives they could never have conceived of, in order to make sure their societies don't break down. Because while their jobs might be simple, even common at times, they are still impossibly important.

If nothing else goes wrong first.

Yumi and the Nightmare Painter is a novel of The Cosmere by Brandon Sanderson, the third of his "secret projects" written during the Covid-19 pandemic.

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This novel provides examples of:

• After the End: Painter's story is set on a planet that has gone through a Class 2 Apocalypse, with the Shroud blanketing most of the planet and humanity staking out a living in small cities and villages protected by Hion lines, which are the only thing that turns back the darkness. More specifically, "the end" in question is the end of Yumi's planet.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The Father Machine was programmed to stack stones to attract spirits, using the energy of the spirits to sustain itself and stack more stones. Turns out that it couldn't differentiate between the spirits of the land and the spirits of the people. It ate nearly every living soul on the planet, creating the shroud out of the detritus of their souls, and constructed fourteen prisons to hold the fourteen yoki-hijo who it couldn't consume. All so that it could continue stacking stones.
• Alien Among Us: According to Hoid, one of the first problems a world faces when they leave their world and discover life elsewhere in the Cosmere is the fact that everyone else has been likely visiting their world for quite a while. The only reason worldhoppers don't help uplift the locals on their own is because it requires a lot of paperwork.
• Amnesia Loop: The father-machine doesn't have enough power to trap the souls of the fourteen yoki-hijo the way it trapped everyone else, but it does have just enough power to erase a day's worth of their memories. So it uses its captured souls to create fake villages and has each yoki-hijo live out the same day over and over again, erasing their memories each night, for seventeen hundred years.
• Amnesiac Resonance: Although the machine could erase Yumi's memories of living out the same day over and over, it couldn't completely erase the skills and muscle memory she developed over the course of the loop. As a result, she got better and better at stacking rocks over the course of the centuries, until she eventually got good enough to pull a spirit free from the machine's grasp and set off the story's plot.
• And I Must Scream:
  • Hoid has been frozen in time, fully aware, from some unspecified attack or accident. Design uses him as a coat rack outside her noodle shop.
  • Even worse for the victims of the Father Machine, which has trapped their souls either in a catatonic state of nothingness they are very much also aware of, or in a "Groundhog Day" Loop where the Laser-Guided Amnesia has them living the same day over and over and over. It's indicated at the end that once the Father Machine gained enough spirits to maintain itself perpetually it would never let them go. Considering those spirits are tantamount to God in this world, then suffice it to say, nobody would be coming to release them.
• Arc Words: "My world, my rules," starts as a snide comment Yumi and Painter give to each other to justify ordering each other around. It gets repeated with more warmth throughout the story. Eventually, Yumi repeats it as a Badass Boast when she realizes she's just one small step down from a Reality Warper.
  Yumi: My world, my rules.
  • In the epilogue, as they defy fate to let Yumi return to life, and after they have already learned they actually live on the same world, this becomes: "Our world, our rules."
• Bad Bedroom, Bad Life: Nikaro's bachelor suite is cluttered with laundry, dirty dishes, and old take-out containers. He tries to convince himself he's Married to the Job as a distraction from the utter mess he's made of his social life.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: Yumi and Nikaro snipe at each other constantly throughout their predicament, which sometimes masks and sometimes only highlights the obvious (and growing) mutual attraction between them. It probably would qualify as Slap-Slap-Kiss, if either was actually capable of touching the other.
• Big Damn Kiss: After Painter brings Yumi back to existence in the epilogue, they share a passionate kiss. According to Hoid, it wasn't a really good kiss since neither of them has any prior experience of doing that, but that didn't matter to them.
• Bittersweet Ending: The shroud is destroyed, all the nightmares are freed, and the city is saved... but Yumi is dead. The end. Until Painter decides that's not good enough and paints her back into existence. Hoid jokingly complains that he ruined a perfectly fine sad ending.
  Yumi: I'm sorry. But sometimes... sometimes it has to be sad.
• Breather Episode: The carnival chapter.
• Brick Joke:
  • Early in the story, Hoid compares the status of the Nightmare Painters to nurses and firefighters — essential workers who everyone is so keen to honour for their service that they don't want to waste time discussing things like salary. Much later in the story, when the characters visit a carnival, the crowd mistakes Yumi for a painter and begin applauding, saying "Thank you for your service", and letting her skip a queue.
  • Yumi starts cooking for herself when in Painter’s world after deciding she can’t live off snacks and Design’s noodles forever. As cooking is something she’s never had to do for herself before, her efforts go from “borderline inedible” to “just about alright” over the course of the story. In the epilogue, after Hoid and Design leave the planet, the latter leaves her noodle shop to Yumi and Painter, with Yumi herself as the new cook.
• Broken Pedestal: The Dreamwatch are actually a bunch of members of Nagadan's upper class who slack off all day while their companions do the dangerous work the Dreamwatch is supposed to do without any credit. Painter is quite disappointed when he learns the truth, both because his heroes are frauds and also because he realizes that he never had a chance of getting to join the Dreamwatch because of his lack of connections.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: Painter is actually one of the best artists in his city, but he's too lazy to paint anything more complicated than bamboo. His failure to be accepted into the Dreamwatch despite his talent convinced him that his art was bad and so he stopped trying.
• Charles Atlas Superpower: One would be forgiven for assuming that Yumi's ability to stack stones in teetering towers thirty high is a result of supernatural aid. In fact, it's the opposite; her incredible stacking abilities summon the spirits. She is just really, really good at stacking stones. In fact, her skill is the only thing that has grown in the almost two thousand years she's been imprisoned, so when she really lets loose she stacks stones higher than buildings.
• Chekhov's Gun: After the time spent at the carnival, Yumi draws a very simple (and not really good) picture showing her and Painter's hands. Near the end, Painter passes that picture to her through nightmare-Liyun, which allows Yumi to regain memories stolen by the machine.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe:
  • The nightmares are able to be shaped by a person's perception of them, but the difficulty in doing this makes it necessary to actualize that perception in the form of a painting.
  • This is how Painter was able to resurrect Yumi, at the end.
• Corrupted Contingency: After his adventures on Lumar, or possibly after (Cosmere spoilers!) discovering what Taravangian did to his memories, Hoid put protections on himself against having his mind or soul interfered with. When he arrived on Komashi and the Machine tried to seize his soul, his protections activated... and froze him into a kind of stasis for the next three years, until Yumi defeated the Machine. He notes that this was not what he'd intended to happen, and presumably the protections will be further refined.
• Cosmic Horror Story: In Komashi's ancient history, a group of scholars devised a machine to summon the spirits of the world. A syntax error resulted in almost the entirety of the human population of the planet having their souls ripped out and turned into a black miasma that covered the entire planet and blocked out the sun, which proceeded to then keep them in a state of perpetual catatonia, after which the Shroud produced living nightmares made from the husks of those souls that would go on to besiege the survivors of the human race for two millennia. And all of that pales in comparison to the fourteen highly gifted individuals it trapped in a Lotus-Eater Machine so it can use them to harvest the remaining souls left on the planet, done so by living out an illusion of the same day crafted by the Shroud over and over again for eternity. If one is unfamiliar with the Cosmere it would likely seem like reality up and collapsed.
• Emotion Eater: The nightmares seem to gain sustenance from the fears of humans. This is because they are themselves former humans and absorbing the raw emotions of living people (specifically fear, being the most primal) help them regain some sense of their humanity.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": It's traditional to refer to painters by title. Obviously, the painters can't refer to each other this way, but Painter has internalized it to the point that he even thinks of himself this way.
• Fantastical Social Services: Nightmare painters are essentially a state-run extermination service. The pests just happen to be living nightmares that creep into the city from the eldritch darkness beyond, and the extermination involves painting them into harmless forms before they can eat enough fear to assume a much more dangerous physical form.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Hoid explains that Painter's world uses a different calendar to the people he is telling the story to. He doesn't add such an explanation when they get to Yumi's world, because they have the same time measurements (though the names are different), because they're the same world.
  • It's mentioned that Yumi averages twelve spirits called each session (compared to ten for most others), but she manages thirty-seven the first day we see her. Yes that was explicitly exceptional even for her, but it's still a huge jump. Because she's been living this same day over and over for almost two thousand years, her skill has grown to incalculable levels, so from her perspective her output suddenly jumped by a huge amount overnight.
  • The drama Yumi watches seemingly ends with the main couple being forced apart forever, but Yumi later hears that there was a secret bonus episode where the couple does get their happily ever after. This leads to the main story ending with Yumi dying to save Painter's society and let the souls of Torio rest, only for Painter to resurrect her in the epilogue.
  • Nikaro speculates that the swap might involve time travel, which Design categorically rules out because traveling into the past is impossible. However, she notes traveling into the future is obviously possible. It turns out this is exactly what Yumi has done by being stuck in an Amnesia Loop for centuries.
• "Freaky Friday" Flip: The plot's Inciting Incident, caused by Yumi freeing a spirit from the Father Machine. Unlike most examples, the flip isn't quite symmetrical, as Yumi's Investiture lets her subconsciously reshape Painter's body to match her self-image, so she doesn't have to pretend to be him. Also, only one body is conscious at a time. Its owner is forced to stay nearby as a ghost, intangible and Invisible to Normals, until their turn to control the other's body.
• Gender Bender: Yumi and Painter are confused because while he appears in her world as her, Yumi appears in his world as herself. Design explains that they're possessing each other's bodies, but Yumi's spirit is so strong that she instinctively rewrites his body to match hers when she's in residence. Design promises that everything should go back to normal once they're done. Probably.
• Gentle Giant: Tojin. While he is very big and seems obsessed with his muscles and exercise regime, in reality he is a good person, and a little shy.
• Ghostly Death Reveal: Referenced for laughs during one of Painter's stints as an invisible spirit. As a spren, Design can see spirits, so when she notices him, she drops a bowl of noodles and starts asking him how he died.
• God Is Dead: A normalcy for a book related to the Cosmere. In this case, the reason the planet is so screwed up is because the Shard Virtuosity committed suicide. Or at least, it seems like this is the reason. Design even says you normally don't see things like this except as a direct result of a dead god. But in the end, it was something entirely different, though perhaps Virtuosity could have done something if she had still been alive. It’s speculated that Virtuosity’s death might have something to do with a planet being visible through the shadows, but not much else.
• Gondor Calls for Aid: Akane and her friends manage to bring thirty-seven painters, about ten percent of all the painters in the city, to help Painter when he tells them an army of nightmares is coming. In a variant, no one is quite there because they want to help; most of them are there because they think it might be funny, or because they were bribed into coming with debts called in or favors promised. They're all rather annoyed when they realize Nikaro is involved, and they almost all leave pretty early on. Then the nightmares come.
• Gone Horribly Right: The machine was meant to stack stones to attract spirits and use them as power. However, it was incapable of distinguishing between human souls and spirits, and harvested the Investiture of the entire population of Torio, destroying the country and turning its people into nightmares. And then it continued stacking stones. Forever.
• Good with Numbers: Design only gives out discounts in prime numbers, and chose her form partly because it reminded her of a cosine.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Yumi's final battle against the father-machine. She knows that it is the machine's power that is sustaining the shroud and holding her soul in this world, and that if she defeats the machine she will pass on. But she goes ahead and does it anyway, to save Painter and his friends and all the innocents of Kilahito.
• Hugh Mann:
  • Design makes basically only the barest attempt to act human. Probably the only reason that it works is because the locals don't know about intelligent non-humans and see her as a benign Cloudcuckoolander, even when she directly tells them she isn't human.
    Hoid: She... did not do a good job acting human. I take no blame, as she repeatedly refused my counsel on the matter. At least her disguise was holding up.
  • Masaka, the creepy girl who wears lots of black and talks about how nightmares are cute, turns out to be a Horde pretending to be human. Painter chuckles and says that her turning out not to be human is the least surprising revelation.
• Human Disguise: Hoid used lightweaving to give Design some sort of three-dimensional disguise; apparently the specifics are complicated, but the short version is that it acts like she's made of flesh.
• I Work Alone: Painter insists on working alone rather than in a pair because he thinks he's a lonely dark hero who no one appreciates. Hoid lampshades that this mostly just means he's socially awkward and won't talk to his peers.
• Lemony Narrator: As with Tress of the Emerald Sea, it’s narrated by Hoid, so this is only to be expected. The story is sprinkled with narrative asides to the reader and jokes at the setting and characters’ expense, particularly Painter.
• Lonely Bachelor Pad: Nikaro's bachelor suite is part of his compensation as a nightmare painter, and he doesn't have much going on in his life besides work, soap operas, and the noodle shop.
• Male Gaze: Between Design's human form being very curvy and her not being very careful when she leans over, Painter spends a significant amount of time trying very hard to look her in the face.
  Hoid: Granted, he did overdo it—his eyes lingered on her the entire time she worked. But don't judge him too harshly. He was nineteen, and I'm a uniquely talented artist.
• Micro Dieting: Yumi's status as a yoki-hijo affords her a large variety of foods, but she's only allowed a few bites per meal, as everything has to be fed to her by attendants and her duties give her an absurdly tight schedule.
• Mistaken for Incest: Yumi introduces herself to Akane as Painter's sister... and then mentions how they took a bath together recently. It might be for the best that all that got buried under Yumi mistaking Akane for Painter's concubine. At the end of the story, when Yumi is saved, Painter has to explain that the girl he's suddenly kissing a lot is not his sister, but his "girlfriend from another city." Apparently, his friends still didn't believe it until his parents showed up and confirmed they didn't have a daughter.
• Ms. Fanservice: Design's body was made to specification by Hoid, combined with the fact that she doesn't really understand shame, so she doesn't know that she shouldn't let people stare at her.
  Design: Make me pretty so they'll be extra disturbed if my face ever unravels. And give me voluptuous curves, because they remind me of a graphed cosine. And also because boobs look fun.
• Nepotism: The Dreamwatch, allegedly the most elite nightmare painters, are actually a bunch of rich and powerful people's relatives who treat the job as a social club and steal the credit from the subordinates who do the actual work.
• No Endor Holocaust: The Shroud being dispelled exposed the living inhabitants of Komashi to the sun for the first time in centuries, and removed the hion lines they'd relied on to power their lives. While this probably should have caused a major catastrophe, Hoid's second epilogue reveals that the people were able to survive the change in conditions. They also managed to persuade some spirits to restore the hion lines, granting them enough power to keep civilization going.
• Non-Malicious Monster:
  • The nightmares are the ghosts of the dead, trapped by the Machine and unable to pass on. They feed on living humans in order to, just briefly, come closer to being human again. When the painters manage to paint them back into their original forms, they do nothing but collapse to the ground in relief.
  • Even the Machine itself isn't malicious. As the scholars say, it doesn't want anything. It's not intelligent. It has no more desire than a waterwheel. It's just stacking stones, collecting souls, and protecting itself. Nothing more and nothing less. According to Hoid, it is slightly more intelligent than the scholars believe (you can't shove that much Investiture into something and leave it completely mindless), but it's still not actively malicious. The only emotion it ever shows is when a yoki-hijo challenges it in stacking, and it begins to move faster in desperation.
• No Ontological Inertia: When Yumi steals all the spirits from the Machine, rendering it powerless, it promptly shuts down. Under normal circumstances, it could just be turned on again... except it's been running non-stop for almost two thousand years, so almost all of it has worn away and been replaced by Investiture. Without a constant power source, those parts disappear, and it's left a pile of scrap.
• Oh, My Gods!: Yumi’s people worship only the spirits and the yoki-hijo, and Painter’s world doesn’t even seem to have the concept of religion, so for once this is averted in a Cosmere setting… which makes it all the more notable when Design and Masaka swear by “Storms”.
• Parenthetical Swearing: The narration notes early on that Painter and Yumi’s languages have no native form of profanity, and like some East Asian languages use specific forms of grammar to denote praise or disrespect. With those two elements in play and the narration attempting at Translation Convention by adding “highly” or “lowly” in parentheses next to certain words to note these grammar changes, this occasionally leads to humorous moments where a (lowly) will appear in the text where a curse word probably should be.
• Physical God: The yoki-hijo, officially, are considered spirits in human flesh, and their word is law. Their wardens get around the fact that it's forbidden to even contradict a yoki-hijo by being very good at passive-aggressive "suggesting" that obviously they would never do this thing or that thing. Design scans Yumi and discovers that the "god" part is closer to the truth than anyone thought; she has as much Investiture as an Elantrian. In fact, when the Machine killed everyone, the fourteen yoki-hijo just brought themselves back to life, refusing to be consumed. The Machine had to trap all of them in their own loops, forgetting the same day over and over, to keep them contained. When Yumi goes out into the shroud, she conquers the nightmares sent after her with barely a thought.
• Refusal of the Call: When the spirits offer Yumi a gift, she knows it will lead to adventure; she politely declines. Hoid mentions that while in many cultures, stories with spirits offering gifts are parables about danger, in Yumi's culture a spirit's gift is always positive; she declined because she genuinely thinks she doesn't deserve it and needs to do her duty. Instead, she offers the spirit her help, and gets drawn into (presumably) a different adventure.
• Sacrificed Basic Skill for Awesome Training: Exaggerated by Yumi, whose role as a yoki-hijo means her entire life is to be given to the spirits, and everything else is taken care of by her warden and attendants. This means she is inexperienced in tasks as simple as feeding and dressing herself, though she’s a quick learner and manages to become relatively self-sufficient during her time in Painter’s world.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Once Hoid is unfrozen he wants off Komashi as fast as possible. As nice as the planet is after the Shroud comes down he openly states he has no intention of ever visiting again.
• Serious Business: The preeminent art form on Torio — as well as the cornerstone of their spiritual practices and their economy — is stacking rocks. Having dedicated her entire life plus 1700 years to stacking rocks, Yumi is incredibly good at it. Hoid muses about the diversity of artistic expression in the Cosmere.
• She Is Not My Girlfriend: Design offhandedly refers to Yumi as Nikaro's girlfriend midway through the story, which the latter makes an awkward attempt to deny — this is, of course, at about the same point the two are starting to develop real romantic feelings for one another.
• Ship Tease: It's implied that Akane and Tojin have a thing for each other, though it's not focused on at all.
• Shower of Awkward: "Freaky Friday" Flip + Yumi’s regular routine involving a ritual bath = the two leads repeatedly having to bathe alongside one another. Being two teenagers with little-to-no experience with the opposite sex (Yumi mentions she’s never even been able to talk to a boy her age before), there’s a lot of awkwardness — and checking each other out — that goes on.
• Soul Power: Technology in Torio is powered by spirits from the earth, as they'll agree to transform into the requested item for a few years. Unbeknownst to Kilahito, hion technology is powered by all the spirits and souls trapped in the Father Machine.
• Supernaturally Delicious and Nutritious: The stable nightmare hungers for Yumi's incredible Investiture. According to Hoid, if it had succeeded in killing her it would have basically become a new yoki-hijo. This is why the Machine couldn't kill any of the yoki-hijo, because from its perspective there was no difference. But as Design points out, Yumi is so powerful that they should be running from her, and when she decides to stop being afraid she rips nightmares away from the Machine with no trouble whatsoever.
• Team Mom: Akane for her misfit group of painters. She sincerely cares about all of them, looks after them and basically adopts Yumi. Nikaro mentions that it's what she's always done.
• Tomato Surprise: The climax of the story reveals that Yumi and Nikaro haven’t been swapping bodies across different planets or time periods, as they suspected — both halves of the story take place on the same planet in the same time period, with Yumi’s half taking place in a Lotus-Eater Machine simulation created by the Father-Machine.
• Too Upset to Create: The general state of Nikaro's life. He's a phenomenally talented painter, but ever since he was rejected from the Dreamwatch and alienated his friends, he's avoided any creative art and sticks to painting nightmares into bamboo.
• Urban Fantasy: In a first for a novel set in The Cosmere, Painter's half of the story takes place in an urban city with modern-day conveniences like electricity and television... where the city is surrounded by The Night That Never Ends, most of said electricity is provided by neon Ley Lines that crisscross the planet, and a relatively common occupation is hunting down the nightmares that sneak into the city every night to feed on dreams.
• The Worm That Walks: Masaka is a Sleepless who came to the planet to get away from war elsewhere in the Cosmere. As such, her body is a swarm of insectoid "hordelings" that she's selectively bred to fit into a human shape, though she has to wear bulky clothing and makeup to hide the seams.
• What You Are in the Dark: Painter encounters a Nightmare fairly early on that's nearly stable. The adults are asleep, the child the Nightmare is feeding on is frightened to the point of voicelessness, and the narration points out how easy it would be for Painter to slip out without having been seen; in fact, that's what he's supposed to do, so he can alert the experts. Instead, he starts painting, driving it away and preventing a potential rampage. It's later revealed that this is why he was chosen to swap with Yumi. The spirits needed a hero, and they found one.
• Wutai: The setting(s) of the novel are heavily based on Asian culture, with the postscript explicitly noting that Painter’s world is inspired by modern Japan and Yumi’s by historical Korea. This causes it to stand out from the rest of The Cosmere, which generally (though not exclusively) leans towards Medieval European Fantasy.
• You Called Me "X"; It Must Be Serious: Throughout most of the story, Yumi refers to Nikaro by his profession (though she does indirectly refer to him by his name when with Akane and the others to keep up her cover as his sister). After Painter reveals the truth of how he lied to his friends, he begins to walk away to leave her alone. It's only when Yumi directly calls out to him by his actual name that he turns to face her. From this point onwards, Yumi frequently switches between calling him "Painter" and "Nikaro."
• Your Soul Is Mine!: A temporary, voluntary version of this is how technology on Yumi's world works. She calls up spirits and asks them to perform a task in exchange for witnessing her art. They transform into a pair of devices (repelling statues, a machine and the control device, etc) and stay that way for a few years. Eventually, the spirit gets bored and leaves, and the person needs to get a new one. The Machine, meanwhile, tricks the spirits into arriving with its technically precise but heartless stacking, then captures them to power itself. The first time it was turned on, it captured every soul in the city, starting with the humans, and soon killed most of the planet in order to keep itself going.

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