Yumi and the Nightmare Painter

Yumi and the Nightmare Painter

Author	Brandon Sanderson
Illustrator	Aliya Chen
Cover artist	Aliya Chen
Language	English
Series	Cosmere
Genre	Fantasy
Published	July 1, 2023 (Dragonsteel; available to Kickstarters)
Publisher	Dragonsteel Entertainment
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (hardcover), audiobook, e-book
Pages	479 pp
ISBN	978-1-938570-37-7

Yumi and the Nightmare Painter is a fantasy novel written by American author Brandon Sanderson. It is part of the Cosmere fictional universe and the third book of Sanderson's "Secret Projects" Kickstarter campaign. It was exclusively released on July 1, 2023, by Dragonsteel Entertainment to Kickstarter backers.

Plot

The story takes place on planet Komashi, a world enshrouded by a dark mist. In Kilahito, a city that exists within the shroud, humans are kept warm and provided light by the hion lines, magenta or blue lines of concentrated power (Investiture, a common aspect in many of Sanderson’s works). The shroud regularly produces coherent nightmare creatures that can hurt or kill humans. Nikaro is a Painter, a group of people that use sumi-e painting to trap and disable the nightmares, thereby preventing them from hurting more people. He lives by himself, and tries not to interact with the other Painters.

Yumi is a yoki-hijo, a woman with the ability to call and bind spirits to do various tasks, attracting them by creating intricate stacks of rocks. She lives in Torio, which, unlike Kilahito, has far less technology and a lack of black mist. After Yumi is contacted by one of the spirits, who begs her to help them, she and Nikaro swap bodies when they go to sleep. When Nikaro is in her body, Yumi exists as a disembodied spirit and, unlike Torio’s residents, sees his actual body. When Yumi is in Nikaro's body, it changes shape to look like her, while Nikaro exists as a disembodied spirit (effectively preventing Nikaro’s few acquaintances from interacting with him). While trying to escape their situation, they are taught how to do the other person’s job while in their body, with Nikaro improving his rock stacking and Yumi befriending Nikaro’s estranged colleagues. Scholars arrive in Yumi’s village that have a machine that can summon spirits. Nikaro and Yumi suspect that there is something suspicious about these scholars, and they snoop around, searching for information.

Concurrently, Yumi attempts to repel a particularly dangerous “stable” nightmare, who grows in strength while avoiding detection from Nikaro’s colleagues. By conversing with Design, an educated “worldhopper” hailing from one of Sanderson’s other series, they gain further insight into their predicament, learning that the “Father Machine” under investigation earlier in the novel demonstrated artificially powerful stone stacking abilities, effectively holding the world’s spirits hostage and causing the vast majority of Torio’s residents to become nightmares in order to prevent them from stopping the Machine’s primary directive. At the time, Yumi’s intense connection to the spirits saved her from this fate. While Yumi and Nikaro assumed they were from different planets, further investigation reveals that Yumi is over 1,700 years old, and had (until the beginning of the story) instead repeated the same day for centuries, losing her memory each night to prevent her from freeing the spirits.

The Machine forces Yumi and Nikaro back into their original bodies, and Yumi back into the time loop. Nikaro confronts a nightmare that cared for Yumi in the past, and is able to encourage it to remind her of her situation. While Nikaro, able to reconnect with his colleagues, then successfully dispels the stable nightmare, Yumi confronts the Father Machine, stacking rocks so effectively she is able to drain it of its energy and free the nightmares to die in peace. While Yumi briefly dies, Painter is seized by inspiration and spiritual energy, and is able to bring her back to life through a masterpiece work of art.

Characters

Yumi

One of the story's main protagonists and heroine. She is a yoki-hijo, a woman with the ability to call and bind spirits. She is from a land where the ground burns to the touch and life can exist only near the geysers that provide the only source of water.

Nikaro / Painter

One of the story's main protagonists and hero. He is a nightmare painter, person with the ability to capture nightmares in a painting, rendering them harmless. He is from Kilahito, a city enveloped in the shroud of mist.

Hoid

The narrator of the story. For most of the story, he is a coat rack in Design's noodle shop.

Design

A cryptic (or liespren) that is bonded to Hoid. When Hoid becomes a coat rack, she decides to open up a noodle shop until he changes back to normal.

Publication

In spring 2022, Brandon Sanderson announced a Kickstarter campaign of "Secret Projects" to publish four secret and brand-new novels written during the COVID-19 pandemic. The campaign reached its goal within a day, and accumulated a total of $41.7 million. Yumi and the Nightmare Painter is the third of the Secret Projects and is part of Sanderson's fictional Cosmere universe. The novel is loosely inspired by the Hikaru no Go manga and is narrated by Hoid, a recurring character who has appeared in multiple Cosmere series novels.

Kickstarter campaign backers received premium editions of the novel published by Dragonsteel Entertainment on July 1, 2023 and a standard hardback edition published by Tor Books was officially released on October 3, 2023.