Dream Hunters (The Sandman)

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Multiboobage: The Mother (of the Sandman's Three-In-One) has several pairs of breasts extending down her torso. The narration compares her to a female pig or rat. It's about a tragic forbidden love, pain, revenge, and lessons learned. Everything that could make my heart flutter and constrict in all the right places. And even after a good night's sleep, I still can't shake this story out of my head - it was so sinfully whole and satisfying.

Prematurely Grey-Haired: The onmyōji once took a journey to China to learn mysticism. He gained that knowledge but also went gray early.Yes, it’s true that he wrote a prose story for the tenth anniversary of Sandman and yes it was illustrated by Yoshitaka Amano, but it was no Neil Gaiman adaptation of a Japanese fairy tale. It was an original story posing as an adaptation, with Gaiman himself providing the misdirection in the form of an unreliable Afterword in which he cites his (fabricated) sources. And, yes, I read the Afterword before reading the original book, because I’m one of those people who tend to read about things before they read the things themselves. I’ll read author’s notes and commentaries before I’ll read the actual text, more often than not. I’ve never been one to heed spoiler warnings. Gaiman does a convincing job of writing in a faux-translation style. His prose in The Dream Hunters is more direct, less full of digressions and figurative wordplay. It reads like a story adapted from a British retelling of a Japanese folktale. Which is, of course, exactly the point. So I will forgive myself and everyone else who fell for the ruse, because the master storyteller did what he does: told a masterful story. And the way of telling is just as important as what is told. It's a tale from the Realm of Dreams, which took place in ancient Japan, a monk who lived in a small temple must face the tests of seduction, deadly spells, and the threat of death. A green-eyed fox wanted to help him through the crisis, but things are complicated when spells and the Realm of Dreams are involved.

In The Dream Hunters, the lead characters are a young monk and a wily fox. First, the fox challenges a badger to a contest in which they will drive the young monk from the neighborhood. But the fox falls in love with the intelligent and discerning young monk. “And that,” writes Neil Gaiman, at the end of the first chapter, “was to be the cause of much misery in the time to come. Much misery, and heartbreak, and of a strange journey.”You may be aware of who is Neil Gaiman, the renowed British writer that got fame precisely with The Sandman comic book series, but also he has written several prose novels like American Gods, Stardust, Coraline, The Graveyard Book and The Ocean at the End of the Lane, just to mention some of the most popular ones. The writing was melodic and fairy-tale like, strange, brutal, unapologetic - very Gaiman, very lovely. The art was not too vibrant, reminescent of 17th/18th/19th century Japanese drawings but never close enough to lose the modern reader's attention. It also had some Art Noveau and Disney influence in places, which can sound contradictory and a royal mess, but the three tied together made for absolute perfection. Like most fables, the story begins with a wager between two jealous animals, a fox and a badger: which of them can drive a young monk from his solitary temple? The winner will make the temple into a new fox or badger home. But as the fox adopts the form of a woman to woo the monk from his hermitage, she falls in love with him. Meanwhile, in far away Kyoto, the wealthy Master of Yin-Yang, the onmyoji, is plagued by his fears and seeks tranquility in his command of sorcery. He learns of the monk and his inner peace; he dispatches demons to plague the monk in his dreams and eventually kill him to bring his peace to the onmyoji. The fox overhears the demons on their way to the monk and begins her struggle to save the man whom at first she so envied. While the artwork is lovely and complements the story, I’m detracting a star because I didn’t really get anything new from this version. The original novella is already beautifully illustrated by Yoshitaka Amano, and while Sandman was always at home in the graphic novel world, I find that the original format chosen for this particular story works better. Yet by the time of The Sandman: Endless Nights—an anthology project completed as the original series neared its fifteenth anniversary, and one that I’ll dig into next time—Gaiman had already flat-out said that The Dream Hunters was “a retelling of an old Japanese folktale [he] completely made up.” I must have read those words in 1993 or 1994, whenever I first sat down to read that anthology. But I ignored them, clearly, because until now I have always thought of The Dream Hunters as not-real-Gaiman- Sandman.