Hiruko is a Baku, a kind of creature that eats bad dreams. He lives in the Silver Star Teahouse, and the owner believes that Hiruko is her brother in a new form. But is she right?
This volume contains six new dreams that Hiruko must plumb the depths of to find out what makes them repeatedly show up in the minds of the dreamers. In the first story, a young boy missing his sister has also lost a chunk of his memory. All he can dream of is a map with an X. He hurries to the X, but always wakes up before reaching it. In his dream, he reaches the area of the map with the X, but does he want to remember what he finds out while he's there?
The second nightmare is of a man who reads captions for motion picture shows from America. He dreams of seeing all the syllables of language as lighted lamps, and when they go out, one by one, he can no longer say those syllables. But will Hiruko's cure for the nightmare be worse than the disease?
The third story, split into two parts, is of an aristocratic girl who fell in love with a commoner boy servant in her family. When her family lost their fortune, she was to be given in marriage to another family to repair her family's fortune. but she wanted only to marry Hiyama, and they ran away together, but were caught by her family. Now parted, she hoped to be able to at least dream about him, but in her dreams, they are separated by a high wall she cannot breach or climb over. Can they ever be reunited?
The fourth story has a famous novelist coming to Haruko for help in completing the story that everyone is reading. He sees the story in his dream as a spiral of words, but the ending has become fogged and muddied. But does he really want to see the end?
The fifth story involves a boy who was sent to military school. Unable to control his emotions, he was picked on. But when he put on a Noh mask in his dream, from that day on, his face never changed from his neutral expression. But now he realizes that he can't make any emotion on his face at all. It's like it is frozen in place. Can Haruko save him from what he has done, or is the damage too deep to cure?
In the last story, Mizuki Asahina, the owner of the teahouse, gives us a look into her feelings and memories as she cleans the rooms of her two lodgers.
Another interesting look at the dreams and nightmares of people. The stories make you realize that dreams and nightmares aren't something static, but arise on their own from deeper problems with the dreamer, and are just a symptom of the malaise deep within. Oftentimes they conceal unpleasant truths that the dreamer doesn't want to deal with in his or her waking life.
And sometimes the person can't deal with the problem, so they bury it so deeply they forget in their waking life what it means, But like a current from the deep, the dreams will carry it up and make them confront what it is they turned their face from in their dreams in the dark of night.
Some of the stories are quite eerie and creepy, but most aren't scary. However, once you read these volumes, you will never quite forget them, or the dreams and nightmares of the characters who had them. This series will stick out in your mind once you start reading, and you won't be able to stop. At least, I wasn't able to. Highly recommended.
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