Yumi and the Nightmare Painter

Yumi and the Nightmare Painter (2023) is a fantasy novel by Brandon Sanderson. It is set in his fictional universe, the Cosmere, which serves as the setting for most of Sanderson’s science fiction and fantasy novels. The novel follows Yumi and Painter, two young people in entirely different worlds who find their lives suddenly linked as they begin to inhabit each other’s bodies. They put aside their differences to uncover the mysteries of their situation and save each other’s worlds. 

This study guide uses the 2023 Hachette UK printing.

Content Warning: The source text portrays emotional abuse.

Plot Summary

Nikaro, who goes by the name Painter, is a nightmare painter in Kilahito, a city enshrouded in permanent darkness and powered by pure energy called hion lines. His job involves capturing the semi-sapient creatures known as nightmares that infiltrate the city from the shroud, which is the name for the darkness surrounding the city. To catch the nightmares, he makes paintings, and the nightmares transform into the objects he paints.

Meanwhile, Yumi is a yoki-hijo—or a summoner of spirits—in Torio, a sunlit land with scorching ground where the plants float off the ground. She is able to summon and command spirits through the practice of stacking rocks. The spirits are then turned into objects that are essential for living and farming. Yumi feels trapped by her responsibilities and wishes to experience freedom. 

One day, she summons a record number of spirits but passes out from the strain. When she wakes up, she is contacted by a spirit who asks for her help. Around the same time, Painter confronts a stable, dangerous nightmare while protecting a child. Both Yumi and Painter feel extremely tired after their experiences and fall asleep. When they wake up, they find their lives intertwined: Painter wakes up in Yumi’s world, inhabiting her body, while Yumi exists in an incorporeal form, perceptible only to him. Unable to convince Liyun, Yumi’s chief attendant, of their predicament, Painter is forced to behave as Yumi. When they next sleep, they wake up in Painter’s world, but this time Yumi has her own physical form while Painter is a ghostly presence. The pair set themselves to discovering what is happening, but their relationship is strained due to their incessant bickering. However, their attraction to one another simmers beneath the surface. 

In Painter’s world, Yumi tries to warn others about the stable nightmare that Painter saw, but no one believes her. She befriends some of Painter’s colleagues, including a friendly young woman named Akane. Yumi also meets Design, a nonhuman, spirit-like creature who runs a noodle shop in Kilahito. Design can see Painter and tries to help the pair. 

Back in Yumi’s world, Painter tries and fails to learn how to stack stones like a yoki-hijo. Meanwhile, a group of scholars from Torio City (Torio’s capital) arrive and present a stone-stacking machine for summoning spirits. Yumi immediately dislikes it, but Painter is uncertain, believing it might have merits. They decide to investigate it, and Yumi discovers hion lines coming from it when it is powered on. The scholars also use a device that detects her presence, and Yumi and Painter flee, using a floating tree to fly. Later, the machine is activated, and Painter tries to compete against it by stacking stones. He manages to summon a spirit, but it gets sucked into the machine.

In Painter’s world, Akane tells Yumi about Painter’s past. He used to be exceptional at painting and expected to join the elite nightmare painter team, Dreamwatch, bringing Akane and her friends with him. However, he failed to get in but pretended that he had succeeded, lying to his friends for months. When Yumi talks to Painter about this, she understands the pressures he was under and decides that she wants to spend time with him nonetheless. They go on a date to a carnival, after which Yumi paints a picture of them holding hands. On their way home, the stable nightmare attacks, almost killing Yumi by consuming her spirit. Akane and one of her friends distract it for a moment, but they are almost killed. Painter arrives and fights off the nightmare, even though he is still incorporeal. 

Following this, in Yumi’s world, they figure out how Painter can stack rocks effectively by working off a template made by Yumi. Using this method, they summon another spirit, which begs them for help before it is captured by the machine. Back in Kilahito, Design tells them that Masaka, one of Akane’s friends, is actually an alien made up of multiple creatures. Masaka explains that she explored the planet and found several impenetrable barriers within the shroud. Using a map of Yumi’s land, Painter confirms that these impassable areas line up with the towns of her world, proving their worlds exist near each other.

In Torio, Yumi and Painter gather a group to destroy the machine, but the scholars are unfazed. They reveal that they know Painter is not actually Yumi and then show that Yumi’s world is an illusion made by the shroud. The people of the world all begin to change into nightmares, with Liyun turning into the stable nightmare Painter fought. Yumi also begins to fade, and then the scholars turn on another device that sends Painter back into his own body.

Yumi wakes up in Torio with no memory of Painter. Back in Kilahito, Painter decides to go to the last place he saw the stable nightmare, which he now knows is Liyun in nightmare form. He sees her again and convinces her not to attack by addressing her as a person. He gives her the painting Yumi made at the carnival, asking that she give it to Yumi. She warns him about an imminent nightmare attack on Kilahito before she leaves. Painter goes to Akane and her friends, asking for forgiveness and help. They agree to help him and enlist other nightmare painters for the battle.

In Torio, Liyun gives Yumi the painting, which helps her get her memory back. She decides to destroy the machine herself. Once she finds it, she uses a rock to break it, but the scholars emerge and explain that this is not the full machine. They say the real machine was powered on 17 centuries ago with the hope that it would create stable energy from the spirits. Instead, it used human souls as energy and consumed those, creating the shroud and the nightmares; then, it consumed the spirits, creating hion lines. The only people who were not permanently captured were the powerful yoki-hijo, but the machine trapped them in illusions where they relived the same day forever. However, Yumi’s skill at stacking stones had pulled a spirit away from the machine, and it used its temporary freedom to link Yumi and Painter, thereby preventing her memory from being wiped.

In Kilahito, Painter and the others fend off the nightmare attack for a time, but they begin to falter. Painter finally manages to stop the attack by turning the nightmares into their human forms—he paints them as he knew them from his time as Yumi. At the same time, Yumi uses a tree made from the shroud to fly to Torio City; here, she stops the machine by stacking stones beautifully, and this draws the spirits away from it. When the machine stops, the nightmares and the shroud disintegrate, but so does Yumi. Before she disappears, she makes a mental connection with Painter, and they share their love for each other.

Painter then begins to paint an image of Yumi floating on a tree, and the act of visualizing her makes her return in her form. Once she accepts that she deserves her own life and happiness, she materializes fully. Later, Design moves away from Kilahito and leaves her noodle shop to Painter and Yumi, who are together and in love.