Yumi and the Nightmare Painter(127)
To this day, no one on the planet knows what Yumi actually is. They think of her as the eccentric cook of the best noodle place in town—the woman with the odd accent who can stack a hundred bowls on top of one another, with silverware balanced on each tier.
That should cover it.
Oh. Except the kiss.
That first kiss, outside the noodle shop, bathed in sunlight. Lips together, sharing a deeper warmth, her hands to his face, his arms pulling her tight—as if to never let go. Pressed so close their very souls seemed to mix. And in the case of these two, those souls did at least mash together with a blast of abiding warmth.
That said, it wasn’t a very good kiss.
Considering the limited experience of the ones responsible, that won’t surprise you. Yet for two people whose only previous brushes with romance involved some particularly aspirational daydreams, it worked well enough.
Plus, here’s the thing. A kiss doesn’t need to be good to be valuable. It doesn’t serve any real purpose. It’s valued solely because of the person you share it with.
Things only have the value we give to them. And likewise, actions can be worth whatever we decide them to be worth.
And so, to these two, that kiss was priceless.
THE END
Postscript
This is my personal favorite of the Secret Projects. I don’t normally pick favorites among my books, so that’s an unusual statement for me to make. However, this book in particular felt like a special gift to my wife, who is often encouraging me to feature more romance in my novels.
This one also has some fairly personal inspirations to me as well—indeed, ones you might not expect. For example, the biggest inspiration is a video game.
One of my favorite video games of all time is Final Fantasy X, directed by Yoshinori Kitase, which hit me just at the very right time in my life—I love the story of that game. One of the things that has stuck with me all these years since playing it is how the two main characters in it have fantastical jobs. (One plays a cool fantasy sport, while the other’s job is to lay spirits of the dead to rest.) It’s not something we see enough in fantasy—people with jobs that are suited to the specific style of worldbuilding done in the story.
For years, I’ve wanted to write a book focusing on the everyday duties of people who had a job in a fantasy world. A job that—to them—was normal, but which would seem strange to us as readers. This idea stewed in the back of my mind for years, as I looked for the right place to explore it.
The second inspiration actually came from my friend, and editorial VP, Peter Ahlstrom. I don’t read a lot of manga, but he loves it. For years before I hired him, he was involved in the fan translation (then eventually, the professional translation) community for manga. During our time just after college, he was involved in a fan community working on a manga called Hikaru no Go, by Yumi Hotta, with art by Takeshi Obata.
I read that out of solidarity for Peter—and found that I really liked it. That manga focuses on a ghostly master who teaches a young new player to play the game Go. The dynamic is fun because the master, who is haunting the young man, can’t play the game—because he has no physical body. But he loves it. The young man doesn’t really care for Go at first, but through the coaching of the master, comes to love it too.
From this I took the idea of two people from different walks of life who had to teach each other to do their fantastical jobs. I loved this dynamic—I imagined their frustration at not being able to do the job right, and instead needing to teach someone else to do it well. Two people who need to trade places and learn from one another, not just when it comes to their jobs, but in their lives as well.
This relationship really kicked the story off for me, and I spent a great deal of time planning their romance. I also have a vague memory of a story I read in college about two people who share a bunk on a space station—where room is tight, so people can’t have their own sleeping space. But they never see each other, because they work opposite shifts by design, each leaving notes for the other. They fall in love just through the notes they leave. This idea of people who develop a romance unconventionally was extremely appealing to me.
Because two of my influences were Japanese in origin, I decided to lean into this, basing Yumi’s culture on historical Korea and Painter’s on a more modern Japan. I leaned into some tropes (like the hot spring) from manga and anime—and this also dovetailed nicely into the “trade places” concept I’d been considering. Some excellent anime (Your Name by Makoto Shinkai being the standout in my opinion) uses this idea—that of two people needing to live one another’s lives.
That said, one thing that was important to me in this story was interaction. Your Name, and that story I can’t remember, both depend on people growing fond of one another in absence—and while that’s a neat dynamic, I wanted something different. I wanted plenty of interaction. Indeed, I wanted to isolate them from other people, and focus the two inwardly, as they grew together. This romantic goal, again inspired by things my wife has said about stories she loves, is what drove me to write this story in my free time, as a gift for her.
One we’re both pleased that you now get to share.
Brandon Sanderson
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brandon Sanderson grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska. He lives in Utah with his wife and children and teaches creative writing at Brigham Young University. In addition to completing Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time, he is the author of such bestsellers as the Mistborn saga, Warbreaker? the Stormlight Archive series beginning with The Way of Kings, The Rithmatist, the Skyward series, the Reckoners series beginning with Steelheart, and the Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians series. He won the Hugo Award for The Emperor’s Soul, a novella set in the world of his acclaimed first novel? Elantris. For behind-the-scenes information on all his books, visit brandonsanderson.com.