Sandman: The Dream Hunters
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Sandman: The Dream Hunters is a novella by Neil Gaiman, lavishly illustrated by Yoshitaka Amano of Final Fantasy fame. The story is tangential to the Sandman comic book series, and can be read without prior knowledge of the main sequence. The story deals with a love affair between a Buddhist priest and a fox spirit or kitsune. Gaiman initially claimed it was based on an old Japanese folk tale, drawn from Y. T. Ozaki's Old Japanese Fairy Tales and retooled to fit in the world of the Sandman, but no such tale is to be found in Ozaki's work, and Gaiman eventually admitted that the story was entirely of his own devising in the Foreword to The Sandman Endless Nights.
In fact, the story takes elements from Chinese folk tales, and can also be found in the collection Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio by Pu Songling.
[edit] Plot
A kitsune-fox and a tanuki-badger make a bet that whichever of them drives a Buddhist priest from his temple, they will claim it as their own. Both of them fail, and the badger flees in disgrace. The fox, however, has fallen in love with the monk, and in the form of an immensely beautiful woman, she apologizes to him for their behavior; he allows her to stay in the temple, provided that she does not cause him any more trouble.
Meanwhile, in a house in Kyoto, a rich onmyoji is consumed by a nameless fear, and consults three hags living at the edge of town. They give him instructions to alleviate this fear; the result is that the aforementioned monk will become trapped inside a dream, and his body will sleep continuously until it dies.
The fox overhears this from several demons employed by the onmyoji, and in an attempt to avert this, she travels to the Dreaming, where she meets Morpheus in the shape of an enormous black fox. (In the story, he is referred to as the King of All Night's Dreaming). He listens to her plight, and in the ensuing conversation, the fox formulates a plan to capture a baku, and use it to take the monk's place on the third night.
The plan is successful, but the monk is distraught at the fox's condition, and leaves his temple so that he may find the means of awakening her. He encounters Binzuru Harada, who offers him physical abuse for abandoning his temple, then instructs him him on how to find Morpheus. After a journey through the realm of dreams (during which he encounters what appear to be Japanese counterparts of Cain and Abel as seen in the Sandman comics), he arrives at the palace. A raven, who is the departed spirit of a poet, guides him through it, and he is granted an audience.
Morpheus tells him what the fox had done, and that if he rescues her, her efforts will have been in vain, but the monk insists, and goes to meet the fox, where she is trapped inside a mirror in her human form. Initially she is reluctant, but again he insists. The narrative then gives an ambiguous statement on whether they then give formal farewells or make love (possibly Gaiman's way of implying that there are contradictory versions of the story, giving it an extra layer of authenticity), and then he takes her place, giving her the advice, "Seek not revenge, but the Buddha." The fox informs Morpheus of this advice, then tells him she will seek the Buddha after seeking revenge. She awakens, and the monk dies several days later.
The fox tracks down the Onmyoji and seduces him in her human form, giving no indication of her true nature, but insists that he cannot touch her because of his affluent position and power. Maddened with lust, he burns down his house and that of the hags, killing them and his family and servants, and meets with the fox. She cajoles him into disrobing, then reverts to her true form and bites out one of his eyes, leaving him with his madness.
In the Dreaming, Morpheus and the raven ponder the events and their significance; Morpheus is satisfied that events played out as they should have, and that everyone involved learned an important lesson, particularly the monk. The narration ends by saying that since then, some people have had dreams of the monk and the fox (in either of her forms) walking through a field together.
