Mermaid's Dream

Big-Eyes; Yuta, Mana	Dream #1 begins with Yuta and Mana are wandering about, looking for a mermaid, when they are attacked and killed by some mysterious creature. Yuta comes back to life and finds himself inside a house with an old man who claims that there is a horrible creature in the forest that cannot be killed. Yuta explains to the man that he is immortal, as the man saw him come back to life. Yuta then asks the old man if he discovered a woman with him when he found Yuta's body. The man replied that there was no one with Yuta when he found him, and that the creature, "Big Eyes," had probably captured her. The creature "Big Eyes" had taken the old man's eye forty years before, and the old man had sought to kill the beast ever since. The two set out to find out what happened to Mana... However, the creature is not all that it seems... and Mana befriends it. Mana is too innocent to know that she should be afraid of its ugliness. She discovers that the creature is actually a "lost soul" who has not completely turned into a monster, yet is also no longer truly a man.	Volume 1 takes place in modern Japan.
	"Big Eyes" is actually a "lost soul" who still retains some human emotions. However, he will occasionally suddenly become a savage creature, killing anything and everything he can, including humans, and eat them. "Big Eyes" can still talk, though only roughly, like a human. The old man says that the only way "Big Eyes" can be killed is by chopping of his head, because he healed from every other wound. Yuta realized that "Big Eyes" was probably a "lost soul." "Big Eyes" still has a few human fingers, and other human aspects, not fully a "lost soul" or an immortal or a human. He is tortured by the monstrous acts he sometimes commits, and by his hideous form.
Volumes 2 and 3 take place in the Medieval or "Civil War" period of Japan.	Yuta says, in the medieval stories ("Dream" #2 and #3), that, "I've been alive some two hundred and ten years." This is three hundred years before the first story (Dream #1). Yuta speaks to a man who claims to just have eaten mermaid flesh, which he bought from a traveling salesman. Yuta is horrified, until the man says that he has a wound that has not healed, despite the flesh, and the man thought it was probably really only carp. Yuta goes to find this salesman to ask him about the "mermaid's flesh" and finds that the salesman has a a daughter who is able to heal immediately from any wound...	Natsume, Yuta
Natsume	Natsume, the salesman's daughter, was created by a monk, who resurrected her corpse through a technique known as "Hangon." The monk put the liver of a mermaid inside her body so that the resurrected corpse would not die again. Natsume came back to life, but she was cursed. She had the desire to kill cats and dogs and eat their livers, and even took the livers from men, while they were still alive, who had fallen in battle. Natsume's father capatalizes on his daughter's immortality by selling fake mermaid's flesh to foolish villagers. He also makes money by using a half-baked version of the Hangon technique to bring people's children back to life... but that life lasts only until he has moved on to the next village. She has been alive for decades with her father, and yet remained at the physical age of twelve. Natsume is a good person, but supposed to be dead, and many would like to return her to bones and ashes...

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