Places
The Silver Star Tea House (銀星館, Ginseikan?)
- The main setting of the manga where the majority of the chapters start off. It is owned by Mizuki and was given to her and Azusa as a gift from their father after their mother had died. Not many come to have tea, which was its original purpose; people are much more interested in seeing the baku that's inside.
- There are two floors to the tea house that appear in the manga: the first floor is where Hiruko meets his clientele, and where Mizuki serves tea or coffee to them regardless of whether they ask for it or not; the second floor contains four rooms, three of which are occupied by Hiruko, Mizuki, and Hifumi a piece, and the fourth being Azusa's old room, uninhabited and reserved for his return. Mizuki makes a point to clean the entire tea house daily.
Nightmares
- Eaten by Hiruko; the reason why the Silver Star Tea House is visited by customers. With each customer comes a new nightmare, each very different than the last, but all distressing to the customer and usually rather disturbing. Hiruko takes customers and himself into their nightmares with the help of his cane, Formalin, always using the phrase "Sleep now... Leave this world behind". When Hiruko has finished resolving the customer's problem within the nightmare, he rewakens them with the phrase, "Time to wake up". The nightmare's contents are sucked into Formalin's orb where they are stored until Hiruko is ready to eat them. The taste of the nightmare depends on what the nightmare was about; blood stained nightmares being the most delicious. Hiruko describes the taste of the best nightmares as one that has the deep, strong, crimson flavor of blood.
The Delirium (妄鏡堂, Moukyoudou?)
- A bizarre place. Its rooms, when entered, cause a delusional person's fantasies to become reality. Whether it's a blessing or not depends on the person. The Delirium normally be found by those lost in their fantasies. The person within the room cannot leave unless they realize they are delusional, which rarely happens. Hiruko sometimes visits the Delirium, generally when he needs something fixed (like his briefcase or cane, both of which have at some point in the manga been accidentally destroyed by Hifumi). Kairi owns the mysterious building, being the "key" that opens the door to a room to allow a customer to enter. Apart from Kairi and Hiruko (and occasionally Hifumi) the only other person to come and go as they please is Shima. Often fantasies played out here do not end particularly well, such as the time when Kairi accidentally entered one of the rooms. Hiruko and Hifumi went in after him, but his enormous, insane fantasies eventually caused the room to explode (no one was hurt).
Read more about this topic: Yumekui Kenbun
Famous quotes containing the word places:
“People who live in quiet, remote places are apt to give good dinners. They are the oft-recurring excitement of an otherwise unemotional, dull existence. They linger, each of these dinners, in our palimpsest memories, each recorded clearly, so that it does not blot out the others.”
—M. E. W. Sherwood (18261903)
“All places are alike,
And every earth is fit for burial.”
—Christopher Marlowe (15641593)
“All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers.”
—Carson McCullers (19171967)