A dreamer sits by the grave of a deceased woman and loses all sense of time. Only when she turns into a white lily does he realise a hundred years have passed. Inspired by the surreal first story from Soseki Natsume’s collection of short stories Yume jūya (‘Ten Nights of Dreams’) from 1908, the composer and Holland Festival associate artist Ryuichi Sakamoto teamed up with director and visual artist Shiro Takatani to make a dreamlike opera. Taking inspiration from a Mugen Noh – traditional Japanese dance theatre with magical elements – Sakamoto explores the phenomenon of time and the relationship between humankind and nature. Against a dreamlike backdrop that seems to go on forever, the dancer Min Tanaka portrays ‘humanity’, and shō player Mayumi Miyata represents ‘nature’ through movement and sound/music. Sakamoto: ‘We live and we die. And after we die, our body becomes part of the next being. This is samsara itself, the life circle of life on earth. In dreams, those temporal structures are not linear. Everything is condensed’.