Paprika (10 page)

Torao moved to a corner of the room to make the call. After giving directions to the house, he returned to his father. “It was a woman who answered. She said she’d arrange it right away.”

“
Arrange it right away
”?! So it couldn’t have been Paprika who’d answered the phone – could it? And did that mean the apartment wasn’t Paprika’s either? Noda’s chest heaved violently as he considered the implications.

The chauffeur left the room, causing Noda to raise his voice once more. “Pay the … driver … pay the driver …”

“What’s that? The driver? He’s already gone, dear. Don’t worry. The company always pays!”

“No … To … keep him … quiet …”

“I understand. Leave it to me,” said Torao, following the driver out.

Paprika’s taxi pulled up an hour later. Noda’s attack had already subsided.

10

Noda was standing alone on a deserted country road. He seemed very familiar with his surroundings; it must have been a scene from his childhood home in the country. From the far end of the road, someone was riding toward him on a red bicycle. Noda began to feel anxious. Before Noda could deny the existence of the red bicycle or the person riding on it, Paprika entered his dream.

“Who is it?” she asked.

“Don’t you know, Mari?” Noda replied in a boy’s voice. “It’s Sukenobu!”

Noda seemed to have mistaken Paprika for his childhood sweetheart Mari.

The person on the bike certainly looked like Sukenobu, as had the old literature teacher in the previous dream. But it couldn’t have been Sukenobu riding toward Noda on that country road. He was merely a mask, a substitute for one of Noda’s boyhood friends. One that Mari must also have known well.

“No, it’s not Sukenobu!” Paprika said in the voice of a child. Noda started to feel agitated. “Look closer!” Paprika shouted, but it was too late. Noda had already changed the setting of his dream.

He had entered his final REM sleep in the morning hours. Paprika had sat with him all night trying to unravel the darkest secrets of his psyche.

When the call from the Noda household came through, Atsuko had only just returned from the Institute. She was tired, but agreed to go to Noda’s house right away. Of course, she needed time to change into Paprika; she had to alter her hairstyle, change her makeup, and, most troublesome of all, attach freckles under her eyes. They had to be positioned one by one with tweezers, stuck fast to ensure they wouldn’t come off when she washed her face. These changes altered her appearance completely and made her look younger. At the same time, they gave Atsuko an opportunity to prepare herself mentally for the transformation into Paprika.

Atsuko had to be careful when leaving the apartment building. Ever since the press conference, a number of journalists had started to suspect that Paprika was in fact Atsuko Chiba. As a leading candidate for the Nobel Prize, Atsuko found herself caught in the media spotlight, though few suspected that she was still secretly working as a “dream detective.” Caution was essential, nonetheless, as Atsuko had no way of knowing who was watching her, or from where.

Now metamorphosed into Paprika, Atsuko had left the apartment building through the garage door. She couldn’t risk using her own car, so had decided to hail a taxi on the street.

On returning to the building later with Tatsuo Noda, she had come in through the back entrance using her security code and fingerprint. The caretaker who kept watch over the lobby knew Atsuko and had a good understanding of her relationship with Paprika. But if any newspaper journalists or media people had been lying in wait, they might even have inquired into the identity of Noda himself. That would certainly have been counterproductive.

After entering the apartment, Atsuko had first examined Noda, attached the gorgon to his head and waited for him to fall asleep. Then she’d programmed the PT devices to wake her later, and with that had entered a deep sleep. At five in the morning she’d been awoken by a barely detectable, momentary charge of static electricity. She had immediately put the collector on her head and entered Noda’s dream.

Now Noda was walking along a beach at night. A bizarrely shaped speedboat was racing over the water.

“Get down, ******!”

Noda used some foreign-sounding name to call out to Paprika, who had just entered his dream and was holding his hand. Desperate to avoid being spotted by the speedboat, he then threw himself onto the sand.

“What
is
that?!” asked Paprika.

“*****!” Noda replied with a word that even he didn’t understand.

In her half-sleeping, half-waking state, Paprika was unable to distinguish the field of vision in Noda’s dream from that on the monitor screen she was watching. In both, Noda seemed to equate her with his childhood friend Mari, now transformed into an adult, a preposterously tall foreign actress wearing a wetsuit. Paprika was not in the habit of watching such things, but even she recognized it as a scene from a Bond film.

Now the two set off on an insanely fantastic adventure. First they jumped into a river that continued from the sea, then headed off upstream, sometimes gliding underwater, sometimes bobbing on the surface. Something that could have been a boat, or possibly a dragon, started to approach them from further upstream. It projected beams of light from searchlights resembling eyeballs, and spewed flames from its mouth. Noda and Paprika had no choice but to return fire with their submachine guns.

“What ridiculous dreams you have!”

Appalled at the realization that she’d been completely transformed into Ursula Andress, Paprika turned her attention to Noda’s thought patterns. He was enjoying this dream.

Next, Namba, the character whose death had been mourned in Noda’s earlier dream, thrust his upper torso from the head of the boat-beast and started firing wildly at them with his own submachine gun. Namba was Noda’s junior, the maverick Manager of the Development Office; if anything, Noda should have been protecting him. But now they were engaged in a battle that felt more like a war game. Noda showed not the slightest concern that he might kill Namba, nor any fear that he could himself be killed. Perhaps Noda enjoyed having arguments with Namba.

“What film was this?” asked Paprika.

Paprika’s question made Noda vaguely aware that it was only a dream. He started acting absurdly and yelling incomprehensible phrases as he crawled out of the river.

They stood on the bank of a small river next to a broad road. Beyond the river, farm fields stretched endlessly toward a range of mountains in the distance. A small number of rustic shops lined the road. The pair were standing behind one of them, an old tobacco store. Noda seemed to feel a strong anxiety about being there. Paprika followed him around to the front of the tobacco store, where there was a bus-stop sign.

“You used to catch the bus from here, didn’t you,” said Paprika. To Noda, she now appeared as the pretty, freckled Paprika.

“Yes. The bus to … junior high school …”

“In that case …” In her half-sleeping state, even Paprika had difficulty finding the right words.

Paprika wanted to go back behind the old tobacco store, as Noda seemed to have some kind of complex about it. But by now he’d already arrived in his old junior high classroom, the same one as in the previous dream. Standing on the teacher’s podium this time was a thickset, bull-necked man. He appeared to be teaching math.

“Who’s that?” asked Paprika as she took her seat next to Noda.

“Segawa …”

As Paprika recalled, Segawa was a senior executive of one of Noda’s rivals. He had appeared as Noda’s bear-faced classmate in the previous dream.

“Wasn’t he … a bear?”

“No … That’s ******** …”

The faces of Noda’s classmates were blurred and difficult to tell apart.

Segawa now started spouting nonsense while madly scribbling numbers on the blackboard. “The sum of
n
non-negative integers that start from 1 in arithmetical progression haven’t seen you at the usual place recently, and therefore the sum of odd numbers is 1 + 2 + 3 + …… + n = misses you so badly! And this means that, Oh! Hello, Mr. President. Leaving so soon?”

The teacher must also have been someone else, hiding behind the mask of Segawa. Paprika decided to focus on Noda’s emotions toward Segawa.

She stood up and started shouting. “Don’t just sit there! Go and give him one!”

“Right!” Noda stood up.

On the podium, Segawa showed an expression of fear, whereupon his face changed. He now looked like an old man. The classroom had changed to what looked like a company meeting room.

The old man seemed to have been talking for some time. “… and that kind of thing just will not do. Office politics and other ******* simply cannot be tolerated. What if there were victims …”

“Who’s he?”

Now completely unaware that he was dreaming, Noda remained transfixed with terror at the sight of the old man.

“
QUI EST-IL?
” Paprika said again in her best schoolgirl French.

“
IL EST …
” Noda started, but his schoolboy French failed him. Instead, he just muttered, “But he’s dead … he’s dead …”

According to Noda’s
signifiant
, the old man who was so sternly criticizing office politics was the former President of his company.

“And, CUT!” a voice suddenly called. The meeting was being filmed as a scene in a movie. A man unknown to Paprika was the director. The cameraman was Namba. The male actors in the meeting room, their faces unclear, all now relaxed and came out of character. The room was filled with commotion and chatter. The set was a lavish banqueting room that could have been a scene from a film by Visconti, say. Judging by the scarcity of women and the way the guests were dressed, it was obviously a company party.

Baseball cap, sunglasses, mustache. He was every bit a film director, a stereotypical caricature of a film director. But he lacked the comical touch of parody. Paprika intuitively felt that this was a “shadow,” one of Jung’s archetypes. It was without a doubt the “potential self” of Noda, as the person who was having the dream. The film director must have been Noda himself; he had probably dreamt of being a film director when he was a boy.

“Did you want to be a film director?” asked Paprika, hoping to confirm her theory. The viewpoint of the dream instantly changed. Now it was seen through the director’s eyes. Noda, the director, yelled at Paprika.

“Come on, it’s ********! Ready! And—”

But before he could say “Action,” Paprika yelled back at him. “Who’s the cameraman?!” It could not have been Namba.

This appeared to come as a shock. Just as he was mouthing “*********,” Noda woke up. Paprika may have failed as a dream detective, but felt instinctively that she’d come close to the heart of the matter.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

Noda was lying on his side and staring vacantly at Paprika.

“What do you want to do? Can you get back to sleep?” she asked.

“Ah, Paprika,” Noda said in unconcealed admiration. “You appeared in my dream, didn’t you. That was wonderful. Just wonderful.”

It’s therapy
, thought Paprika.
You’re not supposed to enjoy it
. “Well, all right. You just stay as you are and we’ll have a look at it, OK?”

“OK.” Noda’s speech was unclear, as if he were still in his dream.

Paprika decided to go through the dream strictly according to theory. “You were the director, weren’t you.”

Noda looked embarrassed. “Well, it was nothing really. Just a childhood ambition – we all have them!”

Paprika decided not to mention Namba, but skipped back from the still picture on the screen to the previous scene. “This first President, did he value you highly?”

“Well … yes, I suppose he did. It must be about six years since he died. But you know, he wasn’t really the type to gather all the employees and lecture them like that …”

“You respected him?”

“Well, yes. I wish I could have learnt a lot more from him. He despised internal politics, and quite rightly so.”

“Aah. The Wise Old Man.”

“Pardon?”

“One of Jung’s archetypes. The Wise Old Man. An old man in a dream is someone who teaches us how to act appropriately. It’s supposed to be a personification of the unconscious wisdom inside us.”

“So he’s telling me that internal politics aren’t good?”

“No, it’s something else. He mentioned victims, didn’t he?”

“That’s right.” Noda’s expression changed to a grimace as he tried to remember something. “But I don’t understand what he meant.”

Back-skip. “What about Segawa’s nonsensical math lesson?”

“Yes. I met Segawa last night, at the party.” Noda laughed. “A residue of my day, I suppose?”

“Could be, but why math?”

“Well, he is a very calculating individual …”

“Does he look like your old maths teacher?”

“No.”