Paprika

by Yasutaka Tsutsui

  “But Shibamata had to go ahead with it, didn’t he. He was up to his neck in debt.”

  “That’s right.” Morita took the liberty of sitting on the sofa opposite Konakawa’s desk. “We discovered he’d been heavily in debt before the fire, but then had managed to pay everything off after the fire. That was when we took him in for questioning. Kumai had told Shibamata that if he went through with it, he would go to the police. So Shibamata had to kill him.”

  “Why didn’t we realize it at the time? We were still at the murder scene when the fire broke out.”

  Morita shook his head vigorously as if to deny Konakawa’s self-reproach. “We were fooled by the relationships in that house. All of us were. Anyway, everyone’s full of admiration for you. You were determined not to close the case. Of course, Yamaji and the others were over the moon that you’d handed them the credit. More than that, though, they thought it strange. They wanted to know how you managed to link the murder with a house fire in the vicinity. It certainly didn’t click with me at first, even when you said we should investigate Kumai.”

  “I saw it all in a dream,” Konakawa said with a sheepish smile. “Can you believe that?”

  Morita suddenly looked serious and nodded earnestly. “Yes. Yes! That definitely happens. I believe it. Then again, the fact that you were dreaming about it in the first place shows how determined you were to solve the case!” He seemed to know a little of the subject. “What sort of dream was it?”

  Konakawa hesitated. Should a senior police officer relate his dreams to a junior? He would surely be considered weak in the head if he did. But he decided to continue. “Well, it was a dream I had more than once. That murder scene in Hachioji. It would always be followed by a fire. When I was a boy, I started a small fire in a storeroom. I was only messing about. I thought the dreams were all about that. Then I suddenly remembered there’d been a fire nearby after the murder.”

  “What? It was that simple?” Morita seemed inordinately impressed. “And have you always used dreams to solve cases?”

  “No. Not at all. The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind. But something made me think that way … You know …” Konakawa blushed uncharacteristically. He was lost for words.

  “Well, well.” Morita remained full of admiration. “If only all the senior officers had your enthusiasm for solving cases.” He must have been referring to the ones who wasted their time on petty politics.

  As soon as Morita had left the room, Konakawa called Tatsuo Noda. He hadn’t given his friend a single progress report since Paprika had started treating him. He began by apologizing for that.

  “You sound so well,” was Noda’s riposte. “It’s just like the old you.”

  “Well, thanks to you, I’m feeling much better now. And I’m sleeping better at night.”

  “Has the treatment finished?”

  “Not yet.”

  “And what sort of treatment is she giving you?” Noda said in a tone that failed to conceal his curiosity.

  Noda had only just arrived at work himself. So many times he’d wanted to call his friend, to find out how the sessions with Paprika were going. But he’d resisted each time, fearing that his affections for Paprika would be all too transparent. As would the twinge of jealousy he felt toward Konakawa.

  “Well, nothing special,” said Konakawa, reluctant to spell it out.

  Damn, thought Noda. It’s definitely something special. “Well, as long as you’re enjoying it,” he said, suppressing his feeling of envy.

  “I am. I feel better each time,” Konakawa said with deliberate vagueness, as if he’d seen right through Noda’s pretense.

  “Paprika’s a wonderful woman, don’t you think?” Noda fished.

  “Yes, she is.”

  “A really mysterious woman. Who do you think she is, really?”

  “What? Don’t you know?” Konakawa’s voice leapt with surprise. “She’s Atsuko Chiba. You know, the scientist who invented those PT devices along with that other one, Kosaku Tokita. At the Institute for Psychiatric Research. They’ve been shortlisted for the Nobel Prize because of it.”

  Noda groaned silently. “Her? Atsuko Chiba? But Shima didn’t say anything … I did know her surname was Chiba, but … How did you find out? Did you ask her?”

  “I didn’t have to. It was obvious.”

  “Well, you’re the detective, I suppose. But don’t you think she’s a bit young for someone in that position?”

  “Do you think a top psychotherapist would really look her age? She’s actually twenty-nine. I’ve checked out her background. I’ve even seen her photograph. There’s no doubt about it. Paprika is Atsuko Chiba.”

  It came as no great shock to Noda – he’d half-imagined this very scenario. So how does that affect things, he wondered. Had it destroyed the fairy tale he held in his heart? No, it had not. Fairy tales belonged to the realm of fantasy. The Paprika who was not Atsuko Chiba, or anyone else, the Paprika with the independent personality, still lived inside Tatsuo Noda.

  “Sorry to shatter your dreams,” said Konakawa, noting Noda’s silence.

  “Ha! Don’t be silly,” Noda replied, even then letting out a sigh. “So I suppose she was even disguising her voice? When I called her apartment, another woman answered, an older woman. But there was never any sign that anyone else lived there. I did find that strange.”

  “Actually, there’s something I wanted to ask you,” Konakawa said in a tone of concern. “Did she tell you about any trouble she was involved in?”

  “Trouble? Has something happened? Well, now that you mention it, she once had a black eye. It looked as if someone had punched her. I thought she’d been attacked by a patient …” Noda thought back and remembered how it had seemed, at times, that Paprika wanted to ask something of him, or how, at other times, she’d been strangely withdrawn.

  Relenting under Noda’s insistence, Konakawa related an episode from his treatment. “… And this Vice President actually appeared in my dream. His face, at least. Of course, I didn’t recognize him. At first I thought it was because Paprika was somehow concerned about him.”

  “What, you mean Paprika’s thoughts appeared in your dream as images? Even while she was investigating your dream? That never happened to me.”

  “So you’re saying it’s unnatural?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Anyway, it bothered me, so I got her to print out an image of the man’s face. And then I had this Inui fellow checked out.” Konakawa’s reticence of just a week earlier was gone. Now, in complete contrast, he was talkative and full of enthusiasm. “He’s the Director of the Inui Clinic, a private psychiatric hospital not far from where Paprika lives. I was in the area the other day, so I drove up to it. It’s quite an impressive building, although it faces a back street. What amazed me was that I’d seen the building in my dream at Paprika’s. In my dream it was an embassy, but anyway, the image of that building somehow found its way into my dream. One thing I can say for sure is that I’ve never been down that back street. But Paprika didn’t recognize the embassy as Inui’s clinic when she was investigating my dream.”

  “So it’s even less likely that her thoughts were feeding into your dream?”

  “Exactly. I think something’s going on at that Institute. Don’t you think something’s troubling her?”

  “Now you mention it, yes, I do.”

  “I’ve got an appointment with her tonight. I’ll think I’ll just ask her straight.”

  “I wonder,” Noda groaned. “If it were something she could explain just like that, wouldn’t she have asked our advice about it long ago?”

  “You mean she never asked your advice about it?”

  “I got the feeling she wanted to, but was of two minds. Sometimes she seemed to be hiding something. That’s why I was concerned.”

  “Well, if she didn’t ask you about it, she certainly wouldn’t mention it to a police officer. I reckon it’s something that can’t be made public.”

&nbs
p; “That reminds me, actually. When I told her what you did for a living, she nearly jumped out of her skin. I think she wanted to refuse. You see, it’s actually illegal to use PT devices for dream analysis outside the Institute.”

  “Well, look at her. She’s a famous scientist, shortlisted for the Nobel Prize. It stands to reason she’ll have her fair share of rivals setting traps for her, people trying to bring her down. I could get someone to check out the Institute, based on the idea that something funny’s going on there. But what if it turned out to be nothing? And we’ve gone in there with our size-ten boots and only made Paprika’s position worse?! No, I think it’s best to ask her about it first.”

  Noda was about to suggest approaching Torataro Shima, when a blue light lit up on his telephone console. His secretary was calling him.

  “Hold on a minute,” he said to Konakawa before switching the line. “Yes, what is it?”

  “Time to leave for Aoyama Seiki, sir.”

  “Ah. They want me to see their new product. But I don’t have to go, do I?”

  “You did give your word.”

  “So I did. Right. No problem.” Noda had his secretary organize the hired limousine, then switched back to Konakawa. “Are you working tonight?”

  “It’s nothing that won’t keep. Paprika takes priority.”

  Oh dear, thought Noda. He’s falling in love with her too. He might just as well have said “because I love her.”

  “I’m sure there’s something troubling her,” said Noda. “I think she needs our help. Shall we meet somewhere and talk about it?”

  “Good idea.”

  “How about nine o’clock at Radio Club? That’ll give you time to make your session afterward.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  Noda replaced the receiver. He could hardly wait to see Paprika. He convinced himself that he wasn’t fabricating a story out of nothing just to see her. No, he really was worried about her.

  The driver of the limousine was the same as before, when Noda had suffered his attack. He’d driven Noda twice since then, but even when there were no other passengers, he had never made any mention of the attack. He hadn’t even asked how Noda was. Noda saw him as someone he could trust implicitly.

  Immediately after turning onto the main road, they found themselves in heavy traffic. They edged their way through a set of lights, but were still hardly moving at all. On the opposite side of the central reservation, a moss-green Marginal was waiting for the lights to change. Noda gasped when he saw the passenger in the rear seat.

  Torataro Shima was sitting there, but he looked decidedly strange. His eyes were directed straight ahead in a hollow gaze and his body looked rigid. His right arm was raised diagonally as if in a Nazi salute.

  “Would you mind sounding your horn?” Noda said to the driver as he let down the window.

  “What – here?”

  “Yes! There’s someone I know in that car.”

  The driver sounded his horn. The cars were no more than three or four meters apart, yet Shima made no reaction at all.

  Noda gasped a second time when he saw the woman in the driver’s seat. “Paprika! It’s Paprika, isn’t it?!”

  It must have been Paprika when not disguised as Paprika – in other words, Atsuko Chiba. She wore a mature suit, her characteristic freckles were missing, her hairstyle was different, her image was not so much cute as elegant. But it was definitely Paprika; that air of intelligence, those dangerous good looks put it beyond doubt.

  Noda tried calling louder. “Paprika!”

  She didn’t seem to hear. It was as if she were thinking so deeply about something that she was oblivious to everything else. She certainly didn’t notice Noda. He found that more than strange. She was normally the kind of person who would notice things immediately.

  The traffic in the opposite lane started moving off. The Marginal headed straight through the lights.

  A little farther ahead, there was a gap in the central reservation. A U-turn looked possible. Noda’s limousine also started to move off.

  Noda leant toward the driver. “Hey! Would you follow that car?” he shouted. “That moss-green Marginal?”

  Part Two

  1

  In the fifteenth century, the post-Renaissance Catholic church fell into discord as the power of the Holy Roman Empire waned. This sparked vigorous reform movements all over Europe, producing a number of heretical beliefs. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, popular movements for religious reform had taken hold in German and Swiss lands. These eventually yielded the heresy known as Protestantism.

  One of the heretical sects that emerged at this time was the Saxon Order of Brethren. Its purpose was to claim for itself the cultural and ideological power that the Roman Catholic church had lost. It soon succumbed to intolerance, however, owing to an overzealous pursuit of dogma. It came to be seen as a heresy within a heresy, and suffered repeated acts of suppression. It survived nonetheless, albeit with very few followers, as a powerful and fanatically religious secret society supported by theologians, artists and natural scientists who went unrecognized by society at large in their respective eras.

  At the start of the twentieth century, an atmosphere of erotomania flooded the streets of Vienna. Freud’s sexual emancipation and the ideology of Gustav Wyneken’s Jugendkultur group mutually influenced each other, while homosexuality became fashionable among students and middle-class youth, mainly those of Jewish extraction. Scholars and artists, thus awakened, joined the Saxon Order to become its principal members, and the sect’s rituals assumed an overtone of homosexuality. At this point the sect changed its name to Sezession, mimicking an artistic movement that emerged in Munich at around the same time. In this guise, it could avoid the opprobrium of society and the church, which was particularly strict on homosexuality, and could thus continue its rituals unmolested.

  It was in his early thirties, while he was studying at the University of Vienna, that Seijiro Inui first came to know of the sect. More than ten years had passed since the end of the war, and old-fashioned homosexuality had been quietly revived in parts of the university. The comely Seijiro Inui had soon received his “baptism” from a professor in the Medical Faculty. He had then joined Sezession at the professor’s behest, and received true baptism as a religious sacrament.

  Sezession was characterized by ancient mystical beliefs based on Greek culture and thought. It conducted clandestine Hellenistic rites, in which respect it resembled the eastern Orthodox Church. However, its services were accompanied by suggestive music from the final phase of the romantic school, as well as the burning of incense mixed with narcotic substances.

  As many of the believers were controversialists, arguments over the interpretation of the Bible and articles of faith were permitted without restriction. Nevertheless, observance of the dogma decided at public meetings was enforced as a doctrine that carried absolute authority. Much debate was conducted over how the latest cultural and ideological trends should be incorporated in this doctrine. Since these included notions like Nietzsche’s Übermensch, the doctrine became divorced from real life and increasingly intolerant.

  The “establishment” was seen as the embodiment of evil in all epochs. As such, it was self-explanatory that the members of Sezession, considering themselves children of God and superior beings, were not accepted by the society around them. They therefore felt themselves entitled to use any means at their disposal to wage a holy war against the power and authority of the establishment. Any power or authority that was won back reverted to the sect, to be used in the service of its members. To them, even Jesus Christ was a comrade in arms who had fought against the establishment; he was even, occasionally, fêted as an object of homosexual love.

  For Seijiro Inui, being robbed of the Nobel Prize by another medical scholar was a kind of religious ordeal. Ever since that time, he’d vowed to defend scientific orthodoxy in observance of the doctrine, even if it meant transcending the ethics and morals of the
establishment. To him, this mission was in itself a holy war.

  During his time in Vienna, he had visited art museums all over Europe. There, he’d seen and admired numerous heretical or homoerotic paintings, like Reni’s Martyrdom of St Sebastian at the Musei Capitolini in Rome. Under their influence, he had developed a liking for beautiful youths with classical, Grecian looks. But after his return home, he was disappointed to find there were hardly any young men of that description in Japan.

  Inui never married. Sex and marriage with women were grudgingly permitted as a way of deceiving the establishment, but for members to be led astray by the amorous charms of a woman meant to betray the doctrine, even to betray themselves as children of God and superior beings. Inui had always treated women as commodities, outlets for carnal desires; he recognized no spirituality in them whatsoever.

  The only person he had ever loved was Morio Osanai, a young man he’d met when already on the cusp of middle age. It was thanks to Westernization, Inui thought, that such good looks had also started to appear in Japan. He rejoiced at his good fortune in living long enough to see that day, but at the same time, felt saddened by his own advancing age. In spite of that, Osanai happened to respect Inui, and eventually came to return his affection in kind. Inui had an unquenchable love for Osanai, this youth so imbued with classical Grecian beauty.

  Inui’s success in treating psychosomatic maladies came from an idea he’d garnered from the secret rituals of the sect, particularly its practice of mystic meditation using narcotic substances. Thus it was that, even when shortlisted for the Nobel Prize, he humbly attributed his achievements to Sezession. But those achievements were then hijacked by a British surgeon who had merely taken Inui’s methods and applied them to actual treatment. At this, Inui was transformed into a kind of ogre who devoted his life to cursing the establishment. He believed the true orthodoxy of psychiatry to lie in his methods alone, together with the classical theories of psychoanalysis on which they were founded. He fought against all other theories as heterodoxies, perversions. Needless to say, the present enemies in his holy war were Kosaku Tokita and Atsuko Chiba, who sought to use the PT devices they had developed solely for purposes of inhuman therapy.