Paprika

by Yasutaka Tsutsui

  The akbaba came to attack again. Seeing the ghoulish bird descending diagonally from high above the crossing, a young couple on a date commented disinterestedly:

  “What’s that? A vulture?”

  “There’s a few. Been flying around awhile now.”

  “Gross.”

  Paprika escaped into a building. Inside the main entrance, to the right, were stairs leading down to the basement. She ran down the stairs and pushed open the heavy oak door. Paprika was relieved to feel the warm air and sense the soft, nostalgic smell of Radio Club.

  “My!” gushed Kuga, smiling radiantly and bowing. But then he read from Paprika’s expression that all was not well. “Is something the matter?” he asked, narrowing his eyes more than they were already.

  “H-help. Help me.” Paprika could barely speak.

  Keeping a steady eye on her, Jinnai emerged from behind the counter. “As I thought. There’s something going on outside, isn’t there.”

  There were no customers in the bar, but any person of keen perception could detect abnormal events going on aboveground, even from down here in the basement. Jinnai and Kuga supported Paprika’s weary body from both sides as they led her to a sofa in one of the booths. There, she started to explain the whole story.

  “A new device we developed for treating mental illness has turned out to have unexpected effects,” she said, virtually recumbent on the sofa.

  Jinnai sat opposite the sofa, looked Paprika in the eye, and nodded in response to her every word. He seemed to be showing her that he understood, or perhaps rewarding her for attempting to explain a complex tale in simple terms. Kuga sat at Paprika’s feet, closed his eyes and listened, a faint smile playing on his features. Perhaps her voice sounded like soothing music to him. Perhaps she was telling him his favorite story.

  “Dreams have started to merge with reality. But it’s not just that Inui’s dreams have begun to infiltrate reality. What we’re seeing now is the collective subconscious of everyone who’s been exposed to the side effects of the DC Mini.”

  “So you’re saying all these weird things were originally in someone’s dream but are now real beings, real things that have an impact on reality?” Jinnai asked once Paprika had finished her tale.

  “That’s what I’m saying.” Paprika had forgotten to mention something, and now made a point of emphasizing it. “To be killed by them means to actually die in reality. Please be careful. But by the same token, they can also be killed. The difference is that, when they die, their physical form also ceases to exist in reality.”

  Jinnai immediately stood and returned to his position behind the counter. “All right. We’ll have to fight them.”

  Kuga half-opened his eyes. He rarely opened them more than that anyway. “So they take their strength from dreams, do they?”

  “Yes.”

  “Right.” Kuga stood up. The look on his face seemed to suggest that his whole life had been leading to the decision he was now about to make. He went straight to the sofa in the next booth and lay down on it.

  “Oy, Kuga! What are you doing? This is no time for snoozing!”

  “I’m going to sleep first,” he said in a voice that was already sleepy, settled in a supine position and placed both hands over his midriff. “Then I’m going to fight these demons, using the power of the inner mind.”

  To Paprika’s amazement, Kuga had already understood that the boundary between dreams and reality no longer existed.

  The solid oak door was struck violently, as if something heavy had hit it from the other side. The sound of a living thing hitting the door was repeated a second and then a third time, accompanied by a vulgar cry of “Gwaa! Gwaa!” and the rough flapping of wings. A loud, high-pitched squawk seemed to come from the tip of the creature’s beak.

  “It’s an akbaba!” Paprika shouted, edging into a corner of the sofa. Jinnai gathered together anything that could be used as a weapon – cutlery, sharp-edged tableware – and emerged again from the counter holding a thin knife. Timing his movement to the repeated banging against the door, he wrenched the door open.

  A single akbaba whistled through the air, narrowly missing the top of the door frame. It flew to the back of the bar and turned near the ceiling.

  “Gwaa!”

  As the akbaba set its sights on Paprika and prepared to swoop down on her, the knife hurled by Jinnai sank deep into its right eye.

  “Gweeeeerghh!”

  The creature threw back its bald head at the end of its thin neck, then plummeted down to the table below, scattering black and white feathers everywhere. It writhed violently for a moment, then vanished.

  Indifferent to the commotion as he slept on the sofa, Kuga was already starting to snore.

  21

  “Our enemies are phantoms from the realm of dreams.”

  Chief Superintendent Konakawa was appealing to the heads of the Riot Squad, the Traffic Riot Squad, the Special Task Force, the Mobile Patrol Force, and the Police Aviation Unit. They had all gathered at the Incident Headquarters hastily set up in the Metropolitan Police Department. The time had come to reveal the ghastly truth, but there was no need to explain all the details.

  “To overcome the enemy, the first thing we must have is willpower. We must remain steadfast to ourselves and impervious to the enemy’s tricks. Our weapons will destroy the enemy, but we have no room for complacency, for they will keep reappearing. This is a battle that will seem to have no end. But weak-heartedness is as much our enemy as they are. I strongly expect the most strenuous efforts from all units. That’s all. Now please go and mobilize your men.”

  22

  Kuga had learnt how to regulate his sleep as part of daily life; he could drop off anywhere. He now stood up, empowered by his dream, and set off to fight the phantoms.

  As if to symbolize his spiritual self-enhancement, Kuga climbed an imaginary staircase and reached the heavens above the metropolis. From the lofty heights of the starlit sky, he looked down at the nightlife district. It was in utter chaos. Having passed through the realm of dreams, Kuga had gained full control of his body and freedom of movement. Now he turned to confront the malignant spirits with a smile acquired by purifying the inside of his psyche. His body was several times bigger than normal.

  A busy intersection was awash with the wailing of police sirens. There, one-legged sciapods and glyros with legs growing out of their heads were terrorizing passersby, while the star-shaped demon Haborym harried drivers in their cars. Kuga made mystic signs with his fingers and chanted the Buddhist mantra of Acala the immovable one, the incantation of the fire realm. The phantoms hurled looks of bitter reproach at Kuga as they burned up and disappeared.

  The scene was like a pastel painting with uncertain depth or perspective, emphasizing the lack of boundaries between dream and reality. Light and dark that resembled neither night nor day alternated like the flickering of a film projector. Buildings swayed and roads undulated as if they were playing a game. Vehicles and people, phantoms, policemen, and police cars passed to and fro like colored shadows cast on the glass window of a projection room. Paprika and Jinnai were running to find a more certain reality, but they knew, in themselves, that they wouldn’t find it anywhere. How very unsettling! Perhaps that was what caused all kinds of uncertainty. Perhaps it was a world in which the winners would be those who could move freely across boundaries.

  Still wondering how he’d gotten hold of it, Jinnai was openly brandishing and continuously firing a pistol. That made him wonder if he had some alter ego, or a secret past. He stuck his knife into the neck of a glyro that was clinging to Paprika. He and she were heading toward her apartment together. There they hoped to find the path to a kind of reality.

  A large church appeared before them. They both knew it was a trap. But they would have to enter that trap and fight the subconscious of the abnormal, not to mention their own subconscious. They ran up the church steps without a moment’s hesitation. The entrance opened wide and contorted its
elf, as if to say “Enter!”

  “Swine!”

  Jinnai took aim at the entrance and fired several shots at it. The steps started frantically shaking up and down, from side to side. The church vanished, and before she knew it Paprika was running up the stairs to her apartment. Alone.

  Paprika was concerned over Osanai’s safety. There had been no sign of him, in dream or reality, since his appearance as that perversely beautiful samurai, shot by Ube’s gun. That tragic image of the dying young samurai had remained in her memory like a sashie illustration. She may even have started to feel love for him, coupled with a modicum of pity.

  She reached a landing where the floor sloped slightly. The floor indicator was distorted and seemed about to melt and flow away. But Paprika knew she was on the landing between the fifteenth and sixteenth floors. Perhaps she was near the fifteenth floor because she’d thought of Osanai. She walked along the corridor toward his apartment. She could see him in his bedroom. He was lying on his bed naked, looking up at the ceiling with a lifeless expression. He had lost a significant part of his personality.

  “But it’s all right. You can get it back,” she said to console him as she leant over his face from above. She had reverted to the form of Atsuko Chiba. “Your own personality, you know. After all. You are so very beautiful.”

  Osanai looked up at Atsuko from below. His eyes were like black obsidian holes that threatened to suck everything in. Hypnotized, Atsuko couldn’t help being drawn down to his face. “Ah. You poor thing. You poor thing.”

  “Doctor Chiba. I have no sense of reality,” Osanai said in the delirious tone of a man with no soul. “You can only love me in this state.”

  Wasn’t that precisely why she could love him? Maybe not. Maybe it was because she had been an accomplice to evil. It was perfectly natural for them, as two individuals who’d fallen from grace together, to have their hearts so violently moved by each other’s beauty. An embrace. An act of mutual seduction that could only occur within a framework of guilt. Atsuko was already naked. The whole room turned dark blue, dark as the bottom of the sea. Atsuko draped herself over Osanai, like a starfish trapping a mollusk. Her hands and feet felt numb. She could even anticipate her convulsions at the point of climax. A devil, a devil has got in. It’s inside me now. Inside my mind, inside my body. If not, what is this sublime sensation of pleasure?

  “No,” said Seijiro Inui. “You think of God and the Devil as being two principles, good and evil as conflicting concepts, humans as unstable beings that exist between the two.”

  Where’s he looking from, where’s he talking from? Is he somewhere in this room? In the TV screen? Atsuko was so carried away by the surge of sexual desire that she couldn’t even look around her.

  “But you’re wrong,” he continued. “Good and evil are a single entity in conflict with humans. God and the Devil, as religious principles, are in conflict with worthless, banal conscience, morals, petty bourgeoisie, reason.”

  Inui appeared right next to them. He was lying on the bed naked, resting one hand on Osanai’s shoulder as he spoke. Atsuko no longer felt it unnatural, as she would normally have done. Inui’s words should have sounded like unclear utterances of opaque meaning. But his words resonated in Atsuko’s ear and reached deep into her mind; they were clear in both meaning and language. Atsuko could no longer doubt the truth of his words.

  “Yes, you should have known from the beginning. We share good and evil through our dreams. That’s why you feel nostalgic about evil. That’s precisely why all sorts of evil are as familiar to humans as God is. It’s because there’s evil that good exists, because of the Devil that God exists!”

  The door burst open with a crash. Tatsuo Noda stumbled into the room, followed by Yamaji and the two inspectors.

  “So this is where you are. Inui!” bellowed Yamaji. Inui responded by standing and roaring violently. Paprika was instantly transformed; she was no longer naked, no longer Atsuko Chiba. It was as if her personality had been reversed. As if she had, at that very moment, acquired the ability to cast aside her sensuality and the logic of dreams.

  “Arrest him!” she shouted. “I mean Inui, the real Inui! He’s got a DC Mini on his head. I saw it!”

  Still completely naked, Inui’s body expanded until it filled the room. “Go back!” he called down from the ceiling. “Go back to your own dreams! To your own subconscious! To your own fears!”

  “Don’t think about it!” shouted Paprika. “Don’t let him kindle your fear!”

  But it was too late. Before her warning could sink in, Noda’s fear had already been kindled. Oh no! He was on the steel frame of a multistory building under construction. The very place he feared more than any other. Damn! Damn that Seijiro Inui! How did he know about my fear of heights?!

  The reality was that Noda had taken himself there. He could see the city and houses spread out far below the swaying steel frame. The frame began to twist beneath his feet, snaking back and forth, trying to make him fall. Noda cried out. He tried to hold tight, but at the moment his hand reached a steel column, it slid away from him. This terrifying scene was being created inside Noda’s mind.

  “Help! Somebody! Paprika! Paprika!” he called, lurching violently.

  He was crying. If he fell, he would die. He would die in reality. For although he was in a dream, it was also reality for him. A hideous reality that should never be allowed to exist.

  Paprika didn’t come to help.

  23

  Tokita was back in his apartment. He was completely unaware that, only a few moments earlier, Atsuko and Inui had appeared in Osanai’s apartment on the same floor. He was equally unaware that Noda had then burst in with the officers to confront Inui. Those events might just as well not have happened.

  Shima was also in Tokita’s apartment, along with Matsukane from the Morning News. Matsukane had rescued Shima in his car, then driven him to the Metropolitan Police Department. Once the appearances by phantoms and hobgoblins seemed to have died down, they had returned to the apartment building together.

  “I wonder what it means that they’ve died down,” Matsukane mused as he accepted a cup of coffee from Tokita’s mother.

  “And can we be certain?” Tokita chipped in. Racing around for so long had made him hungry; he’d asked his mother to prepare some food, and was perfectly happy to scoff it in front of his guests.

  “The Chief Superintendent said so,” added Shima, lounging on a sofa in the living room.

  “What? Has there been a press conference?” Tokita put his chopsticks down in surprise.

  “No, no. That’s tomorrow. He just said it to us.”

  “The fact that the appearances have died down,” Tokita said, sounding relaxed again, “must mean that Inui has woken up. Either that, or he’s entered non-REM sleep and isn’t dreaming. One of those. I’ve a feeling he’s been wearing the DC Mini all along. In that case, as Atsuko says, he’ll find it harder to wake up. Yes. I reckon he’s entered non-REM sleep.”

  “Non-REM sleep? But where?” Matsukane asked impatiently. “If only we could find out where he’s sleeping.”

  “Well, he can travel through space at will,” Tokita said ruefully. “What if he’s in a hotel room where he used to stay when he was in Europe, for example? Some place like that from his memory? It would be hopeless. And seeing as he’s getting there through the dream world, he could even go back into the past.”

  “Into the past?!” Matsukane gasped. “Traveling through space and time?!”

  “It’s all too horrid,” Tokita’s mother said with a shudder. “You’re saying this man, whoever he is, can make all these terrible things happen, far worse than earthquakes or floods, and remain perfectly safe himself?!”

  “Actually, these weird happenings may not all be coming from Inui’s dreams,” Shima said languidly. “Different people’s dreams seem to be merging with each other. People who’ve only used the DC Mini once. People like you or I, who’d had the dreams of schizophrenics fed
into our subconscious. Those schizophrenics themselves. People who come into contact with someone wearing a DC Mini. And so on. I’m sure you’ll agree.”

  “Well, that parade of dolls and the giant Buddha, for a start. Those things were obviously not from Inui’s dreams.” Tokita picked up his chopsticks to continue his meal, but stopped when he saw the grilled fish on his plate. It was his favorite. “I mean, look at this,” he said in dismay. “This is one of mine.”

  The fish, tail end already stripped to the bone, opened its mouth wide and started to talk in a loud, piercing voice. “What’s the matter? What’s the matter? I’m a clever boy. A clever boy. Why did you throw me in the waste-paper basket? Next year’s conference will be held in Brussels. So be sure to eat two rice dumplings. Ah. Here’s a pun for you. Sayuri Yamaoka, the girl next door. Ahahaha.”

  “It’s got mixed up with some schizophrenic’s dreams,” Tokita muttered.

  Tokita’s mother had been standing next to him, watching it all with her mouth as wide open as the fish’s. She cried out in horror and fainted. Tokita caught her as she fell. He and Matsukane carried her to the living room, where they laid her on the sofa now vacated by Shima.

  After returning to the table, Matsukane stared vacantly at Tokita’s plate for a while. The grilled fish was now just food again. Suddenly, Matsukane said something that seemed quite unbecoming for a serious newspaper reporter. “Maybe the DC Mini could provide links with the spirit world. Channeling, you know.” He stood up, evidently shocked by the stupidity of his own statement, and hurried toward the television to change the subject. “I know it’s late, but there must be some news on?”

  “… chaos around the Metropolitan Police Department at the moment. The Department had earlier announced a press conference to explain the cause of these happenings, and measures to be taken against them. It’s now thought highly likely that the conference will be attacked, just as the earlier conference to announce the Nobel Prize …” The face of a breathless correspondent appeared in the center of the thirty-seven-inch flat TV screen. “The Department has therefore announced that it will cancel or indefinitely postpone tomorrow’s press conference. And I’ve just been told that a TV studio was suddenly attacked about twenty minutes ago, at around four minutes past one this morning. The station was airing a special program about this incident, which of course has been postponed …”