Paprika

by Yasutaka Tsutsui

  “At the foot of the stairs, c-c-coming this way!” the girl stammered in terror.

  “Oh, pack it in!”

  A man sitting near the corridor stuck his head out and peered into the darkness. He said nothing but turned back into the room, shoved his food table to one side and hopped forward on all fours like a frog. While the others were still recovering from the sudden violence of his movement, a tiger leapt into the room from the corridor, as if the man’s hopping had sparked its momentum. It was not a domestic cat, nor a stuffed toy. It was a huge, adult tiger. Unlike the tigers seen on TV or in cages at the zoo, this one was so big that all the guests firmly believed they were looking at a real, live tiger.

  Its excitement and hunting instincts stirred by the panicking party guests, the tiger bounded over to the nearest man and duly sank its teeth into his neck, as if to prove its prowess.

  Guests started shrieking and yelling as they pushed open the sliding doors, scrambling to vault over the railings onto the riverbed. Those in the room jutting out over the river fought with each other to tumble into the waters below. Some were so rigid with terror that they couldn’t move. One clung fast to the alcove post and tried desperately to stand, another sat on the tatami floor and twisted his body effeminately as he tried to shuffle out on his backside. Some fled at the last minute, some clung to the feet of others who were escaping, some rested their backs against the wall and did nothing but spasmodically flex their outstretched legs.

  A young sales employee from Head Office sat there staring blankly as blood spurted from the neck of the tiger’s first victim. The tiger left its immobilized prey and came for more, making the sales employee its second meal.

  The serving girl clung to the legs of the Chinaman as he fled, dragging her all the way out onto the veranda. Noda and Namba looked on from their seats with dazed expressions. They were by now the only ones left.

  “Sh-shall we get out?” Namba suggested, placing a hand on Noda’s shoulder and rising on legs that shook to the point of convulsion.

  The tiger, its mouth covered in fresh blood, had ripped a chunk of flesh from the unfortunate employee’s windpipe. Reacting to Namba’s movement, it turned to glare at them.

  15

  Sleeping was too scary. Morio Osanai was in bits.

  If he slept, someone else’s dream would come flying at him, as a residual effect of the DC Mini. It wouldn’t matter if it was Inui’s dream, but sometimes others, like those hellish visions from Himuro’s nightmares, would come to life in Osanai’s dreams and scare the wits out of him. Himuro was dead, but in those dreams he was still very much alive.

  Inui had admitted to Osanai that he shared the same ordeal.

  “But listen,” he’d said. “It must be the same for the woman. When night falls, she must also dread going to sleep.”

  That didn’t make the dreams any less terrifying, though. Far from it; whenever Osanai met Atsuko in his dreams, a battle royale would ensue. For she, at the same time, was having a dream in which she was fighting with him. Yes, they shared dreams from different beds, but there was nothing romantic about it at all; these were always epic battles that frayed his nerves. First of all, he had to work out whether he was in his own dream or someone else’s. If the latter, he had to ascertain whose dream it was. It may have belonged to Torataro Shima or Kosaku Tokita, men whose minds he’d tried to destroy with the DC Mini, just as he’d done with Himuro. The ability to intrude into other people’s dreams may even have been acquired with just a single use of the DC Mini. In that case, even those former clients of Paprika’s might appear in Osanai’s dreams without actually intending to. That senior company executive, for example, or that senior police officer.

  Osanai was particularly scared when the policeman made an appearance. Konakawa had the keen eye and sharp mind of a detective. If he were to chance upon the dreams of the weak-willed Hashimoto, he would sniff out Himuro’s murder in no time at all.

  Osanai could hardly go without sleeping, on the other hand. He also had to work, and so couldn’t sleep in the daytime, when everyone else was awake. To protect themselves from the enemy, the only possible strategy for Osanai, Inui, and Hashimoto was to make sure they all slept at the same time.

  Hell. How long will these residual effects last? Or will they last forever? Osanai had stashed his DC Mini in a lead storage box normally used for dangerous chemicals. Would the nightmares continue as long as the device still existed, however much he tried to block its power? Atsuko Chiba had probably realized the dangers of the DC Mini already and was no longer using it. But with or without the device, they were still accessing each other’s dreams through its residual effects alone, since, as luck would have it, Osanai’s apartment was directly below Atsuko’s in the same building.

  Osanai was trying to sleep lightly, so that he could wake at any time. It wasn’t easy, but that was the only way. He fell asleep at two in the morning.

  It looked like the Outer Garden of Meiji Shrine. Osanai seemed to be jogging. He had never jogged in his life, though he’d occasionally felt he ought to. That probably explained why he was dreaming about it. Another man in jogging gear approached him from afar. A man who looked too old to jog. Idiot. Take up jogging that late in life, you’ll only end up destroying yourself. Wait a minute. It’s Torataro Shima!

  As expected, Shima recognized him and came toward him. Is he back to normal now? He must remember me doing those terrible things to him. Oh no. He’s coming to give me an earful!

  Shima and Osanai stopped and faced each other. Shima smiled. His good-heartedness irritated Osanai; he found it faintly spooky.

  “Are you completely recovered now?” Osanai asked, speaking politely out of habit.

  “Oh yes. Oh yes,” Shima replied, still smiling. “That ****** ***** you gave me was cured by Paprika. She’s a genius, you see. Not mediocre, like you.”

  Osanai saw red. This isn’t Shima manifesting in my dream. This is Shima in person. I’m mixed up in his dream. Now he can say things he’s too scared to say in real life! “Shut your mouth, you decrepit old fool. Old fuddy-duddy wool-for-brains. I’m the genius, round here! Get it? Go to hell, you useless old git. Why don’t you just crawl under a stone and die?!”

  As if startled by this unexpected abuse from an inferior, Shima’s face suddenly grew longer. At the same time, his body sank into the ground up to his neck. With only his head showing, he started tunneling through the earth like a mole, leaving trails snaking around the park. When he collided with a tree root and could go no farther, he looked up and started wailing.

  “Serves you right!” yelled Osanai.

  Osanai was smothered by a vaguely pleasant sensation, as if he were about to give his bullying father some of his own medicine. He started walking toward Shima’s head with the intention of kicking it away. Then a dangerous voice, taut and metallic like a piano wire, flew at him from behind.

  “Stop that!”

  It was Paprika. She was a small child, but her red shirt and jeans instantly identified her. Osanai seemed to have regressed to his boyhood. Paprika held a catapult with its rubber sling extended, ready to release, and aimed it at him. He knew through bitter experience just how dangerous this could be. A friend had once hit him in the eye that way. If he hadn’t instinctively closed his eyelid, he would have been blinded. To this day he could still feel the violent pain it had caused.

  “Don’t!” Osanai pleaded.

  They were on a gently sloping road with grand houses on either side, but Osanai had no time to flee into any of them. Instead, he covered his head with his hands and cowered down at the roadside. “Don’t! It’s dangerous! Don’t shoot! Please don’t!”

  “Tee hee!” the bad girl Paprika chuckled triumphantly. “I knew it! Boys always hate this!”

  Even with hands held over his face, Osanai knew that Paprika was standing right next to him, aiming the slingshot at the crown of his head.

  “Oy! Look out, Morio! Here it comes!”

&nbs
p; “No!!”

  He couldn’t stand it any longer. It may well have been a dream, but he was in danger of taking a serious injury back to the waking world with him. He stood up, waved his arms madly to avoid the oncoming shot, and ran all the way back to his boyhood home on New Year’s Eve.

  On New Year’s Eve, the adults in Osanai’s family had a habit of staying up late to prepare for the following day’s festivities. They usually went to sleep at three or four in the morning. The children couldn’t get to sleep for all the excitement, and would stay up with the grown-ups as they busily went about their work. They would eventually fall asleep in the living room, where their grandfather would be sitting grim-faced, a large bottle of sake at his side and a sake cup in his hand, firing off instructions to the womenfolk. But now, as Morio raced into the living room, he found there not his grandfather but Seijiro Inui, dressed in a man’s kimono and sitting cross-legged on the floor. He glared up at little Morio with a look of immense displeasure.

  “I took great pains to prepare a delicate draft of butarylonal and sulphonal, to help me sleep so deeply that I would not dream. I had only just fallen asleep, and what do you go and do? Dah!”

  “I’m sorry!” young Morio whined. “But I was scared! I was so scared!”

  “This must be your dream,” Inui said as he looked around the room. “You must be sleeping more deeply than the rest of us. You’ve let someone else invade your dream.”

  “This is a nostalgic memory, but it’s frightening,” Osanai cried. “Maybe it never really existed. Maybe it’s an after-memory, because I’ve seen it so many times in my dreams.”

  “What used to happen here?” Inui asked, every bit the psychiatrist.

  Osanai turned toward the hallway. The front door had been left open. Because family members were constantly going to and fro, the door was usually left open most of the night. Sometimes vagabonds would take the opportunity to get inside the house. It always happened that way in his dreams, and maybe it really did happen that way, every year on New Year’s Eve. Or maybe it only happened once. Or never at all.

  Sometimes the uninvited guest was a delinquent youth who would smirk while filching things from the room. Sometimes it was a yakuza thug with dark menacing eyes, who would pick a fight about nothing and extort money and goods from the house. Sometimes it would be an enormous drunk who looked like a vagrant and would try to rape Morio’s mother and sisters. The unwanted visitor would invariably be thick-skinned and brazenfaced, unfazed by the stout resistance from Morio and his family, and would keep reappearing when he seemed to have gone. One of these visitors would always appear once this New Year’s Eve dream had started.

  “I see. So who’ll be coming tonight?” Inui groaned gloomily after tracing back through Osanai’s memory. “This is part of your ego, a weakness you’re desperate to protect. They’ll prey on that, for sure.”

  A woman screamed in the hallway. “Who is it? Who’s there?” It was the terrified voice of his mother. They’re here! Osanai yelled, already on the verge of tears. Go away! Get out! “You have no right to come here!” We’re higher in status than you. This is a proud and noble family. We have nothing to do with poor uneducated people like you. “We have nothing to do with you.” “Penniless scum!” “Get out!”

  “Ah. You must be Morio Osanai.”

  It was Chief Superintendent Konakawa who stood there in the doorway with the dark of night behind him. He was neither uneducated nor poor, but an elite member of society whom, if anything, Osanai should have looked up to with respect. His stern countenance betrayed no sign of sentimentality. He wore a newly tailored suit, like the one he’d been wearing in the elevator that time. He wore it with impeccable style, as if it were perfectly normal, as if he hated looking slovenly, even in a dream. This was the type of adult Osanai had hated most of all when he was a boy. But suddenly Osanai wasn’t a boy anymore. Perhaps he’d been forced to change, against his will, by Konakawa’s intrusion into his dream.

  “Who is it?” Osanai was aware that both the question and the voice he used to ask it were those of an imbecile, but he was powerless to prevent his regression. The most he could manage was to keep standing upright, when his body wanted to slump down on the edge of the hallway step.

  “You know who it is,” Konakawa replied without a hint of a smile. He’d already started probing Osanai’s consciousness. Chief Superintendent. Chief Superintendent. The sound of his rank alone was enough to turn Osanai into a whimpering heap.

  At the same time, Konakawa’s dreaming thoughts also flowed through to Osanai’s mind. So that’s what she meant by “side effects.” Good. It’s the perfect opportunity. And it’ll help Paprika. I’ll use it to discover the truth and fight the enemy.

  “What have you done with Himuro’s body?” he demanded.

  Osanai screamed inside. Must get away. Must get away. No energy left to fight.

  Luckily for him, the shock of confrontation altered the depth of his sleep, and that also changed his dream. He was in an old-style inn. No, not an inn, more like an old post station from Edo days. A throng of travelers filled the public vestibule. Osanai himself was a young samurai. Must be careful, he was thinking. His knowledge of period novels told him that places like this were crawling with sneak thieves, cutpurses, crooks, pickpockets, pilferers, luggage thieves, and other such miscreants. This was where he now found himself. His dream must have been warning him: “Be on your guard.” Though dressed as a samurai, he was scared. Who’s here? An itinerant merchant. A mother and daughter on a pilgrimage. A sumo wrestler. A young married couple. A monkey showman. All representatives of the squalid lower classes he so despised. Ah! There he is. That man peering at him from afar, through the crowd of human heads. It was the gray-haired, pipe-smoking master carpenter Torataro Shima. And there was Atsuko Chiba, dressed as a strolling musician. Osanai stood up. He’d had enough. Hell, I can’t get away from them. They won’t leave me alone. Damn them! All right. I’ll have to slice them up. He drew his sword.

  16

  I’m still dreaming, Osanai thought in his dream. But that was no reason to make light of things. Osanai’s subconscious mind demanded that he now be more serious than ever, suppress his will to just let things happen.

  But was he alone in the dream? It certainly felt that way. He knew he was dreaming, as he was still dressed as a young samurai. He still held the sword in his hand. What had happened after he’d drawn it from the scabbard? There was no blood on the blade. In a way, it felt as if a lot of time had passed since then, but there were gaps in Osanai’s memory. He could have been having a dream in which he’d just woken from a dream.

  The young samurai sat up in bed. There were two beds, side by side. PT equipment next to them. A dimly lit room. Yes, perhaps a treatment room, but he only knew of the room from seeing it in someone else’s dream. Paprika’s dream. It was the bedroom in Atsuko Chiba’s apartment. The room where she treated her clients.

  Osanai existed in his own dream and had no substance in reality. Yet there was a sense of reality around him, the very palpable presence of someone instrumental nearby. Could such a thing happen? Since he was only dreaming, he couldn’t think more deeply about it than that. Osanai crawled out of bed with a lethargy hardly becoming a young samurai.

  A voice could be heard coming from the next room. A man’s voice. The next room must have been the living room. Had Atsuko invited a man to her apartment, where they were enjoying a cozy chat? Osanai shook with jealousy. The young samurai suddenly tilted his body and leant against the wall beside the door. He opened the door a fraction, peered into the living room, and strained his ears.

  “But the tiger didn’t come to attack me. Far from it. It sidled up to me and pressed its body against mine, as if we were old friends, affectionately. Purring, even.”

  It was that man. That senior company executive, Tatsuo Noda. He continued to talk as he looked around wide-eyed at the other people in the room – Atsuko Chiba, Kosaku Tokita, Torataro Shim
a, and two unknown men. How could their presence be so clear and their speech so distinct, compared to Osanai’s own vague existence? They were like reality itself.

  “Apparently, that kind of thing couldn’t usually happen. I mean, a rogue tiger sidling up to a person after going berserk in a place like that. And then, as I gently stroked the tiger’s wiry hair, I realized the truth. It was either a dream, or if not a dream, at least the tiger had come out of a dream. To be more exact, it was my old friend Takao Toratake in the guise of a tiger.”

  Atsuko, Tokita, and Shima were sitting around Noda, who had rushed straight over after returning from his business trip. Konakawa was absent, having an important function to perform as Deputy Chief Commissioner. Instead, he was represented by Chief Inspector Yamaji and Inspector Ube. Tokita and Shima had made a full recovery and now could look after themselves; Morita and Saka had been relieved of their posts.

  “The tiger disappeared in front of my eyes. I kept shouting ‘Disappear! Disappear! Please disappear! Go back to the land of dreams,’ probably in a dream myself. Or perhaps I was actually calling out in reality. Namba was next to me, and he also saw the tiger vanish, but like me, he didn’t fancy exposing himself to ridicule by telling such a fantastic story to the police. And you know all about the ensuing uproar from the media. The police, fire service, and Hunting Association made a search of the mountains, but of course they found no sign of any tiger. The trouble was that two men were dead and many more injured. It couldn’t be dismissed as a collective hallucination. So now, they’re keeping a close watch on the area in the belief that there’s a real tiger out there.”

  “So it’s the same as the Japanese doll in that restaurant,” said Yamaji, his eyes gleaming as he struggled to comprehend the absurdity of it all. It was as if he were trying to retain the modicum of logicality befitting a police officer. “It came out of a dream, then disappeared because it didn’t really exist, but still left people dead and injured. What can this all mean?”