Paprika
Authors: Yasutaka Tsutsui
Tags: #Literary, #Fiction, #Psychological, #General, #Science Fiction
Paprika
Yasutaka Tsutsui
Vintage (2009)
Tags:
Psychological, Science Fiction, Literary, General, Fiction
Psychologicalttt Science Fictionttt Literaryttt Generalttt Fictionttt
Paprika - exotic, piquant, to be used sparingly. The eponymous heroine of Tsutsui's novel is the alter ego of brilliant and beautiful psychotherapist Atsuko Chiba, one of the leading brains in the Institute for Psychiatric Research. An expert in the use of 'psychotherapy devices' that trap a patient's dreams and display them on a monitor, Atsuko is able to manipulate those dreams, even enter them, as an aid to psychoanalysis. When treating private patients, Atsuko transforms herself into the guise of Paprika - a captivating girl of unknown age - to mask her true identity.As Paprika delves ever deeper into her realm of fantasy, the borderline between dream and reality becomes increasingly blurred. All the more so when a colleague at the Institute develops a new device that allows the dreams of several individuals to be combined simultaneously. With this, they enter dangerous territory - far from curing their patients, they could drive them insane. Rich in humorous dialogue and ridiculous situations, replete with the folly of human desires, yet with an underlying sense of menace that 'all is not what it seems', Paprika could be described as the very pinnacle of Tsutsui's art.
YASUTAKA TSUTSUI
P
APRIKA
One of Japan’s most renowned modern writers, Yasutaka Tsutsui has won the Tanizaki Prize, the Kawabata Prize, and several other awards. He was decorated as a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. He lives in Japan.
ALSO BY YASUTAKA TSUTSUI
Salmonella Men on Planet Porno
A VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES ORIGINAL, FEBRUARY 2013
Translation copyright © 2009 by Andrew Driver
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Japan by Shinchosha, Co., Ltd., Toyko, in 1993. Copyright
©
1993 by Yasutaka Tsutsui. This translation originally published in hardcover in the United Kingdom by Alma Books Limited, Richmond, in 2009, by arrangement with Yasutaka Tsutsui through Japan Foreign-Rights Centre & Andrew Nurnberg Associates Ltd.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tsutsui, Yasutaka, 1934–
[Papurika. English]
Paprika / Yasutaka Tsutsui ; translated from the Japanese by Andrew Driver.
p. cm.—(Vintage contemporaries original)
eISBN: 978-0-307-37727-2
I. Driver, Andrew. II. Title.
PL862.S77P3713 2012
895.6′35—dc23
2011044462
Cover design and illustration by Kelly Blair
v3.1
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Part One
1
Kosaku Tokita lumbered into the Senior Staff Room. He must have weighed at least two hundred fifty pounds. The air in the room grew hot and stuffy.
The Senior Staff Room of the Institute for Psychiatric Research had five desks but only two regular occupants – Kosaku Tokita and Atsuko Chiba. Their desks jostled for space near the window at the far end of the room. The Senior Staff Room was separated from the Junior Staff Room by a glass door, but as the door was always left open, each just felt like an extension of the other.
The sandwiches and coffee she’d brought from the Institute shop were still sitting on Atsuko Chiba’s desk. She had no appetite today; it was always the same old thing for lunch. The Institute had a canteen, used by staff and patients alike, but the meals it served were like horse feed. On the bright side, Atsuko’s lack of appetite meant she never had to gain weight or compromise her good looks – looks that had TV stations begging for her on an almost daily basis. But then again, barring their merits when treating patients, Atsuko had no interest at all in her own good looks or her TV appearances.
“The staff are having kittens,” Tokita lisped as he lowered his bulky frame next to her. One of the therapists had gone down with paranoid delusions. “They say it’s contagious schizophrenia. None of them want to touch the scanners or reflectors.”
“That is a worry,” said Atsuko. She herself often had such experiences. After all, psychiatrists had always been afraid of catching personality disorders from their patients; some even claimed that mental illness could be transmitted through the mucous membranes, like herpes. Ever since psychotherapy or “PT” devices had first come into use – particularly the scanners and reflectors that scanned and observed the inside of the psyche – this fear had come to assume an air of reality. “It’s the ones who don’t like identifying with their patients, the ones who
pass on
, who tend to worry about that kind of thing. Pff. You’d think an experience like that would give them a chance to self-diagnose as psychotherapists.”
“Passing on” meant blaming it on the patient’s mental disorder when a therapist was unable to forge human bonds with a patient. It had been at the very root of schizophrenic diagnosis until just two decades earlier.
“Oh no! Not chopped burdock with sesame and marinated pan-fried chicken
yuan
style, AGAIN!” Tokita thrust out his thick lower lip in disgust as he opened the lid of the
bento
lunch box prepared by his mother. Tokita lived alone with his mother in one of the Institute’s apartments. “I can’t eat that!”
Atsuko’s appetite was duly aroused when she peered into Tokita’s sizable lunch box. For this was surely a
nori bento –
a thin layer of rice at the bottom, topped by a single sheet of dried
nori
seaweed moistened with soy sauce, with alternating layers of rice and
nori
on top of that … A classic
nori bento
from the good old days! To Atsuko, the box was crammed full of the home-cooked delights she craved, the taste of her mother’s food. She hadn’t always been one to skimp on meals, after all. In fact, she actually felt quite hungry now.
“All right, I’ll eat it for you,” she said decisively, her hands already stretched out to receive. And with both of those hands she went to grab Tokita’s large bamboo lunch box from the side.
Tokita’s reaction was equally swift. “No way!” he cried, pinning her hands down on top of the box.
“But you said you didn’t want it!” Atsuko protested as she tried to prise the box from his grasp. She had a certain confidence in the strength of her fingertips.
Apart from this lunch box, there was nothing at all in the Institute that could satisfy Tokita’s appetite or suit his palate. He too was desperate. “I said no way!”
“Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.” Torataro Shima, the Institute Administrator, stood before them with a frown. “Our two top candidates for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, fighting over a lunch box?!” he said with a hint of sadness.
Torataro Shima had a habit of getting up from his desk in the Administrator’s Office, casually strolling around the Junior Staff Room and speaking to anyone he found there. Some of the staff would jump up in fright when he suddenly spoke to them from behind; some pointed out that it was not terribly good for the heart.
Even addressed thus with such distortion of mouth and such heavy sarcasm by the Institute Administrator, the pair refused to relinquish their grip on the lunch box, and merely continued their struggle in silence. For a few moments, Shima simply stared at the spectacle with an expression of pity. Then he gave two or three little nods of his head in resignation – as if he’d just remembered that genius always goes hand in hand with infantile behavior.