Paprika (29 page)

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.

It was not that Inui denied the validity of PT devices, and particularly their pièce de résistance, the DC Mini. He merely felt they should be put to better use in improving the human mind. In fact, he and Osanai had used DC Minis stolen from Tokita to steep themselves in occultic raptures based on their love for each other. There could be no more effective tool than the DC Mini for teaching the quintessence of the doctrine via mystic meditation, thus leading the user to ecstasy, as Inui had done with Osanai. For the sake of the sect, the DC Mini should be available for broader use among the public, the irredeemable contemporary man. For the time being, in particular, he urgently needed to open the eyes of the doctors and scientists around him. For they had sold themselves completely to the establishment and were now serving the false god of technology. Following a chance remark by Osanai, Inui had realized that, whenever he treated Osanai with tender affection, he himself had come to resemble Jesus. He had even started to see himself as the savior of the psychiatric world.

Osanai used his skill as a psychotherapist to read deep into Inui’s mind, and resonated with what he found there. It was about six months earlier that he’d started his plot to deliver control of the Institute to his beloved master. He’d succeeded in the first stage of his plan, namely to win over Himuro. He had successfully induced mental illness in Tsumura and Kakimoto, those blind worshippers of Tokita and Chiba, and had spread the terrifying rumor that schizophrenia was catching. Everything had gone according to plan, almost like clockwork; things had developed at a speed that even Osanai found surprising.

Having at last got their hands on the DC Mini, Osanai and Inui had decided that now was the time to settle the matter once and for all. Then they had acted on that decision. Depending on how it was used, the DC Mini could indeed become the “seed of the Devil.” They’d used it to turn Shima and Tokita into mental cripples. The only one left was Atsuko Chiba. She had started to suspect Osanai, and it wouldn’t be easy to deal her the same fate. She would have to be isolated within the Institute, before she could exact a vengeance that would surely be severe. She was, after all, an experienced therapist who had already treated a range of mental diseases and neuroses under the guise of Paprika.

Inui was in his own clinic when Osanai called to inform him that Shima had disappeared. Inui knew instinctively that Atsuko had taken Shima under her wing. Though it was already in the afternoon, in fact closer to evening, Inui went straight to the Institute. There, he gathered most of the important employees, therapists, and senior nurses of the Institute and its hospital in the Meeting Room. This was the room where they usually held press conferences; it had a capacity of more than two hundred. First, Inui allowed Osanai to explain the situation.

“Awfully sorry to call this meeting so suddenly. The fact is that a very serious state of affairs has arisen, one that could have a grave impact on both the Institute and the hospital. As you may already have noticed, all sorts of unpleasant rumors have been going around recently, and this has disturbed the peace we need to continue our work. We must take a serious view of this situation and make earnest efforts to improve it. The Vice President would now like to say a few words. I’m sure what he says will open your eyes to a serious problem that affects the whole of the medical world, a problem that lies behind the superficial situation we now face. I hope you’ll all give some very careful thought to this.”

Osanai then handed the baton to Inui, who took to the rostrum. More than a hundred mostly white-coated listeners looked up at the tall figure of Inui, as if appealing to him with eyes full of fear.
Poor things
, thought Inui. There had been no one they could depend on until now. Neither Shima nor Tokita was the kind of person who could be relied upon as a leader, and Atsuko Chiba was just a woman. Inui felt pity and contempt for the employees. They would be putty in his hands; he could frighten them, threaten them, cajole them, anger them, sadden them just as he pleased. He stood before them with a stern expression that could have been interpreted as cruel.

“As servants of the medical profession, we should all be thoroughly ashamed of ourselves. For we have disregarded human dignity and relied upon science and technology alone. Have the principles of this Institute really been correct until now? Given the situation that has now arisen, I can only conclude that they were wrong. We have strayed from the path of true medicine. As your Vice President, I must accept partial responsibility for this. I failed to voice my ongoing opposition, and as a result, this truly lamentable state of affairs has occurred. I refer of course to the outbreak of schizophrenic symptoms among our staff, some of whom have fallen into an irrevocable state of mental desolation. This is a calamity inflicted by the haphazard and immoderate development of PT devices by a few of our employees. Sadly, their disgraceful behavior has now come to the attention of the media. It stimulates their prying tendencies, even to the point of exposing the Institute’s past violations of law. And I refer finally to the disappearance of President Shima, a scandal that has come to light this very day.”

Many of the staff members were hearing about Shima’s disappearance for the first time. Some let out cries of dismay, others groaned in despair. The news caused a ripple of commotion that ruffled the air in the Meeting Room.