Paprika (46 page)

“Help! Paprika! Paprika!!”

“Did he say Paprika?” Tokita stood up.

“Wait a minute. That’s Noda!” Shima muttered to himself.

Tokita walked to the television and stood staring at it with arms crossed, as if to demand an explanation from the TV set itself. The viewpoint of the camera seemed to have changed – the camera was now Tokita’s eye. Perched precariously on a thin steel girder high in the night sky, swaying in the wind with nothing to hold on to, was a life-size Tatsuo Noda.

“Noda!” Shima rose in alarm. “He can’t stand heights! He’ll be terrified! Something must have sparked his fear to make him go there! We’ve got to help him, or he’ll fall to his death!”

“Where is this place?” asked Tokita.

Matsukane came to stand next to him. After surveying the whole screen as if searching for something, he thrust a finger toward the bottom of the picture.

“This is the Palace Side Building. Here’s the Meteorological Agency. It must be that office building that’s going up in Takehira-cho.” He looked around the room. “Where’s the telephone? I’ll call the police right away.”

“He’s going to fall!” Shima shrieked. “They’ll never make it!”

“That’s right. They’ll never make it,” Tokita repeated calmly. “He appeared on this television, and that means he’s asking for our help. All right!” He suddenly raised his voice. “Mr. Noda! Can you hear me?”

Noda turned toward the screen, his hair ruffled by the wind. The movement made his body lurch again. From his reaction, it was clear that he’d heard Tokita’s voice but couldn’t see his face.

“No!” Shima howled as he covered both eyes with his hands.

At the same moment, Tokita thrust his arms into the television screen. The screen dissolved, and the scene inside it became a real space that was an extension of the room. The wind blowing high in the night sky started to bluster inside the apartment. Tokita gripped the arms of the life-size Tatsuo Noda. After a momentary expression of surprise, Noda clung tightly to Tokita’s stout arms. With a great heave of strength, Tokita pulled Noda’s body out of the television onto the floor of his living room.

24

Two weeks passed, then a third.

Inui continued to elude his pursuers.

Appearances of phantoms and other strange sights had decreased in frequency. But there was still no way of preventing them; bizarre happenings would occur whenever there was a press conference involving Atsuko and Tokita, or an announcement by the Metropolitan Police Department.

Real calamities would descend on reporters trying to cover these events. But Matsukane alone had courage. He alone refused to fear the evil intentions, the spiteful malevolence of dreams. Ignoring the fear that pierced his heart with the prickly sting of a thistle or a nettle, the fear that lurked in his subconscious like a skin rash caused by lacquer, he was actively gathering material and taking comments from Atsuko and Tokita. These he circulated among the newspapers as special correspondence. Luckily, the mischief of dreams couldn’t change the content of newspaper articles, which demanded a waking consciousness. The most they could achieve was to make the letters on the page appear more blurry and harder to read.

Something was happening. People were suspicious and wanted to know, but, at the same time, had a vague intuition that wanting to know was in itself taboo. They’d grown used to reacting with more or less the same state of agitation, making no distinction between petty cases and major ones, confronted by a taboo presence that directly threatened their well-being.

The public had no means of resisting the seeping spread of madness. When people suddenly started laughing in the street, it was difficult to judge whether their insanity was caused by a bizarre happening in the vicinity, or by their suppression of their fear until that point. This was because some of these happenings took a form that could only be perceived by individuals. The digits on a watch might suddenly become jumbled, for example, or a mother’s face might momentarily change to that of a seal. People only had to experience a single such happening for their own complexes, traumas, and fears to be activated; they would be at their mercy thereafter. This most commonly took the form of an inferiority complex, or an Oedipus complex, sexual perversions or phobias.

The sufferers would make their own nightmares appear in reality, and the ensuing bizarre happenings would then swallow up other people around them as well. It was like a monstrous chain letter born of nightmares. That was why, when Atsuko’s image on the front cover of a weekly magazine turned into the Devil, spoke, or laughed aloud, some people would notice it every time while others failed to. That was why, on suddenly hearing some foul abuse about Kosaku Tokita or the Nobel Prize bellowed loudly in their ears, the only ones to flinch were those who were listening to radio-cassette players at the time.

These monstrous happenings had first occurred in central Tokyo, later spreading to three or four outlying prefectures. This made it easy to pinpoint the whereabouts of Seijiro Inui, their “epicenter,” in the center of the metropolis. But his malevolent intentions could now transcend time and space. Wherever Atsuko and Tokita went, those intentions were bound to pursue them in the form of nightmares.

The day of the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony was fast approaching. Although Atsuko’s nightly dreams were still frightening, they were gradually softening in tone. Elements that seemed to come from Inui’s dreams had started to appear only in fragments. Even they were no longer so aggressive, but appeared little more than fleeting reminiscences in which the atmosphere of his debauched paganism could still be felt. Atsuko couldn’t know for sure whether he was sleeping in the day and rarely dreamt at night. Perhaps he could no longer wake up, due to the effects of the DC Mini, and was gradually wasting away in his sleep somewhere. Or perhaps he was keeping his malevolent ambitions warm somewhere, waiting for the perfect moment to strike.

Instead, the dreams of Tokita, Noda, Konakawa, Shima, and even Osanai had started to merge with Atsuko’s dreams. Being the dreams of men who loved her, they smothered her softly, as if to protect her from Inui’s dreams. Sometimes she would yield her body to the pleasure of sleeping between Tokita and Osanai; at other times, the pair caressing her on the bed would be Noda and Konakawa. Since the men were in the majority, their dreams overwhelmed Atsuko’s. She had no idea where her own dreams had gone, but she was by no means unhappy to consort with them in their dreams. The divine sensations of pleasure she found there, almost as if her body could melt, were not to be found in the real world; in many ways, they felt even more vivid than reality. Sometimes neither Atsuko nor the men could tell whether they were dreaming or not. For when they awoke, Atsuko would often find herself embracing one of them on her bed, or cavorting with any two at the same time.

When they saw her in the daytime, the men would remember the previous night’s dream and look embarrassed. Then again, so would she. In any case, being perfect gentlemen, they declined to talk about it among themselves; they chose not to succumb to vulgarity, beyond the occasional witty comment.

The day of the departure for Sweden had arrived. The only reporters who made it to Narita International Airport at ten-thirty that morning were Matsukane of the
Morning News
and crews from three or four TV companies. The other companies had clearly been frightened off, thinking it inevitable that the event would be visited by outlandish phenomena. If nothing happened, ironically, it would be because they’d failed to anger Inui with their overzealous coverage.

At the request of the prizewinners, few came to the airport to see them off; the only people in attendance were two representatives from the Swedish Embassy, three or four members of the Agency for Cultural Affairs and other government bodies, and Torataro Shima. No one else came from the Institute for Psychiatric Research. Police officers Morita and Ube were present, but that was obviously for security reasons. It was a lonely departure. Even the media coverage was nothing more than a brief interview with the pair as they stood in the lobby.

“Now that you’re at last preparing to leave for the, er, Nobel Prize Awards Ceremony,” started a female reporter, casting anxious glances around for fear of strange happenings, “how do you feel? In a word?”

“Er … In a word, at last preparing to leave … Awards ceremony … How do I feel, in a word.” Atsuko was trying hard to vanquish the demons of sleep. “It’s just like a dream. A dream. No. This
is
a dream.”

“Yes, I’m sure it is.” The reporter suddenly sprouted a cow’s head, which flopped down low in front of her. The weight brought her to her senses with a sharp intake of breath, but the cow’s slobber still hung from her mouth. “Do excuse me. I’ve only eaten one helping of rice porridge this morning.” And she slurped the slobber back into her mouth.

“Have a safe journey,” said Matsukane with tears in his eyes, seemingly trapped in the emotional incontinence of dreams. “You see, I also love you, so very acutely, I love you so very acutely. Because look here. It’s so hard, so hard my trousers are about to split.”

“Ah! Matsukane-san!” Atsuko kissed him passionately.

“And what about all those unearthly apparitions? Is there any chance they could …” A male reporter was interviewing Tokita. As he spoke, the reporter flinched at his own words and peered around nervously. “… any foreseeable apparitions at the awards ceremony … Is it not necessarily the kind of work where you mainly replace things at home, er?”

“You’re right, you’re not wrong. Yes. Apparitions appear because it’s a dream, you see.” Tokita was slobbering even more than usual. “Elbowing your way through a dream looking for reality, elbowing through, just like it’s reality itself, all the way to Stockholm, all the way there …”

As the pair started off toward the departure gate, snapped by some but pursued only by a solitary television camera, there was a minor happening. The surroundings grew dim, as if bathed in a dark-purple light. The flight announcements were interrupted by Inui’s voice, obnoxiously ingratiating as if he harbored some secret design, sounding over the speakers with a low menacing laugh.

“The host of Christ, assembled on the plain of Jerusalem, declares war on the host of Lucifer on the plain of Babylon …”

It was a line from the spiritual training of the Jesuits, well known for their militarism. Hardly any of the smallish number of passengers awaiting flights in the departure lounge seemed to have heard it. It was almost certainly a declaration of war on Atsuko and Tokita, and was sufficient to produce a chill in those who saw them off, causing them to hurriedly depart the scene.

The Scandinavian Airlines direct flight to Stockholm, a jumbo jet, took off from Narita at eleven-fifteen that morning. The scheduled time of arrival was just past two in the afternoon, but taking the time difference into account, the flight actually lasted more than ten hours. Atsuko took the window seat next to Tokita in the first-class section. They were treated as privileged guests of the Swedish state; the cabin crew knew all about them.

About two hours after takeoff, the plane lurched violently.
Hello?
thought Atsuko, and looked around the cabin. It was just as she’d thought. Sitting at the rear with his anxious face half-hidden, keeping watch over Atsuko and Tokita with worried looks, was Chief Superintendent Toshimi Konakawa of the Metropolitan Police Department. He had evidently appointed himself their escort to protect them during the awards ceremony, but had followed them secretly to avoid angering Inui. That almost made Atsuko smile. The lurch just now had been the thumping of Konakawa’s heart under the tension of his mission.

In any case, there was nothing to smile about. Inui had obviously chosen the Nobel Prize Awards Ceremony, that occasion of great dignity and tradition, for the ultimate battle between heaven and hell. He was planning to plunge the ceremony into turmoil.

25

Standing on a podium surrounded by flowers and microphones, Professor Karl Krantz was giving a speech in Swedish to introduce the prizewinners in Physiology or Medicine. His Majesty the King of Sweden sat to his left on the stage, surrounded by members of the royal household, with formally dressed laureates and Nobel Prize committee members to the right and left of center. An invited audience of more than two thousand filled the spacious concert hall, sitting in hushed reverence as they followed the proceedings. An hour had already passed since the start of the ceremony at five o’clock. So far, nothing unusual seemed to have happened at all. But Atsuko could feel the faint tingle of electricity agitating the air inside the building.

He’s here
.

Inui was palpably present, but
fearing
his presence would only make that fear incarnate. On the other hand, Atsuko had half resigned herself to that already. Whether sooner or later, this ceremony would surely be reduced to chaos and confusion.

Very few of the assembled guests, including those invited from Japan, harbored any fear that the calamitous events in that strange, far-off land would reverberate as far as Sweden. Most of them had never heard of those events in the first place. Even if they had, they simply laughed them off as daft rumors.

“Er, the King’s face just changed to Inui’s,” Tokita whispered to Atsuko in the seat next to him.