Paprika (5 page)

“Probably, but I’d far rather you stayed.” Yes, Paprika was young enough to be his own daughter, but Noda had started to feel as if he could indulge himself a little with her.

Paprika laughed and rose from her chair. “No, you should sleep now. And anyway, I’m famished. I’m going to get something from the kitchen.” It sounded like a deliberate ploy to make him sleep. Paprika left the room.

What an excellent therapist – as I expected
, thought Noda. She made him feel relaxed just by talking to him. They’d never met before, but her posture and expression made her seem somehow familiar, almost as if they were related. She made him feel it was all right to talk about anything he wanted. And while she tended to speak childishly, she never said anything that made Noda feel uncomfortable –
unlike most young women these days
. Yes, she was young and beautiful, but at the same time she had a motherly quality that served to restrain a man’s baser urges, surrounding him instead with warm, reassuring sensations. Noda breathed a huge sigh of satisfaction. There would certainly be no anxiety attacks occurring here tonight.

Several times a month, Noda would arrive home at four or five in the morning. His wife, preoccupied as she was with their son’s education, had never shown undue concern; Noda knew she wouldn’t be particularly perturbed, even if he turned up at seven o’clock. And Noda’s wife must have known, more perhaps than Noda himself, that having an affair was simply not in his nature.

“
Your condition is only mild
,” Paprika had said. Maybe, to a therapist, his condition seemed unspectacular. But Noda himself found no comfort in that at all. It mattered little that the symptoms were not yet affecting his daily life. Now was the most crucial time. Above all, his enemies must never know of his illness; he had to be cured before they could hear about it.

In the old days, thinking about his enemies both inside and outside the company would have been enough to keep him awake until the small hours. But now he’d grown accustomed to the struggle. Now, planning cunning strategies in his head would send him off to the land of nod with a satisfying degree of mental fatigue; he almost enjoyed it. He felt sure he would fall asleep quickly tonight. As his consciousness started to fragment and crack, meaningless images started to cavort through the crevices of his mind.

5

Noda woke naturally. Or perhaps he only thought as much; perhaps Paprika had roused him with some kind of device. Paprika sat in a position where they could see each other if Noda turned his head slightly to the right. She was looking at the console monitor with a helmet-like apparatus on her head. Noda thought it must be the “collector” he’d heard about. The light from the monitor screen lent Paprika’s face an ethereal glow.

“What time is it?” asked Noda.

Paprika removed the collector and smiled. “Not yet two o’clock. You’ve just finished your first REM sleep. Do you always wake up around this time?”

“No. I thought perhaps you’d woken me deliberately.”

“No, I wouldn’t do that. It must have been this dream that woke you. You remember it, of course?”

“Yes, I do.” Noda sat up. “But how do you know that?”

“When we’re woken during REM sleep, we usually remember what we were dreaming at the time. So, shall we just analyze this dream tonight?” Paprika took Noda’s clothes from the wardrobe and placed them at the foot of the bed. “Although morning dreams are actually much more interesting.”

“It was a very short dream. Can you really learn anything by analyzing that?” Noda said as he dressed himself.

“Of course! Dreams in this phase of sleep are usually short, but the information they contain is condensed. It’s like watching an experimental short film. Morning dreams can sometimes last an hour or so. They’re more like epic feature films.”

“Really? You have statistics of that sort? How interesting.”

“Let’s watch an experimental short then, shall we? Come on, sit here,” Paprika said, patting the foot of the bed invitingly. Now fully dressed, Noda sat next to Paprika. He looked at the monitor. The screen was motionless for now, frozen in an alternating pattern of gray and black waves.

“Can dreams only be monitored in black and white?”

“There’s not much point seeing them in colour, is there?” Paprika said as she pressed a button to start the picture.

It was a school classroom. In Noda’s dream, he was looking toward the teacher’s podium. On the podium stood a slender man of about sixty. He was talking, but his speech was so muffled that it was difficult to hear what he was saying.

“Where is this classroom?”

“My old junior high school.” To Noda, it felt quite unnerving to be seeing the same dream twice. And with Paprika sitting there next to him, he also felt rather uneasy – as if a total stranger might be about to witness some past act of self-gratification … “But when I was having that dream, I didn’t think it was a classroom. I thought I was at work.”

“Why’s that, I wonder?” Paprika paused the picture. “And who is that man?”

“Well, it’s because of him that I thought I was at work. It’s Sukenobu, one of our directors.”

“Don’t you get on with him?”

“You could say that. He’s frightened that I’ll rise too high in the company. He’s also jealous of my success with the zero-emissions vehicle. He says we’re rushing things too much. In fact, he’s been colluding with a Ministry official to obstruct the development.”

“Why would he do that?”

“He wants to be the next President. Well, it’s a long way off yet, but that’s why he’s worried about my age. I’m ten years younger than him, you see.”

“And why’s he worried about that?”

“He thinks he’ll be the first to die, or that he’ll be forced to retire when he goes senile.”

The picture started again. Sukenobu continued to talk while writing something on the blackboard. He could be heard mentioning the poet Basho and his book
Oku no Hosomichi
. The words
Hakutai no Kakyaku
appeared on the blackboard.

“It looks like a Japanese literature lesson.”

“Classics. I hated those lessons. The teachers always had it in for me.”

“And does your old teacher have something in common with this Sukenobu?” The picture was frozen again.

“No. The teacher was always changing – sometimes it was a man, sometimes a woman, now young, now old. I had so many teachers of Japanese literature that they couldn’t possibly have anything in common with anyone. Except that they all had it in for me.”

The picture started again. Sukenobu asked Noda something from the teacher’s podium. Noda stood and was about to answer. Freeze-frame.

“This never actually happened in reality, but in the dream I mistakenly pronounced
Hakutai
as
Hyakudai
. I wonder why that was. I took the trouble to read
Oku no Hosomichi
recently, so I should know the correct reading is
Hakutai
.”

On the screen, Sukenobu was facing Noda, scolding and chiding him.

“Now. The problem is this next bit,” said Paprika.

“Yes.”

Noda’s classmates were laughing at him as he was being scolded. A low ripple of laughter could be heard, and as Noda’s line of vision surveyed the classroom, his classmates all appeared to have the faces of wild animals. Bears, tigers, boars, wolves, hyenas – all mocking him. Freeze – frame.

“Why do they all look like wild animals?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you recognize any of them?”

“No. I don’t know any wild animals! One of the bears looks a bit like the senior executive of a rival company, though.”

“What’s his name?” Paprika was writing everything down on a memo pad.

“Segawa. I don’t particularly see him as a problem, though.”

“People who aren’t a problem in our waking lives often appear in our dreams. If someone who really
was
a problem appeared in your dream, the shock would wake you, wouldn’t it.”

“I suppose so. As it happens, I don’t see Sukenobu as much of a problem either. Though I hope you won’t think me big-headed for saying that.”

“You’ve every right to be big-headed. After all, you’re a big player, aren’t you?”

“Yes, but do big players suffer from anxiety neurosis?”

“Well, I don’t know about that.” Paprika restarted the picture.

The experimental short moved on to the next scene. It was a funeral. A photograph of a middle-aged man could be seen surrounded by flowers. A woman in mourning dress turned to face Noda’s line of vision, and seemed to be pleading with him about something. The woman was young and beautiful; in a way, she resembled Paprika.

“Who’s that woman?” Freeze-frame.

“The wife of one of our employees, a man called Namba. But I’ve never actually met her in the flesh.”

“Well, does she look like someone else?”

“No one in particular. You, perhaps.”

“And who’s the man in the photo?”

“That’s Namba.”

“So Namba’s dead.”

“Yes, but in reality he’s very much alive. I met him just this afternoon.”

“Is he one of your enemies in the company?”

“Quite the opposite. He’s very important to me – he manages the Development Office.”

“So he’s your junior?”

“Yes, but it doesn’t feel like that. To me he’s a colleague, a comrade in arms, an ally – someone I can talk to.”

Paprika started the picture again. After showing mourners at the funeral for a few more moments, the picture suddenly broke off.

“Yes, that’s when I woke up. When I saw the mourners, it came home to me that Namba really had died – in the dream, I mean. I think it was the shock that woke me.”

Paprika played the same short dream back twice more.

“Fancy some coffee? We’ll have it in the next room,” she said as she got up, looking distinctly weary.

Noda was willing, and they moved to the living room. The bright night view of Shinjuku showed no sign of dimming, even after two in the morning.

“You seem to have a lot of residues,” Paprika said as she arranged coffee cups on her glass table.

“Residues?”

“Residues from your day’s activity. It’s a Freudian term.”

“You mean the office, Sukenobu, Namba, all that?”

Paprika poured the finest Blue Mountain coffee into Noda’s cup, with the precision of a scientist transferring a solution from one flask to the other. “You said your Japanese literature teachers ‘all had it in for you,’ didn’t you.”

“Did I?”

“You said it twice. But people don’t usually use that phrase in that kind of situation.”

“I suppose they don’t. They’d normally say they were always being told off, or something like that. So it must have something to do with how I feel about Sukenobu.”

“So you’re saying this Sukenobu has got it in for you?”

Noda groaned as he picked up his cup. “Well, now I think about it, that’s not really true either. ‘Itching for a fight’ might be a better phrase.” The rich aroma of the coffee wafted into his nostrils. “Ah, that smells good.”

Paprika said nothing but gazed out at the night sky, apparently lost in thought as she sipped her coffee.

“Could I venture my opinion as an amateur?” asked Noda.

“Go on.”

“Why did I give the wrong answer to the teacher, even though I knew the right one in reality? Well, it’s a strategy I sometimes use against Sukenobu at work. To deliberately let down my guard, you see, as a trap. So as well as being a ‘residue,’ it could also stem from my superiority complex toward him.”

“Was
that
what it was?!” Paprika laughed. “Is there anything else you can tell me?”

“I don’t know why Namba died in the dream. And why did his wife appear, when I’ve never even met her?”

“An unknown woman who appears in a man’s dream is what Jung calls the
anima
.”

“What’s that?”

“The feminine inner personality present in the subconscious of the male. And a man who appears in a woman’s dream is her
animus
.”

“But she looked like you.”

Paprika blushed. “It was just your impression on meeting me for the first time. You imprinted that on your
anima
. It wasn’t even a residue of your day!” She almost sounded angry.

“In that case,” Noda said, calmly returning Paprika’s glare, “if my
anima
is a representation of myself, or an idealized vision of the feminine inside me, would that dream just now express some feminine concern that Namba could die?”

“Hmm. What standing does Namba have in your company?”

“He’s not popular, if that’s what you mean. He’s isolated, a loner. I can’t decide whether the problem is his scientific aloofness or his artistic temperament. He’s stubborn and won’t listen to others. He understands nothing of strategy and even argues with me sometimes.”