Paprika (39 page)

One middle-aged dealer transformed himself into a Chinaman, with an upturned bowl on his head, a long pipe in his hand, and his jacket worn back to front. The party guests were all clutching their stomachs and helplessly rolling around with laughter at his antics when a serving girl came stumbling in from the corridor. With hair wildly disheveled and the hem of her kimono hitched up to her thighs, she ran though the party room as if something were chasing her.

“R-Run! Run for your lives!!” she screamed as she clung to the Chinaman’s legs.

The party guests whooped and laughed raucously. They assumed it was part of the entertainment.

“Attagirl!”

“Very convincing!”

At first, Noda too thought the girl’s entrance was part of the show. But when he saw her close up, her appearance was far too convincing for it to be an act. Her face and lips had turned mauve and her whole body was shaking. She seemed dumbstruck with terror.

“What’s the matter?” Noda shouted as if scolding her.

She turned her strained face toward him. “It’s a t-t-tiger!” she shrieked. “A tiger’s on the loose!!”

A tiger in a Japanese inn. Everyone fell about laughing again.

But Noda wasn’t laughing. He knew this was no joke. For a tiger had appeared in his dream a little while earlier. Coming to an old-style inn had reminded him of Toratake, and as he took his after-bath snooze, he had dreamt of a tiger. And now that tiger had become real, due to the residual side effects of the DC Mini.

Surely not?!
he thought. Yes, he’d advised the others to “forget about distinguishing dream and reality,” but he’d only meant that in reference to Paprika’s world.

Noda shook his head. He’d read a newspaper article about a man who kept a pet tiger. Maybe the tiger had escaped.

The laughter subsided somewhat. The guests had started to realize that the girl’s terrified appearance was not an act. Noda exchanged looks with Namba. “Where is this tiger?” asked Namba.

“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!”

“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!”