Paprika (40 page)

“Ah. You must be Morio Osanai.”

It was Chief Superintendent Konakawa who stood there in the doorway with the dark of night behind him. He was neither uneducated nor poor, but an elite member of society whom, if anything, Osanai should have looked up to with respect. His stern countenance betrayed no sign of sentimentality. He wore a newly tailored suit, like the one he’d been wearing in the elevator that time. He wore it with impeccable style, as if it were perfectly normal, as if he hated looking slovenly, even in a dream. This was the type of adult Osanai had hated most of all when he was a boy. But suddenly Osanai wasn’t a boy anymore. Perhaps he’d been forced to change, against his will, by Konakawa’s intrusion into his dream.

“Who is it?” Osanai was aware that both the question and the voice he used to ask it were those of an imbecile, but he was powerless to prevent his regression. The most he could manage was to keep standing upright, when his body wanted to slump down on the edge of the hallway step.

“You know who it is,” Konakawa replied without a hint of a smile. He’d already started probing Osanai’s consciousness. Chief Superintendent. Chief Superintendent. The sound of his rank alone was enough to turn Osanai into a whimpering heap.

At the same time, Konakawa’s dreaming thoughts also flowed through to Osanai’s mind.
So that’s what she meant by “side effects.” Good. It’s the perfect opportunity. And it’ll help Paprika. I’ll use it to discover the truth and fight the enemy
.

“What have you done with Himuro’s body?” he demanded.

Osanai screamed inside.
Must get away. Must get away. No energy left to fight
.

Luckily for him, the shock of confrontation altered the depth of his sleep, and that also changed his dream. He was in an old-style inn. No, not an inn, more like an old post station from Edo days. A throng of travelers filled the public vestibule. Osanai himself was a young samurai.
Must be careful
, he was thinking. His knowledge of period novels told him that places like this were crawling with sneak thieves, cutpurses, crooks, pickpockets, pilferers, luggage thieves, and other such miscreants. This was where he now found himself. His dream must have been warning him: “Be
on your guard
.” Though dressed as a samurai, he was scared.
Who’s here?
An itinerant merchant. A mother and daughter on a pilgrimage. A sumo wrestler. A young married couple. A monkey showman. All representatives of the squalid lower classes he so despised.
Ah! There he is
. That man peering at him from afar, through the crowd of human heads. It was the gray-haired, pipe-smoking master carpenter Torataro Shima. And there was Atsuko Chiba, dressed as a strolling musician. Osanai stood up. He’d had enough.
Hell, I can’t get away from them. They won’t leave me alone. Damn them! All right. I’ll have to slice them up
. He drew his sword.

16

I’m still dreaming
, Osanai thought in his dream. But that was no reason to make light of things. Osanai’s subconscious mind demanded that he now be more serious than ever, suppress his will to just let things happen.

But was he alone in the dream? It certainly felt that way. He knew he was dreaming, as he was still dressed as a young samurai. He still held the sword in his hand. What had happened after he’d drawn it from the scabbard? There was no blood on the blade. In a way, it felt as if a lot of time had passed since then, but there were gaps in Osanai’s memory. He could have been having a dream in which he’d just woken from a dream.

The young samurai sat up in bed. There were two beds, side by side. PT equipment next to them. A dimly lit room. Yes, perhaps a treatment room, but he only knew of the room from seeing it in someone else’s dream. Paprika’s dream. It was the bedroom in Atsuko Chiba’s apartment. The room where she treated her clients.

Osanai existed in his own dream and had no substance in reality. Yet there was a sense of reality around him, the very palpable presence of someone instrumental nearby. Could such a thing happen? Since he was only dreaming, he couldn’t think more deeply about it than that. Osanai crawled out of bed with a lethargy hardly becoming a young samurai.

A voice could be heard coming from the next room. A man’s voice. The next room must have been the living room. Had Atsuko invited a man to her apartment, where they were enjoying a cozy chat? Osanai shook with jealousy. The young samurai suddenly tilted his body and leant against the wall beside the door. He opened the door a fraction, peered into the living room, and strained his ears.

“But the tiger didn’t come to attack me. Far from it. It sidled up to me and pressed its body against mine, as if we were old friends, affectionately. Purring, even.”

It was that man. That senior company executive, Tatsuo Noda. He continued to talk as he looked around wide-eyed at the other people in the room – Atsuko Chiba, Kosaku Tokita, Torataro Shima, and two unknown men. How could their presence be so clear and their speech so distinct, compared to Osanai’s own vague existence? They were like reality itself.

“Apparently, that kind of thing couldn’t usually happen. I mean, a rogue tiger sidling up to a person after going berserk in a place like that. And then, as I gently stroked the tiger’s wiry hair, I realized the truth. It was either a dream, or if not a dream, at least the tiger had come out of a dream. To be more exact, it was my old friend Takao Toratake in the guise of a tiger.”

Atsuko, Tokita, and Shima were sitting around Noda, who had rushed straight over after returning from his business trip. Konakawa was absent, having an important function to perform as Deputy Chief Commissioner. Instead, he was represented by Chief Inspector Yamaji and Inspector Ube. Tokita and Shima had made a full recovery and now could look after themselves; Morita and Saka had been relieved of their posts.

“The tiger disappeared in front of my eyes. I kept shouting ‘Disappear! Disappear! Please disappear! Go back to the land of dreams,’ probably in a dream myself. Or perhaps I was actually calling out in reality. Namba was next to me, and he also saw the tiger vanish, but like me, he didn’t fancy exposing himself to ridicule by telling such a fantastic story to the police. And you know all about the ensuing uproar from the media. The police, fire service, and Hunting Association made a search of the mountains, but of course they found no sign of any tiger. The trouble was that two men were dead and many more injured. It couldn’t be dismissed as a collective hallucination. So now, they’re keeping a close watch on the area in the belief that there’s a real tiger out there.”

“So it’s the same as the Japanese doll in that restaurant,” said Yamaji, his eyes gleaming as he struggled to comprehend the absurdity of it all. It was as if he were trying to retain the modicum of logicality befitting a police officer. “It came out of a dream, then disappeared because it didn’t really exist, but still left people dead and injured. What can this all mean?”

Atsuko had no answer. Even if she could begin to reply, the best she could achieve would be an abstract hypothesis that would reaffirm the unfathomed power of dreams. For although they were merely messengers from the realm of dreams, these apparitions had the power to cause death or leave lasting scars in the real world.

“It’s all my fault.” Tokita had covered his face with his hands a number of times already, but now groaned loudly as though he could bear it no longer. “I should never have invented such a stupid thing. I was too careless. I should have given it a protective code. I’m a failure. A failure as a scientist.”

They all fell silent. None could find the words to comfort or excuse him. His sense of guilt thus reconfirmed, Tokita squirmed in his chair as he continued to release little explosions of self-reproach.

“I didn’t think of the consequences. I was drowning in a sea of my own invention. That’s right.” He turned to Atsuko beside him and slowly extended his fat palms. “I will dismantle the DC Minis. Give them all to me. At least the ones you’ve got. I’ll dismantle them immediately.”

“W-w-wait a minute!” Yamaji was on the edge of his seat. “I understand how you feel, but the enemy also has DC Minis. I’m not going to sit here and let you dismantle ours! It would be me who’d take the rap if we had reason to regret it later.”

“That’s right,” agreed Noda. “At least discuss it with the Chief Superintendent first.”

“All right. Just as long as the very existence of the DC Mini doesn’t increase the residual effects,” Tokita moaned on.

“But even if we disposed of all the DC Minis we have,” Shima said weakly, showing signs of fatigue in his eyes, “as long as
they
still have them, they’ll keep invading our dreams night after night. I can’t take much more of this. Last night Osanai made a complete fool of me again.”

He must have been talking about the way he’d been verbally abused, buried in the ground with only his head showing and made to scuttle about like a mole.

“Our only chance of getting the devices back from them is in our dreams. I don’t think they’re wearing them anymore. But even so,” Atsuko said to encourage the weak-willed Shima, “please be patient for a little longer. I’ll always protect you, just as I did last night.”

“Oh, yes! You did, didn’t you. And you were still fighting …” Shima said dolefully. He seemed to have aged noticeably.

Noda and Tokita nodded toward Atsuko with the empathy of comrades who share the same dreams. Whether or not they’d actually appeared in those dreams, they had witnessed Atsuko’s nightly battles.

“The Chief Superintendent was saying he’d had a fair old dingdong with Inui last night,” Yamaji said with a wry smile. “Ah, but of course it’s nothing to jest about.”

“You mean after
that
,” Atsuko said, glancing across at Shima.

“It was like a scene from New Year’s Eve. Osanai escaped from the Chief, but then Inui must have appeared in the hallway instead of him,” Shima said with a worried look. “But of course! That hallway must have been part of Osanai’s dream, so naturally the scene would have changed.”

“I didn’t see that bit,” Tokita said nervously. “I wonder if he was all right, fighting with Inui?”

“Don’t worry, he can look after himself,” said Noda, as if to banish the notion that he himself might
not
have been “all right.” “We’re on the offensive, after all.”

“After that, Osanai appeared as a young samurai in an old post house,” Shima continued. “Even we were dressed in period costume. I was shocked when the samurai drew his sword, but around that time Inui and the Chief Superintendent would have been fighting in their own dreams, I suppose.”

“Oh yes. He drew his sword,” echoed a hollow voice from somewhere else. Everyone froze and stiffened with fear. Inspector Ube alone rose and stared at the bedroom door.

“Someone’s in there!”

“Who is it?” Yamaji also stood. “Who’s in there? Come out now!” he demanded, already bracing himself with a sense of foreboding.

The door opened slowly. The six in the living room gasped. There in the doorway, leaning on the doorpost, stood Morio Osanai. He was dressed as a young samurai and held a naked sword in his hand, his indistinct outline merging with the glimmering light behind him. His lifeless eyes of gloom and darkness glowered at them under heavy lids, casting a look that carried a vague threat of malice. Though his visual appearance was incomplete, he carried an evil presence that pierced the subconscious of the six. He was beautiful – so beautiful, indeed, that he could have stepped out of a
sashie
illustration from an Edo-period novel. But that merely enhanced the sense of danger.

“He’s from last night’s dream,” Atsuko said as she retreated toward the kitchen. Her seat had been closest to the door.

“Disappear! Disappear!” Tokita incanted loudly while protecting Atsuko with his massive frame, mindful of the tale he’d just heard from Noda. “You don’t exist. Disappear! Disappear!”

The young samurai smiled thinly, then started to murmur words that were clearly those of a man talking in his sleep. “What happened after I drew the sword. In my hand, it’s in my hand. When I wake up, there’s old Tokita. Ticky tocky tacky too. There’s me. Adultery, is it. Devil of the white chair, devil of the gold chair. Wretch. Cur.”

Ube aimed his pistol at the young samurai, who was approaching Tokita with sword poised at eye level. Unwilling to shoot, Ube turned to Chief Inspector Yamaji. “Er – what do you want me to do?”

“If you shoot him, he surely won’t die in real life,” Yamaji said in confusion. “But what effect will it have on him?”

The young samurai made for Tokita, wielding the blade above his head.

“Get him off me!” Tokita yelled as he cowered before the samurai.

“Shoot him!” screamed Atsuko. “It’ll have no effect in reality!”

“Shoot!”

Ube sensed that the samurai was about to bring his sword down. He pulled the trigger.

The samurai’s body jerked as a spray of red spattered his chest. His sword sliced aimlessly through the air. The sight of his Adonisian face distorted with pain, his hair all disheveled, was not without its sordid side, as if painted with distemper. But at the same time it shone with a perverse beauty that seemed not of this world. His staggering lurch was a dance of death in full technicolor. Those faltering cries of anguish, the fresh blood that trickled from the corner of his mouth, those dying eyes staring fixedly into space – these were truly the aesthetics of death. And in the very instant before he fell facedown on the floor, he vanished.