Paprika

  “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 inn
er 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.”

  “But you feel protective toward him.”

  “Frankly, it’s getting to be a bit of a pain. Though yes, he is a valuable person.” Noda noticed how terribly tired Paprika looked. “Well, it’s getting rather late, isn’t it. Should we leave it there?”

  “Thank you. And sorry. It’s just that I’ve got an early start tomorrow, and there are still things I need to do.”

  “All right then, that’s it for now,” said Noda, getting up quickly. “I look forward to the next session.”

  “Right. I’ll be in touch.”

  “By the way … Paprika?” Noda said as he made to leave. “That second part of the dream? Does it mean I should protect Namba more than ever, because he has so many enemies?”

  Paprika opened her eyes wide and laughed. “That’s maybe how Jung would have seen it! But I think something else caused your neurosis. Something to do with your school days, I’d say.”

  6

  It was already past one in the afternoon when Atsuko finally arrived at her laboratory. She’d been up all night studying a memo of questions from the newspaper companies.

  A press conference had been called for two o’clock. The memo contained a schedule of the questions to be asked; the newspaper companies always provided them in advance. Atsuko usually needed to prepare the answers beforehand, partly because Kosaku Tokita was such a blubberingly inept speaker. And since there were always bound to be some questions that weren’t on the memo, Atsuko had to prepare answers for the hypothetical ones as well.

  Atsuko ordered Nobue Kakimoto to make two copies of the answers and to take one each to Shima and Tokita. Then she made some coffee. She loathed press conferences. There would always be some jumped-up new science or academic correspondent who really thought he knew his stuff, but just asked the same old questions as everyone else. No matter that Atsuko had answered that very question ad nauseam in the past; they still expected her to provide a neat, easy answer every time. On this occasion, as it happened, the news that Tokita and Chiba were leading contenders for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine had started to circulate. There were bound to be a few social affairs correspondents who were itching to ask banal questions about that; it was Atsuko’s job to protect her naive colleague from them.

  Torataro Shima had always insisted that it was important to inform society of the Institute’s achievements and enlighten the public as to the value of its research. But to Atsuko, attending a press conference simply meant being exposed to public view in a way that was barely welcome. In her view, the journalists weren’t interested in noting some form of higher intelligence in the young, beautiful woman called Atsuko Chiba. They hated the idea that she was their intellectual superior, and merely seemed bent on finding something in her that would reinforce their preconceived image of Japanese femininity.

  At five to two, an employee from the Secretariat came to call Atsuko. The Meeting Room reserved for the press conference was already humming with the chitter-chatter of more than two hundred journalists and photographers. The room was like a pressure cooker ready to blow.

  The seating arrangement had been decided long ago by Torataro Shima. As always, Atsuko sat in the center with Tokita to her right and Shima to her left. Behind them in the corner sat the Secretary-General Katsuragi, who acted as moderator. Once Atsuko had taken her seat, the party was complete. Some social affairs correspondents who were attending for the first time let out involuntary gasps of astonishment at her ravishing beauty, which even exceeded its reputation. Atsuko wore a navy-blue suit.

  Katsuragi stood, declared the press conference open and introduced the trio. Then Shima himself stood and greeted the throng most genially. He stressed, somewhat patronizingly, that the press conference was being held at the urgent request of the media; he stopped short of mentioning that Tokita and Chiba had been shortlisted for the Nobel Prize. But no sooner had Katsuragi invited the journalists to ask questions than a man who was obviously a social affairs correspondent started grilling them on that very issue. What chance did they each have of actually winning the Prize, in terms of percentage? None of the three could find words to answer such a half-witted question. So then the journalist directed his question to Atsuko in person.

  “I don’t think that’s a question I’m qualified to answer,” she answered.

  “Why is that?”

  “Because I’m not qualified to answer it.”

  A modest round of laughter ensued. Then a science correspondent, a familiar face at the Institute, rephrased the question. He prefaced it with an apology that a social affairs correspondent who was attending his first press conference had been allowed to start proceedings with a question of the very lowest caliber. “This is a question for Doctor Tokita,” he went on. “Doctor Tokita, your nomination for the Nobel Prize must of course be related to your achievement in developing PT devices. Now, I’ve heard it explained a number of times, but I still have a lot of trouble understanding the actual principle behind these devices. Do you think you could explain it to us once more, in words that we can actually understand?”

  In fairness, the question was on the memo; Atsuko had no choice but to let Tokita provide the answer himself. The problem was that there were no more than three people in the whole world – including Tokita himself – who understood the principle behind the PT devices. And now Tokita, a bad speaker at the best of times, was going to explain it all in words that everyone could understand? The very thought made Atsuko squirm, and Shima must have felt the same. Nevertheless, Tokita began to reply. He normally spoke with a pronounced lisp, owing to his short tongue, but when he became agitated it developed into a veritable slobber. He always did his level best to speak intelligibly, in his own way. But it was always after the first few words that his intelligibility began to fall apart.

  “Well … Um … Er … To explain it all from the beginning, er, when I was at primary school, and secondary school for that matter, I was known as a ‘geek,’ you see, because I did nothing but play computer games, but then I gradually started programming games and messing about with semiconductors and making all kinds of things. You know. But then my late father said I should become a doctor, so I went to study psychopathology at a medical university, you follow, but even then I kept messing about with computers on the side, and apart from that I got quite interested in ECG, that’s electrocardiograms, so then I thought, what if I were to put the two together, and then I suddenly hit on the idea of using fiber bundles to create a slit-no-check system for floating computer image processing, and when I did brain tests using this, all sorts of things started to appear on the images besides the brain waves—”

  “Er, sorry, but that’s where you always lose me,” the science correspondent interjected hurriedly. “What exactly do you mean by a ‘slit-no-check system,’ for example?”

  “Ah. Yes. Well, how shall I put it. Er. A slit electron stream electro-transmission efficiency, by which I mean, the electrode in the slit through which the electrons pass, well, the ratio of the average rated current to the non-slit current injection, if we applied that direct
ly to the fiber bundle designed to universalize the conversion code on the analogous mapping space using discrete fractal compression, we would no longer need a validity check, nor a slit, nor a floating core, and so—”

  “Er – sorry,” the science correspondent interrupted again, now growing quite impatient. “Could we possibly take these phrases one by one? First off, this ‘fiber bundle’ – is it the same as the ones they use in a gastrocamera? It’s a bundle of fibers just like that, yes?”

  Atsuko gave an involuntary sigh. It was quite a loud sigh. The journalists all turned to look at her.

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “The reason why Doctor Chiba sighed just now”—Tokita laughed, gallantly trying to cover for his colleague—“is that I have only just started to explain the principle of PT devices, and if I were to explain all the concepts one by one, as you say, we would quite literally be here for hours! If I may just answer about the fiber bundle, though, you’re quite right. Yes. So then we construct horizontal parallel buffers with these bundles of fibers, and then superimpose vertical parallel arrays over them. So then the field quite literally becomes infinite, and we no longer need to check the input data, or what have you. That means we don’t need a floating core or anything like that, you see.” In his own mind, Tokita felt sure he’d explained the principle in terms that any schoolboy could understand. He nodded in satisfaction at his feat. “Are you with me thus far?”

  The room fell silent. None of the reporters had a single idea what he’d been talking about.

  A middle-aged journalist stood up, his face contorted in an ironic smile at the sheer unintelligibility of it. “Sorry, but I’m not with you at all. And if we can’t understand it, how are we to write articles that our readers will understand?”

  “I see,” replied Tokita, a look of discomfort on his face.

  “So you see, Doctor Tokita, it’s really up to you to help us understand, isn’t it.”