4

From her hairstyle and dress sense, Paprika seemed a rather simple girl. But the more she spoke, the more her intelligence seemed to shine through, like the gleam in her eye.

“Um … Would you mind if I had another?” asked Noda.

“Sure. Go ahead,” Paprika said at first, then suddenly added, donning her therapist’s hat, “Wait a minute. How many have you had? This is your second, right? Well, OK. If it’s only your second. Go ahead.”

Paprika’s funny little flurry made Noda feel even more relaxed. “Mind you, I’d better not, if you’re going to start the treatment soon,” he said. “They say it’s best if you don’t drink.”

Paprika smiled precociously before looking hard at her client. “You’re a gentleman, Mr. Noda. I’ll stop here too. Though I’d love to continue.”

“I’ll treat you some other time,” Noda said, then lowered his voice. “Speaking of which, where do you do the treatment? Shima didn’t say …”

Paprika looked around the bar again. They were still the only customers. But even so, perhaps this wasn’t quite the place to discuss the ins and outs of psychoanalysis. She emptied her glass in one gulp, then nodded. “I’ll show you. Come on!”

“P.S. I Love You” was playing again as they got up to go. Paprika went straight outside, leaving Noda to settle up at the counter.

“Are you feeling all right, Mr. Noda?” Jinnai asked in a tone of concern, having caught snatches of their conversation.

“Why?” asked Noda, taken aback.

“Well, the girl’s a nurse, isn’t she?”

Noda stepped outside to find Paprika sitting in a taxi by the curbside. She must have stated her destination already, for the driver headed off toward Akasaka the moment Noda settled into his seat. The road was lined with high-rise buildings, most of which had apartments on their upper floors – investments for the filthy rich, or company housing for the top brass of large corporations.

“I’ll scan your dreams in my apartment,” said Paprika. “I’ve got all the equipment there.” Her breath smelt sweet. It was the breath of a mature woman. Startled, Noda once again wondered how old she was.

“Do you think the treatment will take time, in my case?” he asked, raising the issue that concerned him most.

Paprika donned her therapist’s hat again. “Anxiety is an integral part of being human. Heidegger saw it as a necessary evil. If you could tame your anxiety and find a way of living with it, or even make use of it, you would no longer need treatment. And then you could discover what caused your anxiety.”

“I’m afraid I haven’t got time for that.”

“Sure, understood. You’ve got your work, after all. You’ve got your family. But you need to relax. Don’t be so impatient. In principle, you’ll definitely be cured, provided we can locate the cause. In a way, your condition is like a coin falling into a pocket. Pockets have bottoms, don’t they. The coin will always be found. It’s rare for the condition to get any worse than that.”

Noda was relieved. Perhaps he could avoid going schizophrenic after all!

The taxi stopped in front of a multistory apartment block in Shinanomachi. It was where Shima lived, and the directors of the Institute for Psychiatric Research. The Foundation owned rooms on several floors of the building. In that case, this “Paprika” must also be one the Institute’s directors. The apartments were far too expensive to be owned by ordinary individuals, that was for sure. There was so much that Noda wanted to ask. But he held himself back, and concentrated instead on following Paprika’s dance through the spacious lobby of the apartment building toward the lift. After all, Shima had strictly forbidden him to ask her true identity or her real name.

He was soon to discover her surname, though. As they reached the door to her apartment at the eastern end of the sixteenth floor, it was written in bold capitals on a metal nameplate fixed to the wall: Apt. 1604 CHIBA.

The apartment was on a grand scale that could only have been designed for a senior executive. An eight-paneled glass door led out from a sumptuously furnished living room onto a veranda, with a panoramic night view of Shinjuku visible beyond.

“You must be some kind of VIP!” Noda exclaimed with unbridled admiration, but Paprika remained cool. Besides the kitchen and other facilities, this living room seemed to be where Paprika spent her time when not asleep. She beckoned Noda toward another room at the far end. It was dark and appeared to be a treatment room – the patient’s bed suggested as much. The room also contained other furnishings, including another bed and a wardrobe that must have been Paprika’s. Various devices lined the wall next to the crude pipe-assembled patient’s bed. Monitor screens gleamed with motionless graphics. They were the only source of light, as the room had no windows.

“You don’t suffer from claustrophobia, I hope?”

“No. Fear of heights, if anything.”

“I’ll remember that. Will you be able to sleep straightaway?”

“I’m always tired. I never have any problem getting to sleep,” said Noda, feeling at a loss in such unusual surroundings. “But I wonder whether I could fall asleep under the eye of one as pretty as you?”

“Just relax. Would you get undressed now?”

Noda first took off his jacket and handed it to Paprika. She placed it on a hanger, which she hung in the wardrobe. Next came the tie, then the shirt. Paprika tidied Noda’s clothes with the dexterity and professional attention of a nurse. Reassured, Noda had no hesitation in taking off his trousers.

“What great dress sense you have. Such high quality,” Paprika said, smiling at last, as Noda lay on the bed in his underwear. “Do you always sleep like that?”

“I can’t stand pajamas,” he replied. “They make me sweat. I usually wear as little as possible.”

“You could take your vest off as well, if you liked.”

“No, thanks. This will do fine,” Noda laughed. He put his feet under the cold, pure-white sheet at the foot of the bed. The room felt cool. The pillow was hard and smelt of starch.

As he watched Paprika busily moving about and preparing something in the ghostly light of the monitor screens, Noda began to feel a sense of déjà vu. He could hear music. It was Rameau’s “Sommeil de Dardanus.”

Paprika put what looked like a shower cap over Noda’s head. It was transparent, but had an electronic circuit pattern resembling a street map printed on its surface. A single cable trailed away from the back of the cap. Noda felt rather relieved at that; he’d expected it to be more of a hard helmet-like contraption.

“Is this what you call the gorgon?”

“I can see you’ve done your homework. Yes, it’s the gorgon, named of course after the Greek myth. But now, rather than having cables all over the place, it just has the one. Soon we won’t even need the cap.”

“Is it a kind of sensor?”

“You could say that. You could also see it as a combination of interfaces between a highly sensitive brain-wave detector and the central processor. In the old days, they had to embed electrodes under the skull just to investigate brain waves in the cerebral cortex. Now all you have to do is wear this. Aren’t you lucky?!”

“And none of these devices have been commercialized yet?”

“No, they’re still being developed. That’s why it’s so untidy in here …”

So who was developing them? If not Paprika herself, then whoever it was must have assembled the equipment there. In that case, since the devices were still being developed, it would have to be that scientist at the Institute for Psychiatric Research, the one who was up for the Nobel Prize or something. Would such a person really come all this way to a private residence just to assemble the devices? Noda was beginning to feel anxious again. “So it’s cutting-edge technology, you might say?” he asked with a hint of irony.

“Sure,” Paprika replied as if “cutting edge” were perfectly normal. That at last put Noda’s mind at ease. He allowed his head to sink back onto the pillow.

“Aaah … No electrodes embedded under my skull … I shouldn’t have any trouble falling asleep at all.”

“Good. And you’ve had a drink, so I hope you won’t be needing any hypnosis or medication.” Paprika sat on the chair next to Noda, then started talking to him in her relaxed bedside manner. “Do you often have dreams, Mr. Noda?”

“Yes, strange dreams. Often.”

“It’s better to dream a lot, actually. It’s good for the brain. Interesting people have interesting dreams. Dull people only have dull ones. I’m looking forward to seeing yours.”

“And you actually appear in people’s dreams?”

“Well, I won’t tonight, as it’s the first time. I’m not familiar with your dreams, and anyway we’ve only just met. It would be too much of a shock to your system.”

“Oh well. But I must say, I never thought psychotherapy could be so enjoyable!”

“You say that because your condition is only mild. There are people who really hate seeing the dream detective. Right. I’d better not be here. You’ll fall asleep more easily on your own, won’t you.”

“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.