Paprika by Yasutaka Tsutsui

First published in Japanese in 1993; published in translation by Vintage Contemporaries on February 12, 2013 

It's hard to know what to make of Paprika. There's a surrealistic bizarreness to the story that is both appealing and frustrating. The surrealism is a natural component of the story's subject matter: the intersection of dreams and conscious thought.

Paprika imagines a world in which mental illnesses can be detected with devices that scan "the inside of the psyche." One such device is a dream collector that allows a therapist to monitor (and actually enter) a patient's dreams. Now that the devices have been legalized, two researchers are at the cutting edge of the technology: Atsuko and Tokita. One storyline involves a Beauty and the Beast love story between Tokita, who is obese and socially stunted, and Atsuko, whose love for Tokita is rivaled by her love for one of her patients.

The best dream detective is a woman with dual identities who is known in her younger persona as Paprika. Paprika has not worked in several years -- when she was working, the devices were still illegal -- but she's asked to rejoin the Institute for Psychiatric Research to diagnose the neurosis of a businessman named Tatsuo Noda, who is suffering from panic attacks. Paprika's work with Noda, and the secret of Paprika's true identity, gives rise to the novel's second storyline. This evolves into the story of Noda's work, the difficult decisions he must make and the rivalries with which he must cope. The corporate intrigue provides some of the novel's best moments.

The dream collector has certain drawbacks. Therapists can become lost in a patient's mind. A therapist named Tsumura has apparently become infected with a patient's schizophrenia by using the dream collector, but Atsuko suspects that the device was sabotaged. This provides the novel's third plot thread, evolving into a tale of conspiracy as factions within the Institute wage war against each other. That storyline gives the novel its binding narrative but it is also the novel's least interesting aspect.

There are other plot threads and many other characters woven together in this complex and occasionally confusing book. One of the characters is an embittered, misogynistic co-worker who is envious that Atsuko might win the Nobel Prize he was denied. Other characters are patients who, like the therapists, suffer from a variety of anxieties and mood disorders. Nearly all of the characters are developed with surprising subtlety given the novel's brevity.

Jungian dream interpretation and the insight it offers into anxiety and depression is the novel's most interesting theme, and the dream sequences are the best (if also the most ambiguous) in the book. Time and place shift unpredictably and words become garbled; sometimes text is represented as **** because the narrator can't understand what is being said. Yet the novel goes beyond dream analysis. It is also about the confusion (and potential merger) of dreams and reality. Dreams and reality become hopelessly tangled, leaving characters in an understandable state of confusion. If dreams can create reality, should you react to the new reality by pretending you're in a dream? And how do you know whether you're dreaming?

The novel incorporates a number of sex scenes. They are not limited to traditional two-person, male-female coupling. The scenes aren't particularly graphic, and those that are dreamt don't always make sense, but some readers might find them disturbing. Both while she's dreaming and while she's awake, Paprika is raped or nearly raped. Her fatalistic acceptance of sexual assault might upset some readers, as might a dream in which she's begging a man to rape her (or just to have sex with her, whichever he prefers).

Because Paprika is a difficult novel to absorb, I found myself reading a few of the short chapters, then chewing on them for a day or two before returning to the novel. Perhaps I should have soldiered through it in fewer sittings, and if I were to read it again (a second reading would, I think, help me grasp its subtleties), that's probably what I would do. While I ultimately admired the novel and even enjoyed most of it, I'm not sure whether I'll ever be up to a reread because the first reading was a bit draining. Maybe in a few years, after it settles in, I'll tackle it again.

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