Paprika by Yasutaka Tsutsui

Paprika

Yasutaka Tsutsui

Take a surreal adventure into the world of Atsuko Chiba a psychotherapist who works with amazing mechanical devices that allow her to enter her patients' dreams. Look beyond the unwieldy technological explanations and nonsensical dream-language to enjoy the whirlwind of phantasmagorical hallucinations that are both gentle and disturbing, bizarre and erotic. Watch out for late night reading sessions...this one could give you nightmares!

Extract
Baseball cap, sunglasses, moustache. He was every bit a film director, a stereotypical caricature of a film director. But he lacked the comical touch of parody. Paprika intuitively felt that this was a 'shadow', one of Jung's archetypes. It was without a doubt the 'potential self' of Noda, as the person who was having the dream. The film director must have been Noda himself; he had probably dreamt of being a film director when he was a boy.
'Did you want to be a film director?' asked Paprika, hoping to confirm her theory. The viewpoint of the dream instantly changed. Now it was seen through the director's eyes. Noda, the director, yelled at Paprika.
'Come on, it's ********! Ready! And-'
But before he could say 'Action', Paprika yelled back at him.
'Who's the cameraman?!' It could not have been Namba.
This appeared to come as a shock. Just as he was mouthing '********', Noda woke up. Paprika may have failed as a dream detective, but felt instinctively that she'd come close to the heart of the matter.
Parallels
  • The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
  • The Persistence of Memory - painting by Salvador Dali by -
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Violence
Explicit sexual content