Tsutsui, Yasutaka: Paprika (2012, Vintage Contemporaries)
English language
Published 2012 by Vintage Contemporaries.
"Widely acknowledged as Yasutaka Tsutsui's masterpiece, Paprika unites his surreal, quirky imagination with a compelling, haunting narrative. When prototype models of a device for entering into patients' dreams go missing at the Institute for Psychiatric Research, it transpires that someone is using them to manipulate people's dreams and drive them insane. Threatened both personally and professionally, brilliant psychotherapist Atsuko Chiba has to journey into the world of fantasy to fight her mysterious opponents. As she delves ever deeper into the imagination, the borderline between dream and reality becomes increasingly blurred, and nightmares begin to leak into the everyday realm. The scene is set for a final showdown between the dream detective and her enemies, with the subconscious as their battleground, and the future of the waking world at stake"--
Similar in concept to the movie Inception, but this novel came first and is more firmly in the surrealist tradition. You don’t think things can get more absurd than the opening chapters, but they do. A riot of Freudian and Jungian psychology, folklore, occultism, sex, violence, and—most savagely irrational of all—the internal politics of organizations.
