Paprika by Yasutaka Tsutsui

was the girl too! They couldn’t stand the thought that such a pretty girl was so much better than them!”
    Tokita thrust out his fleshy red lips as he continued to whine like an infant. Stifled laughter started to spread among the massed ranks of journalists. It was a diabolical, insidious kind of mockery that they must all have observed, or even experienced, during their own childhoods.
    “I mean, even I can like pretty girls, can’t I? But they didn’t care, oh no, they didn’t care, they’d just stand around and jeer nastily, or they’d push me onto a girl and make me kiss her against my will. Whether I liked her or not, I’d always end up feeling sorry for her. But the girls all resented me for it, they hated me. So in the end I didn’t want to be with other people anymore and started to think of nothing but computers. Well, what else could I do?!”
    Tokita’s babyish wailing could almost have been an act designed to hoodwink the female reporter, but it was altogether too undignified for that. Out flowed the moans, on and on, until the journalists had simply had enough.
    “All right. All right. I understand. I’m very sorry that we asked such an insensitive question.” The science correspondent stood with a pained smile and bowed his head repeatedly until Tokita’s whining had ceased.
    The female reporter, mortified at such a put-down by a colleague, slapped the palm of her hand on the tabletop in frustration.
    “Would you mind continuing?” the science correspondent entreated Atsuko. “I assume you went through a phase of trial and error before applying the devices to psychotherapy?”
    “Well, first we recorded patients’ dreams, purely to discover the abnormal way in which they associate signifiant with signifié . To me, for example, you look like a science correspondent from the Mainichi Times . But to a patient, you might look like a spy from some foreign country. Then the patient would always put those two concepts together as a kind of mental association – spy equals newspaper reporter. But this isn’t like some word association game on TV, where you know the answer but it’s hidden at first. The very fact that the concepts are associated is unknown to the patient. Using patients’ dreams, we discover this kind of abnormal association on their behalf. In some cases, this alone has proved very useful in treating patients.”
    “In a single institution, twenty patients entered the recovery phase during the same period,” Shima threw in with some pride. “Well, we call it the remission phase, but anyway. This was quite unheard of, and caused quite a stir in the psychiatric world at the time, I can tell you. Globally, that is. Perhaps some of you can remember it.”
    “Next, we discovered that we could access patients’ dreams and treat those patients using the collector,” Atsuko continued – only to be interrupted again, this time by the science correspondent.
    “Sure, but as soon as it was reported in academic circles, it came out that the treatment was extremely dangerous, didn’t it. Then you were forbidden to take the devices outside this Institute or use them for other purposes – weren’t you?”
    “That’s it!” the Senior Science Editor from the Shinnichi suddenly exclaimed, making a crude scraping sound with his chair as he stood. “Now I remember! When the devices were banned, wasn’t there a rumor that they’d been taken outside the Institute and used in experiments to treat mental illnesses other than schizophrenia?”
    This new input caused quite a commotion. Some nodded. Atsuko instantly realized that the newspaper reporters had secretly been circulating such rumors for some time, but that, for whatever reason, they’d hesitated to come out with them until now.
    Seeing that he’d properly set the cat among the pigeons, the Senior Science Editor now directed his chin toward Atsuko with a triumphant look of satisfaction. “Am I right? You secretly used the