Paprika

Yasutaka Tsutsui, 1993 [Andrew Driver, 2009]

(March 2012)

A Japanese master to be ranked alongside Haruki Murakami.

This is what it says on the back cover. Tellingly it doesn’t say who this Japanese master is. I have a hard time believing it’s the author of this book, and this is meant to be his ‘masterpiece’. Maybe they weren’t ranking writing ability but some other skill-set. Ballroom dancing perhaps, or maybe speed-eating.

  

“Kosaka Tokita lumbered into the Senior Staff Room.”

This is not the most auspicious of opening lines. I’ve seen worse, but this is pretty laboured and clunky. It’s why I’m going to list translators as well as authors from now on, when appropriate. For the other books in translation I’ve read, I’ve shied away from commenting on the quality of the prose a little. Didn’t seem fair, somehow. This way at least both the original authors and the translators can stand or fall together, and take the credit or blame as appropriate.

It’s mainly blame here. I almost gave up on this book after the first few pages. Take this beauty from the third page of the story –

“Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.” Torataro Shima, the Institute Administrator, stood before them with a frown. “Our two top candidates for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, fighting over a lunchbox?!” he said with a hint of sadness.

Seamless plot and character development, I’m sure you’ll agree. I especially like how the prize category is given in full, despite the fact it’s already been made abundantly clear this is a psychiatric institute and these people are psychiatrists. Were it not for this awkwardly lengthy clarification I may have come to the erroneous conclusion they were up for the Peace or Literature prizes instead. The words and punctuation are also disconcertingly at odds. A ‘hint of sadness’ is how a vet sounds when putting down a family pet. An exclamation mark doesn’t really convey that, and an interrobang certainly doesn’t.

“I know it’s hard Mr Rogers, but Skipper had a good life. There’s nothing more we could have done for him?!”

Pretty soon after making us swallow this awkward lump the institute holds a press conference, which conveniently/clumsily allows for an even greater slug of exposition and back-story to be forced down our still raw and tender gullets. It did make me want to gag a little.

We’re also repeatedly told how beautiful and clever and beautiful and talented and beautiful the protagonist is. Every single male character wants to either fuck her or rape her, or both, sometimes at her own insistence (the raping, not the fucking. I know consensual rape is an oxymoron, but there it is).

The only exception to this is the lead antagonist, largely because, as a member of the global homosexual illumiati, he's one of them evil gayers. And even he has a bash by proxy when he orders her rape (which she finds frustratingly unfulfilling). Tsutsui might just as well have cut to the chase and called her Suu Meeri.

Still, I’ve read other books recently that blossomed after unpromising starts, so I stuck with it, thinking it might improve or have other redeeming qualities.

It doesn’t.

You may have noticed that I enjoy, or at least appreciate, pretty much all of the books I write about here. Obviously there’s a fairly strong selection bias at play. As I’ve got older I’ve got better at judging my own tastes. I’ve also become more willing to drop books halfway if I’m not getting anything from them. I do read some bad stuff, but it generally doesn’t get finished, so it doesn’t get commented on. Frankly I’d have stopped reading this after the first fifty pages if I hadn’t quite fancied the thought of writing it up here and giving it the trashing it deserves.

The characters are so thinly drawn and one-dimensional they could comfortably hide behind a short queue of hydrogen atoms. The dialogue is painfully unnatural and unreadable, and exists not to develop character but to drive the plot. This might be forgivable were the plot not also mundane, tedious, and instantly forgettable. Something about cars and office politics, I think. This is all served to a continual thunder of homophobia and misogyny - with a hint of anti-semitism to taste - and in prose that is just awful. Teeth-achingly, bowel-voidingly, eye-bleedingly awful. It is impossible to overstate this point.

There’s lots of stuff about using technology to see other people’s dreams, and some of these sequences are mildly diverting. But frankly they’re dreams; you could make up any old shit and it’d fly provided it was suitably surreal and trippy. If all I wanted was half-baked psychoanalysis of too-neatly contrived subconscious meanderings I’d talk to the crazy lady who runs the ‘healing’ crystal stall in Camden market. Her efforts to repair my cracked aura might point to a personality that doesn’t quite mesh with the real world, but at least she has one. Tsutsui could have killed off every single one of his characters halfway through and replaced them all with animatronic meat-puppets and I would have neither noticed nor cared.

The cover’s quite nice though.