Comparisons to Haruki Murakami and J.G. Ballard on the cover of this book do Tsutsui little service. His novels do not have the steely gaze and cool prose of Ballard's "Crash," nor the magical-realist tint of Murakami's "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle." What they do have is a thorough awareness of horror films and classic science fiction, plus a peculiar Japaneseness that makes them — for want of a better word — strange.
Amid medical and administrative politics at the Institute for Psychiatric Research, the beautiful and brilliant Atsuko Chiba analyzes schizophrenic patients using psychotherapy (PT) devices invented by her co-Nobel-Prize-nominated, otaku-like partner. These machines enable the doctors to monitor, record, participate in, and manipulate their patients' dreams.
The institute's administrator asks Atsuko to help a friend of his, a top-ranking executive in the motor industry suffering from a very Heideggerean form of anxiety neurosis. Enter Paprika — the dream detective — a kind of superhero among psychoanalysts. While Atsuko is one of Japan's most brilliant psychotherapists, her alter-ego Paprika is, well, Japan's most brilliant psychotherapist.