BEFORE YOU READ THIS BOOK you must know: this is NOTHING like the anime. If that's what you want, move along.Why do I give this book a 4? I suppose because it's one of those pieces that left me going, "WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST READ?"That is to say, there are some positive points from a literary perspective. I'm intrigued by the representations of Christianity vs. Buddhism. There are also plugs of philosophy. The dreams could be interesting to sit down and analyze.But this was a book that took me WAY too long to finish. I thought it'd be a quick read, but the first half of the book is really pretty boring. I also stepped away from the book for awhile because I was so sick of the rape scenes and the narrator's perspective on rape (as one other reviewer mentioned, you can't make rape enjoyable). Not to sound like a total "prude", but I'm interested in why the author felt it necessary to have so many rape and sex scenes.But again, I gave it a 4 because of the second half of the novel which left me questioning the author's motives/ideology a little more. Maybe there is none. Either way, it's interesting to think about. Since I do have a fetish for science fiction and weird books in general, of course I enjoyed it *clear bias here*.Well, I did see that majority of the flaws fell on the poor sentence construction and on how poorly the paragraphs were brought together, but I fell in love with how Tsutsui describes the dreams. The appropriate use of adjectives made the story richer and made the images vivid. Although, I have to say that there was a lot of lost potential in the book, as I have seen the movie first (and boy was it amazing), I still enjoyed the book a lot.When I'm talking about lost potential, I'm talking about how far you can go when you are conscious when dreaming (somewhat like lucid dreaming). Most of the time, the book fell flat when it comes to the ideas in the dreams, and instead of exploring more and more into the impossibilities that could've been, Tsutsui stuck with average. And average, wasn't what I was hoping for when reading about dreams and psychotherapy.Thank the heavens the movie was just perfect though. Four stars, Tsutsui (maybe because I enjoyed the book because I enjoyed the movie. Does that even make sense?)
What do You think about Paprika (1993)?
A crazy story, a very fun experience. I really enjoyed this book!
—meg
