Ring by Koji Suzuki (translated by Robert B. Rohmer and Glynne Walley). (1/2)
Title: Ring.
Author: Koji Suzuki (translated by Robert B. Rohmer and Glynne Walley).
Genre: Fiction, fantasy, horror.
Country: Japan.
Language: Japanese.
Publication Date: 1991 (2003 in English).
Summary: A mysterious videotape warns that the viewer will die in one week unless a certain, unspecified act is performed. Exactly one week after watching the tape, four teenagers die one after another of heart failure. Asakawa, a hardworking journalist, is intrigued by his niece's inexplicable death. His investigation leads him from a metropolitan Tokyo teeming with modern society's fears to a rural Japan - a mountain resort, a volcanic island, and a countryside clinic - haunted by the past. His attempt to solve the tape's mystery before it's too late - for everyone - assumes an increasingly deadly urgency. (Refer to PART 2 for the rest of the quotes.)
My rating: 8.5/10.
My review:
♥ For the moment Tomoko was home alone in their brand-new house.
It was strangely humid, considering that it hadn't rained in several days. In addition to the perspiration that oozed from her body, a dampness seemed to hang in the air. Tomoko unconsciously slapped at her thigh. But when she moved her hand away she could find no trace of the mosquito. An itch began to develop just above her knee, but maybe it was just her imagination. She heard a buzzing sound. Tomoko waved her hands over her head. A fly. It flew suddenly upwards to escape the draft from the fan and disappeared from view. How had a fly gotten into the room? The door was closed. Tomoko checked the window screens, but nowhere could she find a hole big enough to admit a fly. She suddenly realized she was thirsty. She also needed to pee.
She felt stifled-not exactly like she was suffocating, but like there was a weight pressing down on her chest. For some time Tomoko had been complaining to herself about how unfair life was, but now she was like a different person as she lapsed into silence. As she started down the stairs her heart began to pound for no reason. Headlights from a passing car grazed across the wall at the foot of the stairs and slipped away. As the sound of the car's engine faded into the distance, the darkness in the house seemed to grow more intense. Tomoko intentionally made a lot of noise going down the stairs and turned on the light in the downstairs hall.
She remained seated on the toilet, lost in thought, for a long time even after she had finished peeing. The violent beating of her heart still had not subsided. She'd never experienced anything like this before. What was going on? She took several deep breaths to steady herself, then stood up and pulled up her shorts and panties together.
Mom and Dad, please get home soon, she said to herself, suddenly sounding very girlish. Eww, gross. Who am I talking to?
It wasn't like she was addressing her parents, asking them to come home. She was asking someone else....
Hey. Stop scaring me. Please....
Before she knew it she was even asking politely.
She washed her hands at the kitchen sink. Without drying them she took some ice cubes from the freezer, dropped them in a glass, and filled it with coke. She drained the glass in a single gulp and set it on the counter. The ice cubes swirled in the glass for a moment, then settled. Tomoko shivered. She felt cold. Her throat was still dry. She took the big bottle of coke from the refrigerator and refilled her glass. Her hands were shaking now. She had a feeling there was something behind her. Some thing-definitely not a person. The sour stench of rotting flesh melted into the air around her, enveloping her. It couldn't be anything corporeal.
"Stop it! Please!" she begged, speaking aloud now.
The fifteen-watt fluorescent bulb over the kitchen sink flickered on and off like ragged breathing. It had to be new, but its light seemed pretty unreliable right now. Suddenly Tomoko wished she had hit the switch that turned on all the lights in the kitchen. But she couldn't walk over to where the switch was. She couldn't even turn around. She knew what was behind her: a Japanese-style room of eight tatami mats, with the Buddhist altar dedicated to her grandfather's memory in the alcove. Through the slightly open curtains she'd be able to see the grass in the empty lots and a thin stripe of light from the condos beyond. There shouldn't be anything else.
By the time she had drunk half the second glass of cola, Tomoko couldn't move at all. The feeling was too intense, she couldn't be just imagining the presence. She was sure that something was reaching out even now to touch her on the neck.
.....Oh, Mom and Dad, what are you doing?
"Come home!" Tomoko cried aloud
But even after she spoke, the eerie shadow showed no signs of dissipating. It was behind her, keeping still, watching and waiting. Waiting for its chance to arrive.
At seventeen Tomoko didn't know what true terror was. But she did know that there were fears that grew in the imagination of their own accord. That must be it. Yeah, that's all it is. When I turn around there won't be anything there. Nothing at all.
Tomoko was seized by a desire to turn around. She wanted to confirm that there was nothing there and get herself out of the situation. But was that really all there was to it? An evil chill seemed to rise up around her shoulders, spread to her back, and began to slither down her spine, lower and lower. Her T-shirt was soaked with cold sweat. Her physical responses were too strong for it to be just her imagination.
...Didn't someone say your body is more honest than your mind?
Yet, another voice spoke too: Turn around, there shouldn't be anything there. If you don't finish your coke and get back to your studies there's no telling how you'll do on the test tomorrow.
In the glass an ice cube cracked. As if spurred by the sound, without stopping to think, Tomoko spun around.
♥ The man's face was amazingly distorted. The only word that could describe his expression was astonishment. Both eyes were wide open and staring and his bright-red tongue was stuck in the back of his throat, blocking it, while saliva drooled from the corner of his mouth. The ambulance would be arriving too late. When his hands had touched the kid's throat in removing his helmet, he hadn't felt a pulse. Kimura shuddered. The scene was losing reality.
One wheel of the fallen motorcycle still spun slowly and oil leaked from the engine, pooling in the street and running into the sewer. There was no breeze. The night sky was clear, while directly over their heads the stoplight turned red again. Kimura rose shakily to his feet, clutching at the guardrail that ran along the sidewalk. From there he looked once more at the man lying in the street. The man's head, pillowed on his helmet, was bent at nearly a right angle. An unnatural posture no matter how you looked at it.
Did I put it there? Did I put his head on his helmet like that? Like a pillow? For what?
He couldn't recall the past several seconds. Those wide open eyes were looking at him. A sinister chill swept over him. Lukewarm air seemed to pass right over his shoulders. It was a tropical evening, but Kimura found himself shivering uncontrollably.
♥ Asakawa's decision to take a taxi on this day and at this spot was nothing more than a whim, the outcome of a series of innocuous impulses. He hadn't emerged from the subway with the intention of hailing a cab. He'd been seduced by the outside air at the very moment that a taxi had approached with its red "vacant" lamp lit, and in that instant the thought of buying a ticket and transferring through three separate stations seemed like more effort than he could stand. If he had taken the subway home, however, a certain pair of incidents would almost certainly never have been connected. Of course, a story always begins with such a coincidence.
♥ A taxi driver can relax a bit once he knows precisely where his fare is going.
♥ But Asakawa himself didn't much care if the company made money or lost it. All that mattered to him was whether or not the work was engaging. No matter how easy a job was physically, if it didn't involve any imagination it usually ended up exhausting you.
♥ Nothing happened for a while. Ever since then he'd made a point of reading every inch of the local-news pages, but without coming across anything remotely similar. Or was it just that something horrible was advancing, slowly but surely, where Asakawa couldn't see?
♥ He climbed the stairs, muttering to himself, a virus, a virus. Indeed, he should start out with attempts at scientific explanation. Well, suppose there was a virus that caused heart attacks. At least it was a little more realistic than imagining that something supernatural was behind it all; it seemed less likely to get him laughed at.
..and if indeed that clue allowed him to unravel the riddle of their deaths-well, what could it have been anyway? Virus, virus. He was all too aware that the only reason he was calling it a virus was to keep himself form being overawed by the thought of some mysterious thing being behind it all. It made sense-to a degree-to marshal the power of science in facing down supernatural power. He wasn't going to get anywhere fighting a thing he didn't understand with words he didn't understand. He had to translate the thing he didn't understand into words he did.
♥ It wasn't that people refrained from saying anything out of fear of being laughed at for being unscientific. It was that they felt they'd be drawing unto themselves some unimaginable horror by admitting it. It was more convenient to indulge in scientific explanation, no matter how unconvincing it was.
A chill ran up Asakawa's spine and Yoshino's simultaneously. Unsurprisingly, they were both thinking the same thing. The silence only confirmed the premonition which was welling up in each man's breast. It's not over-it's only just started. No matter how much scientific knowledge they fill themselves with, on a very basic level, people believe in the existence of something that the laws of science can't explain.
♥ The best way to seal a woman's mouth was not to reply.
♥ Is there anything else Yoko's afraid of? That's right, there is. Darkness. She's terribly afraid of the dark. She absolutely never goes into an unlit room alone. "Yo-ko," sun-child. But darkness, too, really existed, as light's opposite pole. Even now, Yoko was asleep in her mother's embrace, in a dark room.
♥ A tunnel loomed in front of him, its entrance outlined in brilliant orange light. On the other side, just after he entered the Atami-Kannami Highway, he should start to see signs for South Hakone Pacific Land. The long tunnel would take him through the Tanna Ridge. As he entered it the sound of the wind changed. At the same time, his flesh, the passenger seat, and everything else in the car was bathed in orange light. He could feel his calm slipping away, he could feel his hackles rise. There were no cars coming from the opposite direction. The wipers squeaked as they rubbed against the now-dry windshield. He turned them off. He should reach his destination by eight. He didn't feel quite like flooring it, although the road was empty. Unconsciously, Asakawa was dreading the place he was heading to.
♥ Asakawa could more or less analyze why he'd been drawn to this modern building, to the point of barging into the restaurant. He found it somehow comforting. All the way here he had been imagining dark, utterly primitive log cabins-the perfect backdrop for a Friday the 13th scenario-and there was nothing of that in this building. Faced with this proof that the power of modern science functioned here, too, he felt somewhat reassured, strengthened. The only things that bothered him were the bad road that led here from the world below, and the fact that in spite of it there were so many people playing tennis and enjoying their dinner here in the world above. He wasn't sure exactly why this bothered him. It was just that, somehow, nobody here seemed quite... lifelike.
♥ In the middle of the black screen he thought he saw a pinpoint of light begin to flicker. It gradually expanded, jumping around to the left and right, before finally coming to rest on the left-hand side. Then it branched out, becoming a frayed bundle of lights, crawling around like worms, which finally formed themselves into words. Not the kind of captions one normally saw on film, though. These were poorly-written, as if scrawled by a white brush on jet-black paper. Somehow, though, he managed to make out what they said: WATCH UNTIL THE END. A command. These words disappeared, and the next floated up into view. YOU WILL BE EATEN BY THE LOST... The last word didn't make much sense, but being eaten didn't sound too pleasant. It seemed that there must have been an "or else" implied there. Don't turn off the video halfway through, or else something awful will happen: it was a threat.
YOU WILL BE EATEN BY THE LOST... The words grew larger and chased all the black from the screen. It was a flat change, from black to milk-white. It was a patchy, unnatural color, and it began to resemble a series of concepts painted on a canvas, one over another. The unconscious, squirming, worrying, finding an exit, spurting out-or maybe it was the throb of life. Thought had energy, bestially satiating itself on darkness. Strangely, he felt no desire to push stop. Not because he was afraid of whatever wanted to eat him, but because this intense outpouring of energy felt good.
Something red burst onto the monochrome screen. At the same time he heard the ground rumble, from an undefinable direction. The sound seemed to come from everywhere, such that he began to imagine that the whole cabin was shaking. It didn't feel like the sound was coming from those little speakers. The sluggish red fluid exploded and flew about, sometimes occupying the whole screen. From black to white, and now red... It was nothing but a violent successions of colors, he hadn't seen any natural scenery yet. Just concepts in the abstract, etched vividly onto his brain by the brilliantly shifting colors. It was tiring, actually. And then, as if it had read the viewer's mind, the red retreated from the screen, and a mountain vista stretched out on-screen. At one glance he could tell it was a volcano, with a gentle peak. The volcano was sending up white puffs of smoke against a clear blue sky. The camera seemed to be situated somewhere at the foot of the mountain, where the ground was covered with rugged blackish-brown lava.
Again the screen was swathed in darkness. The clear blue sky was instantaneously painted black, and then, a few seconds later, a scarlet liquid spurted out from the center of the screen, flowing downward. A second explosion. The spray thrown up by it burned red, and as a result he could begin to make out, faintly, the outline of the mountain. The images were now concrete where they had previously been abstract. This was clearly a volcanic eruption, a natural phenomenon, a scene that could be explained. The molten lava flowing from the mouth of the volcano threaded its way down through ravines and headed this way. Where was the camera positioned? Unless it was an aerial shot, it looked like the camera was about to be swallowed up. The rumblings of the earth increased until the whole screen seemed about to be engulfed in molten rock, and then the scene abruptly changed. There was no continuity from one scene to the next, only sudden shifts.
Thick, black letters floated into view against a white background. Their edges were blurred, but he somehow managed to make out the character for "mountain." It was surrounded by black splatters, as if it had been written sloppily by a brush dripping with ink. The character was motionless, the screen was calm.
Another sudden shift. A pair of dice, tumbling around in the rounded bottom of a lead bowl. The background was white, the bottom of the bowl was black, and the one on the dice was red. The same three colors he'd seen so often already. The dice rolled around soundlessly, finally coming to rest: a one and a five. The single red dot and the five black ones arranged on the white faces of the dice... What did it mean?
In the next scene people appeared for the first time. An old woman, face lined with wrinkles, sat perched on a pair of tatami mats on a wooden floor. Her hands rested on her knees and her left shoulder was thrust slightly forward. She was speaking, slowly, looking straight ahead. Her eyes were different sizes-when she blinked, it looked like she was winking instead.
She was speaking in an unfamiliar dialect, and he could only catch every other word or so:
...youth health...since...spend all your time...bound to get you. Understand? Be careful of...you're going to...you listen to granny now because...there's no need to...
The old expressionless woman made her statement, then vanished. There were a lot of words he didn't understand. But he had the impression he'd just been lectured to. She was telling him to be careful of something, warning him. Who was this old lady talking to-and about?
The face of a newborn baby filled the screen. From somewhere he could hear a baby's first cry. This time, too, he was sure it didn't come from the television speakers. It came from very near, beneath his face. It was very like a real voice. On-screen, he could now see the hands holding the baby. The left hand was under its head, and the right was behind its back, holding it carefully. They were beautiful hands. Totally absorbed by the image, Asakawa found himself holding his own hands in the same position. He heard the birth cry directly below his own chin. Startled, he pulled back his hands. He had felt something. Something warm and wet-like amniotic fluid, or blood-and the weight of flesh. Asakawa jerked his hands apart, as if casting something aside, and brought his palms close to his face. A smell lingered. The faint smell of blood-had it come from the womb, or...? His hands felt wet. But in reality, they weren't even damp. He restored his gaze to the screen. It still showed the baby's face. In spite of the crying its face was swathed in a peaceful expression, and the shaking of its body had spread to its groin, even wiggling its little thing.
The next scene: a hundred human faces. Each one displayed hatred and animosity; he couldn't see any distinguishing features other than that. The myriad faces, looking as if they had been painted on a flat surface, gradually receded into the depths of the screen. And as each face diminished in size, the total number increased, until they had swollen to a great multitude. It was a strange multitude, though-existing only from the neck up-but the sounds welling up from them befit a crowd. Their mouths were shouting something, even as they shrank and multiplied. He couldn't quite make out what they were saying. It sounded like the commotion of a great gathering, but the voices were tinged with criticism, abuse. The voices were clearly not welcoming or cheering. Finally he made out a word: "Liar!" And another: "Fraud!" By now there were perhaps a thousand faces: they had become nothing but black particles, filling the screen until it looked like the television had been turned off, but the voices continued. It was more than Asakawa could bear. All that criticism, directed right at him. That's how it felt.
When the next scene appeared, it showed a television on a wooden stand. It was an old-fashioned nineteen-inch set with a round channel selector, and a rabbit-ear antenna sat on its wooden cabinet. Not a play within a play, but a TV within a TV. The television within had nothing on its screen yet. But it seemed to be on: the red light by the channel knob was lit. Then the screen-within-the-screen wavered. It stabilized and then wavered again, over and over, with increasing frequency. Then a single character appeared, hazily: sada. The word faded in and out of focus, distorted, and began to look like another before disappearing altogether, like chalk on a black board wiped with a wet rag.
As he watched, Asakawa began to find it hard to breathe. He could hear his heart beat, feel the pressure of the blood flowing in his veins. A smell, a touch, a sour-sweet taste stabbing his tongue. Strange-something was stimulating his five senses, some medium besides the sounds and visions that appeared as if he were suddenly recalling them.
Then the face of a man appeared. Unlike the previous images, this man was definitely alive-he had a pulsating vitality. As he watched, Asakawa began to feel hatred toward him. He had no idea why he should hate this man. He wasn't particularly ugly. His forehead sloped a bit, but other than that he was actually rather well-formed. But there was something dangerous in his eyes. They were the eyes of a beast closing in on its prey. The man's face was sweaty. His breathing was ragged, his axe was turned upward, and his body was moving rhythmically. Behind the man grew scattered trees, the afternoon sunlight shone between their branches. The man brought his eyes down and looked straight ahead again, and his gaze locked with the viewer's. Asakawa and the man stared at each other for a while. The stifling sensation grew, and he suddenly wanted to tear his gaze away. The man was drooling; his eyes were bloodshot. His neck muscles began to fill the screen in a close-up, then disappeared off the left side of the screen. For a while only the black shade of the trees could be seen. A scream began to well up from deep down inside. At the same time, the man's shoulder came back into view, then his neck, and finally his face again. His shoulders were bare, and the right one carri3ed a deep, bloody gash several centimeters long. Drops of blood seemed to be sucked toward the camera, growing larger and larger until they hit the lens and clouded over the view. The screen cut to black once, twice, almost like blinking, and when the light returned everything was red. There was a murderous look in the man's eyes. His face drew closer, along with his shoulder, the bone peeking out white where the flesh had been gouged out. Asakawa felt a violent pressure on his chest. He saw trees again. The sky was spinning. The color of the sky fading into sunset, the rustling of dry grass. He saw dirt, then weeds, and then sky again. The sky was spinning. The color of the sky fading into sunset, the rustling of dry grass. He saw dirt, then weeds, and them sky again. Somewhere he heard a baby crying. He wasn't sure if it was the little infant from before. Finally, the edge of the screen turned black, darkness gradually encroaching in a ring on the center. Dark and light were clearly defined now. At the center of the screen, a small round moon of light floated in the middle of the darkness. There was a man's face in the moon. A fist-sized clump of something fell from the moon, making a dull thud. Another, and then another. With each sound, the image jumped and swayed. The sound of flesh being smashed, and then true darkness. Even then, a pulse remained. Blood still circulated, throbbing. The scene went on and on. A darkness that seemed as if it would never end. Then, just as at the beginning, words faded into view. The writing in the first scene had been crude, like that of a child just learning to write; but this was somewhat better. White letters, drifting into view and then fading, read:
Those who have viewed these images are fated to die at this exact hour one week from now. If you do not wish to die, you must follow these instructions exactly...
Asakawa gulped and stared wide-eyed at the television. But then the scene changed yet again. A complete and utter change. A commercial came on, a perfectly ordinary, common television commercial. A romantic old neighborhood on a summer's evening, an actress in a light cotton robe sitting on her verandah, fireworks lighting up the night sky. A commercial for mosquito-repelling coils. After about thirty seconds the commercial ended, and just as another scene was about to start, the screen returned to its previous state. Darkness, with the last afterglow of faded words. Then the sound of static as the tape ended.
♥ He felt a breeze. He looked at the living room window. The curtains were trembling.
Hey, I thought I shut that.
He was certain that before drawing the curtains he'd shut the sliding glass door tightly. He remembered doing it. He couldn't stop trembling. For no reason at all, the image of skyscrapers at night flashed across his brain, the way the lighted and unlighted windows formed a checkerboard pattern, sometimes even forming characters. If you saw the buildings as huge, oblong tombstones, then the lights were epitaphs. The image disappeared, but the white lace curtains still danced in the breeze.
♥ The more he talked about it, the more vividly the events of the previous night replayed themselves in his mind. The terror only increased. He even thought he sensed, fleetingly, a shadow lurking somewhere within his body that possessed him.
♥ For Asakawa himself, watching the video had been like unsuspectingly opening a letter-bomb. It was the first time in his life he'd experienced such terror. And it wasn't over. Six more days. Fear tightened softly around his neck like a silken noose. Death awaited him. And this joker actually wanted to watch the video.
"You don't have to make a scene. So I'm not scared-do you have a problem with that? Listen, Asakawa, I've told you before: I'm the kind of guy who'd get the front-row seats for the end of the world if he could. I want to know how the world is put together, its beginning and its end, all its riddles, great and small. If someone offered to explain them all to me, I'd gladly trade my life for the knowledge."
..I want to be there when humanity is wiped out, Ryuji had said, sweat gleaming on his overheated face. All those idiots who prattle on about world peace and the survival of humanity make me puke.
Asakawa's survey had included questions like this:
Tell me about your dreams for the future.
Calmly, Ryuji had replied: "While viewing the extinction of the human race from the top of a hill, I would dig a hole in the earth and ejaculate into it over and over."
Asakawa pressed him: "Hey, are you sure it's okay for me to write that down?"
Ryuji had just smiled faintly, just like he was doing now, and nodded.
"Like I said, I'm not afraid of anything."
♥ In ancient Greece, too, philosophers doubled as mathematicians. Ryuji was like that: the philosophy department signed his paychecks, but his brain was wired like a scientist's. On the other hand, in addition to his specialized professional knowledge, he also knew an extraordinary amount about paranormal psychology. Asakawa saw this as a contradiction. He considered paranormal psychology, the study of the supernatural and the occult, to be in direct opposition to science. Ryuji's answer: Au contraire. Paranormal psychology is one of the keys to unlocking the structure of the universe.
♥ "Our lives may depend on it. Let's make sure of everything, no matter what. Right, my brother-in-arms?"
Ryuji slapped Asakawa on the shoulder. They were both facing their deaths now. Brothers in arms.
"Aren't you scared?"
"Scared? Au contraire, my friend. It's kind of exciting to have a deadline, isn't it? The penalty is death. Fantastic. It's not fun playing if you're not willing to bet your life on the outcome."
♥ "There's a certain universal evil clinging to this incident. I can smell it-the impulse I felt then.... I told you about it, right? The first woman I raped."
"I haven't forgotten."
"It's already been fifteen years since then. Then, too, I felt a strange premonition tickling my heart. I was seventeen. It was September of my junior year in high school. I studied math until three in the morning, then did an hour of German to give my brain some rest. I always did that. I found language study was perfect for loosening up tired brain cells. At four, as always, I had a couple of beers and then went out for my daily walk. When I set out there was already something unusual budding in my brain. Have you ever walked around a residential neighborhood late at night? It feels really good. The dogs are all asleep. Just like your baby is now. I found myself in front of a certain apartment building. It was an elegant wood-framed two-story affair, and I knew that inside it lived a certain well-groomed college girl that I sometimes saw on the street. I didn't know which apartment was hers. I let my gaze roam over the windows of all eight apartments in turn. At this point, as I looked, I didn't have anything definite in mind. Just...you know. When my eyes came to rest on the southern end of the second floor, I heard something crack open in the depths of my heart, and I felt like the darkness that had sent forth its shoots in my mind was growing gradually larger. Once more I looked at all the windows in turn. Once again, in the same place, the darkness began to whirlpool. And I knew. I knew that the door wouldn't be locked.."
..Asakawa found it hard to breathe as he listened. He felt disgusted even to be sitting here drinking beer with this man.
"Don't you feel the least bit guilty?"
"I'm used to it. Try slamming your fist into a brick wall every day. Eventually you won't even feel the pain anymore."
Is that why you go on doing it?
♥ "You said you have a premonition. What is it?"
"You know, just a bad feeling. Only some fantastically evil energy could come up with such an involved bit of mischief."
♥ "Somewhere, there is this vortex of evil energy. I know. It makes me feel... nostalgic." As if for emphasis, Ryuji clutched his copy of the tape to his breast as he headed for the entry hall.
♥ 11:21. How many times had he checked the time today? He was becoming obsessed with the passage of time. Just like Ryuji said, in the morning he;'d only have five days left. He wasn't at all sure if he'd be able to unlock the riddle of the erased part of the tape in time. He felt like a cancer patient facing a surgery with a success rate of almost nil. There was debate over whether cancer patients should be told they had cancer or not; until now Asakawa had always thought they deserved to be allowed to know. But if this was how it would feel, then he preferred not knowing. There were some people who, when facing death, would burn brightly with what life they had left. Asakawa couldn't manage that feat. He was still alright for the moment. But as the clock chipped away at his remaining days, hours, minutes, he wasn't confident he'd be able to keep his wits about him. He felt like he understood, now, why he was attracted to Ryuji even while being disgusted by him. Ryuji had a psychological strength he just couldn't match. Asakawa lived his life tentatively, always worried about what people around him thought. Ryuji, meanwhile, kept a god-or a devil-chained up inside him that allowed him to live with complete freedom and abandon. The only time Asakawa felt his desire to live chase away his fear was when he thought of how his wife and daughter would feel after his death.
♥ So watch it already. You believe in modern science, don't you? You're not a kid afraid of ghosts.
In fact, Oguri was 99% sure that he didn't believe Asakawa. But still, way back in a corner of his mind, there was that what if. What if it were true? Maybe there were some niches in this world that modern science couldn't reach yet. And as long as there was that risk, no matter how hard his mind worked, his body was going to refuse. So Oguri sat in his chair and didn't move. He couldn't move. It didn't matter what his mind understood: his body wasn't listening to his mind. As long as there was the possibility of danger, his body would keep loyally activating his instincts for self-preservation.
♥ Part of him still felt it was a dream, that he'd reach ten o'clock on October 18th without having understood the video or figured out the charm, but in the end nothing would happen and the days would stretch out before him as they always had. Oguri would wear a mocking expression and expound on the foolishness of believing in superstitions, while Ryuji would laugh and say, "We just don't understand how the world works." And his wife and daughter would greet their daddy with these same sleeping faces. Even a passenger on an airplane falling from the sky can't shake the hope that he'll be the one to survive.
♥ It was a beautiful clear Sunday afternoon in mid-October, and the world seemed blanketed in peace.
♥ Once again, Asakawa was filled with nausea. The first time he'd finished watching the video he'd run to the toilet, but this time the evil chill was even worse. He couldn't shake the feeling that something had climbed into his body. This video hadn't been recorded by a machine. A human being's eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin-all five senses had been used to make this video. These chills, this shivering, were from somebody's shadow sneaking into him through his sense organs. Asakawa had been watching the video from the same perspective as this thing within him.
♥ Reality marched on without a break.
♥ Nine o'clock. The silence of the archives was broken by Ryuji's mad screech. "I've found it, finally! So that's where she was hiding."
Asakawa felt himself drawn to the file. He sat down next to Ryuji and put his glasses back on to look at it. It said:
Izu Oshima, Sashikiji. Sadako Yamamura. Age 10. The envelope was postmarked August 29, 1958. Subject sent this with a note predicting it would be imprinted with her own name. She's the real thing, without a doubt. Attached was a photograph showing the character yama, "mountain," in white against a black background. Asakawa had seen that character somewhere before.
"That's... that's it."