Ring by Koji Suzuki (translated by Robert B. Rohmer and Glynne Walley). (2/2)
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 1 for the rest of the quotes.)
My rating: 8.5/10.
My review:
♥ "Sometimes when one is given the answers up front it dulls one's intuition. My intuition has already led me to a conclusion. And now that I have that in mind, I'll twist any phenomenon to rationalize holding onto that conclusion. It's like that in criminal investigations, too, isn't it? Once you get the notion that he's the guy, it suddenly seems like all the evidence agrees with you. See, we can't afford to wander off the track here. I need you to back up my conclusion. That is, I want to see, once you've taken a look at the evidence, if your intuition tells you the same thing mine told me."
♥ Everything had hung on noticing that the black curtain flashing momentarily over the images on the video was eyelids, blinking. The images had been recorded not by machine but by the human sensory apparatus. Essentially, the person had focused her energies on the video deck at cabin B-4 while it was recording, and created not a psychic photo but a psychic video. This surely indicated paranormal powers of immeasurable proportions. Ryuji had assumed that such a person would stand out from the crowd, and gone looking for her, and had ultimately found out her name.
♥ "I still can't believe it, you know. That a human being could really do something like that."
"It doesn't matter if you believe it or not, now, does it?" Ryuji answered without taking his eyes from his map of Oshima, "Anyway, it's a reality staring you in the face. You know, all we're seeing is one small part of a continuously changing phenomenon."
Ryuji set the map down on his knee. "You know about the Big Bang, right? They believe that the universe was born in a tremendous explosion twenty billion years ago. I can mathematically express the form of the universe, from its birth to the present. It's all about differential equations. Most phenomena in the universe can be expressed with differential equations, you know. Using them, you can figure out what the universe looked like a hundred million years ago, ten billion years ago, even a second or a tenth of a second after that initial explosion. But. But. No matter how far we go back, no matter how we try to express it, we just can't know what it looked like at zero, at the very moment of the explosion. And there's another thing. How is our universe going to end? is the universe expanding or contracting? See, we don't know the beginning and we don't know the end; all we know about is the in-between stuff. And that, my friend, is what life is like."
♥ "But what's before birth, what's after death-these are things we just don't know."
"After death? When you die, that's the end, you just disappear. That's all, right?"
"Hey, have you ever died?"
"No, I haven't." Asakawa shook his head with utter earnestness.
"Well then you don't know, do you? You don't know where you go after you die."
"Are you saying there's such a thing as spirits?"
"Look, all I can say is, I just don't know. But when you're talking about the birth of life, I think things go a lot smoother when you posit the existence of a soul. None of the claptrap of modern molecular biologists actually sounds real. What are they really saying? 'Take hundreds each of twenty-odd different amino acids, put them in a bowl, mix them all together, add a little electrical energy, and voilà, protein, the building block of life.' And they really expect us to believe that? Might as well tell us we're all children of God-at least that'd be easier to swallow. What I think is that there's a completely different kind of energy involved at the moment of birth; almost like there's a certain will at work."
.."I think it said something about thoughts being energy."
.."..What the old man was saying, basically, is that ideas are life forms, with energy of their own."
"Huh? You mean, the thoughts in our heads can turn into living beings?"
"That's about the size of it."
"Well, that's a rather extreme suggestion."
"It is indeed, but similar ideas have been propounded since before the time of Christ. I suppose you could just look at it as a different theory of life."
Having said this much, Ryuji suddenly seemed to lose interest in the conversation, returning his gaze to the map.
Asakawa understood what Ryuji was saying, most of it anyway, but it didn't sit very well with him. We may not be able to scientifically explain what we're facing. But it's real, and because it's real we have to face it as a real phenomenon and deal with it as such, even if we don't understand its cause or effect. What we need to concentrate on right now is figuring out the riddle of the charm and saving our own asses, not unlocking all the secrets of the supernatural.
♥ "But I was just remembering a trip I took with the track team back in high school. In the middle of the night, Saito comes bursting into the room. You remember Saito, right? Kind of not quite all there. There were twelve of us on the team, and we were all sleeping together in one room. And that idiot comes running in, teeth chattering, and screams, 'I've seen a ghost!' He opened the bathroom door and saw a little girl crouched behind the trash can by the sink-she was crying. Now, aside from me, how do you think the other ten guys reacted to this?"
"They probably half believed and half laughed it off."
Ryuji shook his head. "That's how it'd work in a horror movie, or on TV. At first no one takes it seriously, and then one by one, they're picked off by the monster, right? But it's different in real life. Every single one of them, without exception, believed him. All ten of them. And not because all ten of then were especially chicken, either. You could try it on any group of people and get the same results. A fundamental sense of terror is built into us humans, on the instinctual level."
"So what you're saying is, it's strange that those four didn't believe the video."
As he listened to Ryuji's story, Asakawa was recalling the face of his daughter, crying from seeing the demon mask. He remembered how puzzled he'd been-how had she known the demon mask was supposed to be scary?
♥ At times their field of vision opened up to their right, to reveal the ocean, and when it did the sound of the wind would change. The sea was dark, reflecting the deep leaden color of the sky, and it heaved violently, throwing up whitecaps. If it hadn't been for those brief flashes of white, it would have been difficult to tell where the sky stopped and the sea began, or where the sea stopped and the land began. The longer they gazed at it the more depressing it seemed. The radio blared a typhoon alert, and their surroundings became that much darker. They veered right at a fork in the road and immediately entered a tunnel of camellias. They could see bare roots beneath the camellias, tangled and wizened; long years of exposure to wind and rain had eroded some of the plants' soil. Now they were wet and slick with rain-it looked to Asakawa like they were speeding through the intestines of a huge monster.
♥ "How would you describe her, say, in a word?"
"In a word? Hmm. Eerie, I'd have to say." Without hesitating, he called her "eerie." And Uchimura had called her "that creepy girl." Yoshino couldn't help but feel sorry for a maiden of eighteen whom everybody characterized as eerie.
♥ "Rehearsal had just ended and nearly everybody had gone home. I wasn't happy with one of my lines, and I came up here to go over my part one more time. I was right over there, see..." Arima pointed to the door. "I was standing there, looking into the room, and through the frosted glass I could see the TV screen flickering. I thought, well, someone's watching TV. Mind you, I wasn't mistaken. It was on the other side of the divider, so I couldn't actually see what was on the screen, but I could see the quavering black and white light. There was no sound. The room was dim, and as I came around the divider, I wondered who was in front of the TV, and I peered at the person's face. It was Sadako Yamamura. But when I came around to the other side of the divider and stood beside her, there was nothing on the screen. Of course, I just automatically assumed that she'd just switched it off. At that point, I had no doubts yet. But..."
Arima seemed reluctant to continue.
"Please, go on."
"I spoke to her. I said, 'You'd better hurry home before the trains stop running.' And I turned on the desk lamp. But it wouldn't turn on. I looked and saw that it wasn't plugged in. I crouched down to plug it in, and that's when I noticed it: the television wasn't plugged in, either."
Arima vividly recalled the chill that had run up his spine when he saw the plug lying there on the floor.
Yoshino wanted to confirm what he'd just heard. "So even though it wasn't plugged in, the television was definitely on?"
"That's right. It made me shudder, let me tell you. I raised my head without thinking and looked at Sadako. What was she doing sitting there in front of an unplugged television set? She didn't meet my gaze, but just kept staring at the screen, with a faint smile on her lips."
Arima seemed to remember the smallest detail. The episode obviously made a deep impression on him.
"And did you tell anyone about this?"
"Naturally. I told Uchy-that is, Uchimura, the director, whom you just met-and also Shigemori."
"Mr. Shigemori?"
"He was the real founder of the company. Uchimura is actually our second leader."
"Ah-ha. SO how did Mr. Shigemori react to your story?"
"He was playing mah-jongg at the time, but he was fascinated. He always did have a weakness for women, and it seemed he'd had his eye on her for a while, planning to make her his. Then that evening, after he'd had a few, he started talking crazy, saying 'tonight I'm going to storm Sadako's apartment.' We didn't know what to do. It was just drunken babbling-we couldn't take it too seriously, but we couldn't go along with it, either. After a while, everybody went home, and Shigemori was left alone. And in the end we never knew if he actually went to Sadako's apartment that night or not. Because the next day, when Shigemorei showed up at the rehearsal space, he looked like a completely different person he was pale and silent, and he just sat in his chair saying absolutely nothing. Then he died, right there, just like going to sleep."
Startled, Yoshino looked up. "What was the cause of death?"
"Cardiac paralysis. Today they'd call it 'sudden heart failure,' I guess."
♥ Trying to remain calm, Yoshino pulled out Sadako Yamamura's portfolio. He looked at her photos.
"Hey, didn't you say she was 'eerie' a few minutes ago?" Yoshino was confused. There was too much of a gap between the Sadako he'd imagined from Arima's description and the Sadako in the photos. "Eerie? You've got to be kidding me. I've never seen such a pretty face."
Toshino wondered why he had phrased it that way-why he'd said "pretty face" instead of "pretty girl." Certainly her facial features were perfectly regular. But she lacked a certain womanly roundness. But looking at the full-body shot, he had to admit that her slender waist and ankles were strikingly feminine. She was beautiful-and yet, the passage of twenty-five years had corroded their impressions of her, until they remembered her as "eerie," as "that creepy girl." Normally they should have recalled her as "that wonderfully beautiful young woman." Yoshino's interest was piqued by this "eeriness" that seemed to elbow out the salient prettiness of her face.
♥ "I think that what made Shizu change was that stone statue of the Ascetic we pulled up out of the sea. There was a full moon that night...." According to the old man, Shizuko's mysterious powers were somehow connected to the sea and the full moon. And on the night it happened, Genji himself had been beside her, rowing the boat. It was 1946, on a night toward the end of summer; Shizuko was twenty-one and Genji was twenty-four.
..Genji just saw there as if in a daze, looking at the most beautiful girl on the island. "Wipe that stupid look off your face and hurry up!" She pulled at his collar until he got to his feet. Genji was used to having her push him around and tell him what to do, but he asked her anyway, "What in the world are we going fishing for?" Staring at the ocean, she gave a brisk reply: "For the statue of the Ascetic."
"Of the Ascetic?"
With raised eyebrows and a note of regret in her voice, Shizuko explained that earlier in the day, some Occupation soldiers had hurled the stone statue of the Ascetic into the sea.
In the middle of the island's eastern shore there was a breach called the Ascetic's Beach, with a small cave called the Ascetic's Grotto. It contained a stone statue of En no Ozunu, the famed Buddhist ascetic, who had been banished here in the year 699. Ozunu had been born with great wisdom, and long years of discipline had given him command of occult and mystic arts. It was said that he could summon gods and demons at will. But Ozunu's power to foretell the future had made him powerful enemies in the world of books and weapons, and he'd been judged a criminal, a menace to society, and exiled here to Izu Oshima. That had been almost thirteen hundred years ago. Ozunu holed himself up in a small cave on the beach and devoted himself to even more strenuous disciplines. He also taught farming and fishing to the people of the island, earning respect for his virtue. Finally he was pardoned and allowed to return to the mainland, where he founded the Shugendo monastic tradition. He was thought to have spent three years on the island, but stories of his time there abounded, including the legend that he had once shod himself with iron clogs and flown off to Mt. Fuji. The islanders still retained a great deal of affection for En no Ozunu, and the Ascetic's Grotto was considered the holiest place on the island. A festival, known as the Festival of the Ascetic, was held every year on June 15th.
Right after the end of World War II, however, as part of their policy toward Shintoism and Buddhism, the Occupation forces had taken En no Ozunu's statue from where it was enshrined in the cave and tossed it into the ocean.
..How many times did her head pop up from the surface of the water to gasp for air? The last time, she no longer had the end of the rope in her mouth. I've tied it fast to the Ascetic. Go ahead and pull him up, she said in a trembling voice.
Gen shifted his body to the bow of the boat and pulled on the rope. In no time Shizuko climbed aboard, draped her kimono around her body, and came up beside Genji in time to help him haul up the statue. They placed it in the center of the boat and headed back to the shore. The whole way back, neither Genji nor Shizuko said a word. There was something in the atmosphere that quashed all questions. He found it mysterious that she'd been able to locate the statue in the darkness at the bottom of the sea. It was only three days later that he was able to ask her. She said that the Ascetic's eyes had called to her on the ocean floor. The green eyes of the statue, master of gods and demons, had flowed at the bottom of the deep dark sea.... That's what Shizuko had said.
After that, Shizuko began to feel physical discomfort. She'd never even had had a headache up until then, but now she often experienced searing pains in her head, accompanied by visions of things she'd never seen before flashing across her mind's eye. And it happened that these scenes she had glimpsed very soon manifested themselves in reality. Genji had questioned her in some detail. It seemed that when these future scenes inserted themselves into her brain, they were always accompanied by the same citrus fragrance in her nostrils. Genji's older sister had gotten married and moved to Odawara, on the mainland; when she died, the scene had presented itself to Shizuko beforehand. But it didn't sound like she could actually, consciously predict things that would happen in the future. It was just that these scenes would flash across her mind, with no warning, and with no inkling of why she'd witnessed those exact scenes. So Shizuko never allowed people to ask her to predict their futures.
..In 1947, having left behind her hometown of Sashikiji for the capital, Shizuko suddenly collapsed with head pains and was taken to a hospital. Through one of the doctors, she came to know Heihachiro Ikuma, an assistant professor in the psychiatry department of Taido University. Ikuma was involved in trying to find a scientific explanation for hypnotism and related phenomena, and he became very interested in Shizuko when he discovered that she had startling powers of clairvoyance. The finding went so far as to change the thrust of his research. Thereafter Ikuma would immerse himself in the study of paranormal powers, with Shizuko as the subject of his research. But the two soon progressed beyond a mere researcher-subject relationship. In spite of his having a family, Ikuma began to have romantic feelings toward Shizuko. By the end of the year she was pregnant with his child, and to escape the eyes of the world she went back home, where she had Sadako. Shizuko immediately returned to Tokyo, leaving Sadako in Sahikiji, but three years later she returned to reclaim her child. From then until the time of her suicide, evidently, she never let Sadako leave her side.
When the 1950s dawned, the duo of Heihachiro Ikuma and Shizuko Yamamura was a sensation in the pages of the newspapers and the weekly newsmagazines. They provided a sudden insight into the scientific underpinnings of supernatural powers. At first, perhaps dazzled by Ikuma's position as a professor at such a prestigious university, the public unanimously believed in Shizuko's powers. Even the media wrote her up in a more-or-less favorable light. Still, there were persistent claims that she could only be a fake, and when an authoritative scholarly association weighed in with the one-word comment "questionable," people began to shift their support away from the pair.
The paranormal powers Shizuko exhibited were mainly ESP-related, such as clairvoyance or second sight, and the ability to produce psychic photographs. She didn't display the power of telekinesis, the ability to move things without touching them. According to one magazine, simply by holding a piece of film in a tightly sealed envelope against her forehead, she could psychically imprint upon it a specified sign; she could also identify the image on a similarly concealed piece of film a hundred times out of a hundred. However, another magazine maintained that she was nothing more than a con-woman, claiming that any magician, with some training, could easily do the same things. In this way the tide of public opinion began to rise against Shizuko and Ikuma.
Then Shiuzuko was visited by misfortune. In 1954 she gave birth to her second baby, but it took sick and died at only four months of age. It had been a boy. Sadako, who was seven at the time, seemed to have showered a special affection on her newborn little brother.
The following year, in 1955, Ikuma challenged the media to a public demonstration of Shizuko's powers. At first Shizuko didn't want to do it. She said that it was hard to concentrate her awareness the way she wanted to among a mass of spectators; she was afraid she'd fail. But Ikuma was unyielding. He couldn't stand being labeled a charlatan by the media, and he couldn't think of a better way to outwit them than by offering clear proof of her authenticity.
On the appointed day, Shizuko reluctantly mounted the dais in the lab theater, under the watchful eyes of nearly a hundred scholars and representatives of the press. She was mentally exhausted, to boot, so there were hardly the best conditions for her to work under. The experiment was to proceed along quite simple lines. All she had to do was identity the numbers on a pair of dice inside a lead container. If she had just been able to exert her powers normally, it would have been no problem. But she knew that each one of the hundred people surrounding her was waiting and hoping for her to fail. She trembled, she crouched down on the floor, she cried out in anguish, "Enough of this!" Shizuko herself explained it this way: everybody had a certain degree of psychic power. She just had more of it than others did. But surrounded by a hundred people all willing her to fail, her power was disrupted-she couldn't get it to work. Ikuma went even further: "It's not just a hundred people. No, now the whole population of Japan is trying to stamp out the fruits of my research. When public opinion, fanned by the media, begins to turn, then the media says nothing the people don't want to hear. They should be ashamed!" Thus the great public display of clairvoyance ended with Ikuma's denunciation of the mass media.
Of course, the media interpreted Ikuma's diatribe as an attempt to shift the blame for the failed demonstration, and that's how it was written up in the next day's newspapers. A FAKE AFTER ALL... THEIR TRUE COLORS REVEALED...TAIDO UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR A FRAUD... FIVE YEARS OF DEBATE ENDED... VICTORY FOR MODERN SCIENCE. Not a single aricle defended them.
Toward the end of the year, Ikuma divorced his wife and resigned from the university. Shizuko began to become increasingly paranoid. After that, Ikuma decided to acquire paranormal abilities himself, and he retreated deep into the mountains and stood under waterfalls, but all he got was pulmonary tuberculosis. He had to be committed to a sanatorium in Hakone. Meanwhile Shizuko's psychological state was becoming more and more precarious. Eight-year-old Sadako convinced her mother to go back home to Sashikiji, to escape the eyes of the media and the ridicule of the public, but then Shizuko slipped her daughter's gaze and jumped into the volcano. And so three people's lives crumbled.
♥ Just then the fax machine began to hum. It printed out an enlargement of the head shot of Sadako Yamamura that Yoshino had gotten from Theater Group Soaring.
Asakawa was strangely moved. This was the first actual look he'd gotten of this woman. Even though it had only been for the briefest moment, he'd shared the same sensations as this woman, seen the world from the same vantage point. It was like catching the first glimpse of a lover's face in the dim morning light, finally seeing what she looks like, after a night of entwined limbs and shared orgasms in the dark.
♥ "..Look, Sadako was only seven then, but her power already far outstripped her mother's. So much so that the combined unconscious will of a hundred people was nothing to her. Think about it: this is a girl who could project images onto a cathode-ray tube. Televisions produce images by an entirely different mechanism from photography-it's not just a matter of exposing film to light. A picture on TV is composed of 525 lines, right? Sadako could manipulate those. This is power of a completely different order here."
♥ Ryuji looked up. "I imagine you've probably heard what people say goes through a person's mind at the moment of death, right?"
Asakawa returned his gaze to the scene in front of him. "The scenes from your life that have made the deepest impression on you are replayed, sort of like a flashback." Asakawa had read a book in which the author described an experience along those lines. The author had been driving his car along a mountain road when he lost control of the steering wheel, plunging the car into a deep ravine. During the split second that the car hung in the air after leaving the road, the author realized that he was going to die. And at the instant he realized that, a bunch of different scenes from throughout his life came pitter-pattering up and flashed through his brain, so clearly that he could see every detail. In the end, miraculously, the writer had survived, but the memory of that instant remained vivid for him.
"You can't be suggesting... Is that what this is?" Asakawa asked. Ryuji raise a hand and signaled the waitress tor bring him another beer.
"All I'm saying is, that's what the video reminds me of. Each one of those scenes represents a moment of extreme psychic or emotional engagement for Sadako. It's not too much of a stretch to think that they were the scenes in her life that left the deepest impression, is it?"
♥ That's right. He's never been there.
"It's got a nice view at night." Asakawa recalled the curiously lifeless atmosphere, the tennis balls with their hollow echo under the orange lights.... Where does that atmosphere come from anyway? I wonder how many people died there when it was a sanatorium.
♥ "Can a virus become extinct? Is that possible?" Asakawa didn't know much about viruses, but he couldn't shake the impression that no matter how much you tried to kill one, eventually it would mutate and find a way to survive.
"See, viruses kind of wander around on the border between living things and non-living things. Some people even theorize that they were originally human genes, but nobody really knows where they come from or how they emerged. What's certain is that they've been intimately connected with the appearance and evolution of life."
Ryuji's arms had been folded behind his head; now he stretched them wide. His eyes glittered. "Don't you find it fascinating, Asakawa? The idea that genes could escape from our cells and become another life form? Maybe all opposites were originally identical. Even light and darkness-before the Big Bang they were living together in peace, with no contradiction. God and the Devil, too. All the Devil is is a god who fell from grace-they're the same thing, originally. Male and female? It used to be that all living things were hermaphroditic, like worms or slugs, with both female and male sex organs. Don't you think that's the ultimate symbol of power and beauty?" Ryuji laughed as he said this. "It'd sure save a lot of time and trouble when it comes to sex."
♥ Immediately after he'd settled himself, Ryuji said, with a perfectly straight face, "Hey, I was thinking-maybe the Devil's behind this whole thing after all." Asakawa was too busy looking at street signs to answer. Ryuji continued. "The Devil always appears in the world in a different form. You know the bubonic plague that ravaged Europe in the second half of the thirteenth century? Half of the total population died. Can you believe that? Half, that's like the population of Japan being reduced to sixty million. Naturally, artists at the time likened the plague to the Devil. It's like that now, too-don't we talk about AIDS as if it were a modern Devil? But listen, devils never drive humanity to extinction. Why? Because if people cease to exist, so do devils. The same with viruses. If the host cell perishes, the virus can't survive. But humanity drove the smallpox virus to extinction. Really? Could we really do that?"
It's impossible in the modern world to even imagine the terror once inspired by smallpox, when it raged throughout the world claiming so many lives. Such was the suffering it caused that it gave rise to innumerable religious beliefs and superstitions in Japan, as well as elsewhere. People believed in gods of pestilence, and it was the God of Smallpox that brought that disease, though perhaps it should have been called a devil. In any case, could people really drive a god to the brink of extinction? Ryuji's question harbored a deep uncertainty.
♥ "When it was over, [Sadako] fixed me with an implacable gaze. Still lying on her back, she raised her knees and skillfully used her elbows to scoot backwards. I looked at her body again. I thought my eyes had deceived me. Her winkled gray skirt had bunched up around her waist, and she made no move to cover her breasts as she backed up. A ray of sunlight fell on the point where her thighs converged, clearly illuminating a small, blackish lump. I raised my eyes to her chest-beatifically-shaped breasts. Then I looked down again. Within her pubic mound, covered with hair, was a pair of perfectly developed testicles.
"Had I not been a doctor, I probably would have been shocked silly. But I knew of cases such as this from photos in medical texts. Testicular feminization syndrome. It's an extremely rare syndrome. I never thought I'd see one outside of a textbook-much less in a situation such as that. Testicular feminization is a type of make pseudohermaphroditism. Externally the person seems completely female, having breasts and a vagina, but usually not a uterus. Chromosomally the person is XY, however-male. And for some reason people with this condition are all beautiful."
♥ Then, suddenly, words flew into my head.
"I'll kill you.
"As I reeled from the strength of will behind the words, I instantaneously intuited that her telepathic message was no lie. There was no room within it for even a sliver of doubt; my body accepted it as a certainty. She'd do me, if I didn't do her first. My body's instinct for self-preservation gave me an order. I climbed back on top of her, placed both hands on her slender neck, and pressed with my full weight. To my surprise, there was less resistance this time. She narrowed her eyes with pleasure and relaxed her body, almost as if she wanted to die.
"I didn't want to see if she'd stopped breathing. I picked her body up and went to the well. I think my actions were still beyond my will at this point. In other words, I didn't pick her up intending to drop her into the well, but rather, the moment I picked her up, the round black mouth of the well caught my eye, and put it in my mind to do it. Everything felt as if it was working out perfectly for me. Or, rather, I felt as if I was being moved by a will beyond my own. I had a general idea of what was going to happen next. I could hear a voice in the back of my head saying this was all a dream.
"The well was dark, and from where I stood at the top I couldn't see the bottom very well. From the smell of soil wafting up, it seemed that there was a shallow accumulation of water at the bottom. I let go. Sadako's body slid down the side of the well into the earth, hitting the bottom with a splash. I stared into the well until my eyes got used to the dark, but I still couldn't see her curled up down there. Even so, I couldn't shake my uneasiness. I flung rocks and dirt into the well, trying to hide her body forever. I threw in armfuls of dirt and and five or six fist-sized rocks before I just couldn't do any more. The rocks hit her body, making a dull thud at the bottom of the well and stimulating my imagination. When I thought of that sickly beautiful body being broken by those stones, I couldn't go through with it. I know that doesn't make any sense. On the one hand I desired the destruction of her body, but on the other hand I didn't want her body to be marred."
♥ "When you raped Sadako Yamamura, you had already contracted smallpox, right?"
Nagao nodded.
"In which case, the last person in Japan to be infected with smallpox was Sadako Yamamura, no?"
It was certain that just before her death, Sadako Yamamura's body had been invaded by the smallpox virus. But she had died immediately afterward. If its host perishes, a virus can't go on living.
♥ He couldn't explain it logically, but from his experience reading novels and watching trashy TV shows, he felt like he had a good idea of the kind of plot device called for now, based on the way the story had unfolded. There was a certain tempo to the unfolding. They hadn't been searching for Sadako's hiding place, but in the blink of an eye they'd stumbled upon the tragedy that had befallen her and the spot where she was buried. So when Ryuji told him to "stop in front of a large hardware store," Asakawa was relieved: he's thinking the same thing I am. Asakawa still couldn't imagine what a horrible task this would be. Unless it had been completely buried, finding the old well in the vicinity of Villa Log Cabin shouldn't be too difficult. And once they found it, it should be easy to bring up Sadako's remains. It all sounded pretty simple-and he wanted to think it would be. It was one in the afternoon; the midday sun reflected brilliantly from the hilly streets in this hot-spring resort town. The brightness, and the neighborhood's laid-back weekday mood, clouded his imagination. It didn't occur to him that even if it were only four or five meters deep, the bottom of a well was bound to be an entirely different world from the well-lit ground above.
♥ It was just after two. They went put only the balcony and ate the box lunches they'd bought on the way while gazing over the grassy meadow surrounding the cabins. The fretful mood that had shadowed them here from Nagao's clinic subsided a bit. Even amidst the worst panic, there are still scattered moments like this, when time flows leisurely by. Even when trying to finish a story by an impending deadline, Asakawa would sometimes find himself aimlessly watching coffee drop from the spout of the coffee maker, and later he'd reflect on how elegantly he'd wasted precious time.
♥ "First of all, if Nagao had really incurred Sadako's resentment, he'd already be dead."
True. She definitely had that kind of power.
"So why did she let herself be killed by him?"
"I can't say. But look: she was surrounded by the deaths of people close to her. She knew nothing but frustration. Even disappearing from the theater company like that was essentially a frustration of her goals, right? Then she visits her father at the sanatorium and finds out that he's near death."
"A person who's given up on the world harbors no resentment toward the person who takes her out of it, is that what you're saying?"
"Not exactly. Rather, I think it's possible that Sadako herself caused those impulses in Old Man Nagao. In other words, maybe she killed herself, but borrowed Nagao's hands to do it."
♥ Before shining light into the well, they moved their heads and shoulders into the roughly fifty-centimeter gap between the top of the well and the floor above. A putrid smell arose on the cold air. The space inside the well was so dense that they felt if they let go their hands they'd be sucked in. She was here, all right. This woman with extraordinary supernatural power, with testicular feminization syndrome... "Woman" wasn't even the right word. The biological distinction between male and female depended on the structure of the gonads. No matter how beautifully feminine the body, if those gonads were in the form of testes it was a male. Asakawa didn't know whether he should consider Sadako Yamamura a man or a woman. Since her parents had named her Sadako, it seemed they had intended to raise her as a woman. This morning, on the boat to Atami, Ryuji had said, Don't you think a person with both male and female genitals is the ultimate symbol of power and beauty?
♥ "Shall I tell you a little more about Professor Miura's theory? There are three conditions that have to be met in order for a malevolent will to remain in the world after death. An enclosed space, water, and a slow death. One, two, three. In other words, if someone dies slowly, in an enclosed space, with water present, then usually that person's angry spirit will haunt the place. Now, look at this well. It's a small, enclosed space. There's water. And remember what the old lady in the video said."
/...How has your health been since then? If you spend all your time playing in the water, monsters are bound to get you.
Playing in the water. That was it. Sadako was down there under that black muddy water playing, even now. An endless, watery, underground game.
♥ "You don't have time to dawdle. Your deadline is almost here." Ryuji's voice grew gradually kinder. "Don't think you can overcome death without a fight."
♥ If this well had been outside, under a sky full of stars, it wouldn't be this horrible. It was because it was covered by cabin B-4 that it was so hard to take. It cut off the escape route. Even with the concrete lid gone, there were only floorboards and spiderwebs above. Sadako Yamamura has lived down here for twenty-five years. That's right, she's down here. Right under my feet. This is a tomb, that's what it is. A tomb. He couldn't think of anything else. Thought itself was closed off to him, as was any kind of escape. Sadako had tragically ended her life down here, and the scenes that had flashed through her mind at her moment of death had remained here, still strong, through the power of her psyche. And they'd matured down here in this cramped hole, breathing like the ebb and flow of the tide, waxing and waning in strength according to some cycle that had at some point coincided in frequency with the television placed directly overhead; and then they'd made their appearance in the world. Sadako was breathing. From out of nowhere, the sound of breathing enclosed him. Sadako Yamamura, Sadako Yamamura. The syllables repeated themselves in his brain, and her terrifyingly beautiful face came to him out of the photographs, shaking her head coquettishly. Sadako Yamamura was here. Asakawa recklessly began to dig through the earth beneath him, searching for her. He thought of her pretty face and her body, trying to maintain that image. That beautiful girl's bones, covered in my piss. Asakawa moved the shovel, sifting thgrough the mud. Time no longer mattered. He'd taken off his watch before coming down here. Extreme fatigue and stress had deadened his vexation, and he forgot the time limit he was laboring under. It felt like being drunk. He had no sense of time. Only by the number of times the bucket came back down the well to him, and by the beating of his heart, did he have any way of measuring time.
Finally, Asakawa grasped a large, round rock with both hands. It was smooth and pleasant to the touch, with two holes in its surface. He lifted it out of the water. He washed the dirt out of its recesses. He picked it up by what must once have been earholes and found himself face to face with a skull. His imagination clothed it with flesh. Big, clear eyes returned to the deep, hollow sockets, and flesh appeared above the two holes in the middle, forming itself into an elegant nose. Her long hair was wet, and water dripped from her neck and from behind her ears. Sadako Yamamura blinked her melancholy eyes two or three times to shake the water from her eyelashes. Squeezed between Asakawa's hands, her face looked painfully distorted. But still, her beauty was unclouded. She smiled at Asakawa, then narrowed her eyes as if to focus her vision.
I've been wanting to meet you.
♥ His wish to hear the voice of the woman he loved one last time had been cruelly shattered. Instead, all he'd done was drown her in his death cries. Now he breathed his last. Nothingness enveloped his consciousness. Mai's voice came again from the receiver near his hand. His legs were splayed out on the floor, his back was up against the bed, his left arm was thrown back across the mattress, his right hand was stretched out toward the receiver which still whispered "hello?" and his head was bent backwards, eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. Just before he slipped into the void, Ryuji realized he wouldn't be saved, and he remembered to wish with all his might that he could teach that asshole Asakawa the secret of the videotape.
♥ He'd been thinking of this from the perspective of a curse pronounced by Sadako, a woman who'd met an unexpected death, but he began to doubt that approach now. He had a premonition of a bottomless evil, sneering at human suffering.
♥ He couldn't help but wonder. What effect is this going to have? With my wife's copy and my daughter's copy, this virus is going to be set free in two directions-how's it going to spread from there? He could imagine people making copies and passing them on to people who'd already seen it before, trying to keep the thing contained within a limited circle so it wouldn't spread. But that would be going against the virus's will to reproduce. There was no way of knowing yet how that function was incorporated into the video. That would take some experimenting. And it would probably be impossible to find anybody willing to risk their lifer to find the truth of it until it had spread pretty far and things had become quite serious. It really wasn't very difficult to make a copy and show it to someone-so that's what people would do. As the secret traveled by word of mouth, it would be added to: "You have to show it to someone who hasn't seen it before." And as the tape propagated the week's lag time would probably be shortened. People who were shown the tape wouldn't wait a week to make a copy and show it to someone else. How fast would this ring expand? People would be driven by an instinctual fear of disease, and this pestilential videotape would no doubt spread throughout society in the blink of an eye. And driven by fear, people would start to spread crazy rumors. Such as: Once you've seen it you have to make at least two copies, and show them to at least two different people. It'd turn into a pyramid scheme, spreading incomparably faster than it would just one tape at a time. In the space of half a year, everybody in Japan would have become a carrier, and the infection would spread overseas. In the process, of course, several people would die, and people would realize that the tape's warning wasn't a lie, and they'd start making copies even more desperately. There would be panic. Where would it all end? How many victims would this claim? Two years ago, during the boom in interest in the occult, the newsroom had received ten million submissions. Something had gone haywire. And it would happen again, allowing the new virus to run rampant.
A woman's resentment toward the masses who had hounded her father and mother to their deaths and the smallpox virus's resentment toward the human ingenuity that had driven it to the brink of extinction had fused together in the body of a singular person named Sadako Yamamura, and had reappeared in the world in an unexpected, unimaginable form.
Asakawa, his family, everybody who had seen the video had been subconsciously infected with this virus. They were carriers. And viruses burrowed directly into the genes, the core of life. There was no telling yet what would result from this, how it would change human history-human evolution.
In order to protect my family, I am about to let loose on the world a plague which could destroy all mankind.
Asakawa was frightened by the essence of what he was trying to do. A voice was whispering to him.
If I let my wife and daughter die, it'll end right here. If a virus loses its host, it'll die. I can save mankind.
But the voice was too quiet.
..He knew what Ryuji would probably say. Be true to what you're feeling this instant! All we have in front of us is an uncertain future! The future'll take care of itself. When humanity gets around to applying its ingenuity, who knows if it won't find a solution? It's just another trial for the human species. In every age, the Devil reappears in a different guise. You can stamp it out, and stamp it out, and he'll keep coming back, over and over.
♥ In his rear-view mirror he could see the skies over Tokyo, receding into the distance. Black clouds moved eerily across the skies. They slithered like serpents, hinting at the unleashing of some apocalyptic evil.