by Kōji Suzuki
Moving only his eyes, Ando looked around the room. Then, gingerly, he sat up. He couldn’t see anybody around. Just as he was starting to wonder if his imagination was playing tricks on him, the water stopped. He held his breath without meaning to.
The woman emerged from behind a corner in the hallway. Just as before, she wore nothing but panties and held a wrung-out towel.
Ando tried to scream, but no sound came out. He brushed away the hand offering him a wet towel and got unsteadily to his feet. Then he backed up until he was flat against the wall. He tried to scream her name, but he still couldn’t find his voice.
Sadako Yamamura!
He tried to recall everything he knew about her. Twenty-five years ago she’d been murdered, thrown into an old well. She had created that awful videotape by means of thought projection. She possessed paranormal powers. She had testicular feminization syndrome; she was a hermaphrodite. Ando turned his stare on her lower body. There was no visible bulge under the white panties that covered her crotch. Of course, her testicles were not supposed to be readily visible. But Ando had touched her down there last night, caressed her over and over. Nothing had struck him as odd; she was in every way perfectly female as far as he could tell. But he hadn’t been able to see. Everything they’d done the night before had been done in darkness. Ando suddenly wondered what her obsession with darkness was meant to prevent him from seeing.
The otherworldliness he’d felt on first meeting her hadn’t been off the mark after all. That time in the elevator in Mai’s building, he’d been desperate to distance himself from her—just like now. The way she’d just appeared like that from Mai’s apartment, he’d had no idea where she’d come from and still didn’t.
He had so many questions, but he could hardly breathe much less ask her anything.
He felt that if he wasn’t careful he’d collapse onto the floor, and if he did, he’d be in Sadako’s clutches. The only way to maintain any dignity at all was to stay where he could look down on her from above.
He didn’t take his eyes off her.
Her naked skin gleamed whitely under the fluorescent lights, as if to impress him with the reality of her flesh, as if to assert to him that she was no ghost. This body of hers overwhelmed him, this body whose arms and legs had been so entangled with his last night. What did he need to do to escape from her spell? There was only one answer: flee. Get away from this place. It was all he could think of. What he saw before him was a monster. A woman come back after being dead for twenty-five years.
With his back against the wall, Ando began to move sideways toward the vestibule. Sadako made no move to block him, following him only with her eyes. Ando looked toward the door. Had he locked it when they came in? He didn’t remember doing that. The door should swing open when he turned the knob. Warily, Ando moved in that direction. He was in no shape to think about taking a coat.
When he’d put several good feet between himself and the woman, he bolted for the door and stumbled outside. In slacks and a sweater he was dressed much too lightly for the cold, but he spared not a thought for that as he ran down the stairs. It was only after he’d run through the lobby and out onto the sidewalk that he was able to turn around to look behind him. There was no sign of pursuit. He looked up at his windows, still brightly lit. He wanted to go someplace crowded. He ran toward the station.
7
The wind chilled him to the bone. He had no particular destination in mind, but he found himself naturally gravitating toward bright places. He turned his back on the shadowy groves of Yoyogi Park. The skyscrapers of Shinjuku loomed ahead like so many black hulks. Between him and them lay the modest bustle of Sangubashi Station, surrounded by narrow shop-lined streets leading into residential areas. He guessed that even on a holiday there might be one or two places open. Ando’s steps took him in that direction. Anywhere there might be people was good enough for him.
It was only when he came to the ticket vending machines at the station that he realized he’d left his wallet behind. He couldn’t go back and get it now. He searched his other pockets. He found the little case he kept his driver’s license in. He remembered shoving it in his pocket the other day when he’d gone on that excursion with Miyashita, thinking he might have to take the wheel at some point. He’d forgotten to take it out of his pocket when he got home. Luckily he’d tucked some money behind the license for emergencies.
A five-thousand-yen bill. That was all the money he had now. At the thought he felt more lonely than cold. Where was he supposed to sleep tonight? Five thousand yen wouldn’t even buy him a night in a capsule hotel.
His only hope was Miyashita. He bought a train ticket, and then stepped into a phone booth. He dialed his friend’s number, doubting he’d have gotten home yet. And, indeed, he hadn’t. No wonder, he’d only just called Ando from Yotsuya, across town from where he lived. He was probably still on his way home to Tsurumi. Ando decided to head in that direction himself.
It was past nine o’clock when Ando sank into a seat on the train. When he closed his eyes Sadako’s face appeared before him as if by conditioned reflex. He’d never had his feelings about a woman change so drastically over such a short period of time. The cold air of mystery he’d sensed on their first meeting had dissipated somewhat on their second, to be replaced by a growing desire for her. When they met a third time, that desire was realized, and the faint beginnings of infatuation had stirred his heart. And then, the fall. She’d lured him up to a high place, had her way with him, and then pushed him off the edge into the abyss. It was unendurable to think that he’d copulated with a woman who should have been dead for twenty-five years. The word “necrophilia” came to mind. Where had this woman come from? Was the part about her being dead a mistake? Or had she really come back from beyond the grave?
It being a holiday, the train was comparatively empty. Only a few passengers had to stand. Across the aisle from Ando, a laborer-type was sprawled across the bench, occupying enough space for three people. His eyes were shut tight, but he wasn’t asleep. Proof of this came every time somebody walking the length of the car passed by him and he opened his eyes a crack to fathom his surroundings. His eyes, however, were so heavy and dull that they almost looked dead. Ando averted his eyes from the man. But the laborer wasn’t the only one. Every one of the passengers was as pale as a corpse.
Ando hugged himself to keep from trembling. If he didn’t hug himself, he was afraid he’d start screaming, right there in the public space of a train carriage.
He accepted a glass of brandy from Miyashita. First he sent a trickle of it down his throat, savoring the sensation, then he drained the glass. He was starting to feel human again, but was still shivering slightly.
“How do you feel now?” Miyashita asked.
“More or less alive.”
“You must’ve been freezing.”
Miyashita didn’t know yet why Ando had come without a coat.
“It’s not the cold.”
Miyashita had shown Ando into the room he used as a study. Ando was sitting on the spare bed in the corner. It was where he was going to sleep tonight, but for the moment, he was just rattling its metal bars. Only after downing his second glass of brandy was he able to stop shaking.
“What happened?” Miyashita’s voice was gentle.
Ando told him everything that had happened since the previous night. When he finished, he fell backwards onto the bed and let out a whine like a mosquito’s.
“I give up! Explain it to me! I’m lost,” he moaned.
“Good Lord,” muttered Miyashita, utterly thrown for a loop. It was one of those moments when people can’t help laughing, albeit bitterly, and that’s what Miyashita did, weakly. When his laughter had subsided, he poured brandy into some hot coffee and started sipping it. He seemed to be deep in thought, trying to find a reply that was logical, that made at least some sense.
“The basic question is, where did Sadako come from?” The rhetorical tone suggested that Miy
ashita had already come up with an answer.
“Tell me. Where did she come from?”
Miyashita turned the question back on Ando. “Don’t you know?”
Still supine, Ando shook his head. “No, I do not.”
“You really don’t know?”
“Tell me! Where did she come from?”
“Mai Takano gave birth to her.”
Ando forgot to breathe for a few moments while he tried to think of an alternate explanation. But he could hardly think at all. He’d lost the power of cogitation. All he could do was repeat what he’d heard.
“Mai Takano gave birth to her?”
“The evil video was born from Sadako’s mind. Mai watched it on a day when she was ovulating. The ring virus was born in her body and then fertilized her egg. ‘Fertilized’ isn’t the right word, though. It’s probably more accurate to say that the nucleus of Mai’s egg was replaced with Sadako Yamamura’s genes.”
“I hope you’re going to tell me you can explain the mechanism by which all this happened.”
“Think back to when we ran the ring virus through the genetic sequencer. We discovered that it contained smallpox genes and human genes mixed together in a fixed ratio.”
Ando sat up and reached for his glass. But the glass was empty.
“So the human genes were …”
“Sadako’s. Split into hundreds of thousands of parts.”
“Hundreds of thousands of ring virus specimens, each carrying a tiny segment of Sadako’s DNA?”
“Despite its being a DNA virus, the ring virus has reverse transcription enzymes. So it ought to be able to insert those fragments into the nucleus of a cell.”
A single virus specimen would be incapable of carrying the entirety of a person’s genetic information. It simply wasn’t big enough. But things would be otherwise if a person’s DNA could be split into hundreds of thousands of segments, and each segment parceled out to a different piece of virus. In the photos taken by the electron microscope, they’d seen what looked like countless numbers of ring viruses, mobs of them. It turned out that each one of them had been carrying a part of Sadako Yamamura’s genetic code, and together they’d ganged up on Mai’s egg.
Ando started to stand up, but thought better of it and sat down again. He always got fidgety when he tried to counterargue.
“But Sadako died twenty-five years ago. Her genetic information shouldn’t be able to manifest itself anymore.”
“Let’s think about that. Now, why do you think Sadako projected those images on a tape?”
What had she been obsessed with at the bottom of that well, on the brink of death? The idea of packing all her hatred for the masses into images that would bring terror to anyone who saw them? Practically speaking, what would she get out of that? There had to be some deeper purpose. But Ando couldn’t comprehend what Miyashita was trying to say.
Miyashita tried to guide him toward the answer. “She was only nineteen.”
“So?”
“So she didn’t want to die.”
“She was too young to die.”
“Isn’t it conceivable that she transformed her genetic information into a code and left it behind in the form of energy?”
Ando’s only answer was a sigh.
She translated her genetic information into images and then projected those images? True, Ryuji had succeeded in communicating with them by encoding the word “mutation” into his own DNA base sequence. But the human genome was huge, much too big to be translated into a single videotape.
Ando finally countered with, “Impossible. The human genome is too large.”
Miyashita spread his arms to point at the corners of the room. “Take this room, for example. Let’s say we were to express the totality of this room in words.”
The study was about eight mats large. A desk stood next to the bed. There was a computer on the desk, and next to that a pile of dictionaries. Most problematic were the bookshelves that took up one wall. They were crammed with what had to be a few thousand books ranging from works of literature to specialist works on medicine. It could easily take a day just to list all the titles and authors.
“That’s a lot of information.”
“But what if …” Miyashita mimed holding a camera. Click. “… you took a picture. You’ve got it all in an instant. With just one photo you can store most of the information that makes up the sight of this room. And think, continuous images would increase the capacity that much more. It wouldn’t be impossible to encode Sadako’s complete genetic information that way.”
Ando saw what his friend was trying to say, but he still wasn’t ready to go along. “Let me think about it for a while,” he said, shaking his head. He needed to go back and retrace for himself a path through what Miyashita was saying.
“Go ahead and think. I’m going to go take a leak.” Miyashita disappeared down the hall, leaving the study door open.
Of course, what Miyashita had spelled out was merely a hypothesis. But regardless of whether or not the mechanism Miyashita had suggested was actually how it had happened, the fact remained that Mai Takano had given birth to Sadako Yamamura a week after insemination. That seemed to be beyond question at this point. A week from insemination to birth was an awfully short time. Something must have served to hasten the process of cellular division. A cell’s nucleus contains chemical compounds called nucleic acids, and cellular division only occurs when the levels of these nucleic acids exceed a certain level. Accordingly, the only way to drastically accelerate the frequency of cellular division is to provide excess quantities of nucleic acids. Perhaps the ring virus had managed this somehow, making it possible to force an incredible rate of growth in the fetus.
The first time he’d visited Mai’s apartment he’d felt the presence of something hidden, even though there was nobody there. His feeling had been right. The newborn Sadako had been hiding somewhere in that room. No doubt she’d been very small still. She could have easily found a place to secrete herself, in the wardrobe, maybe, or in the cabinet under the sink. Ando hadn’t gone so far as to search those places. And because she was still so young, when she’d seen Ando in such a compromised position in the bathroom, she’d laughed. The thing that had touched his Achilles tendon had most likely been little Sadako’s hand.
Sadako took over that room in the absence of its rightful inhabitant and grew there, away from the eyes of other people. A week was enough time for her to reach adulthood. And when Ando visited the apartment a second time, she emerged from within it as a full-grown woman.
Ando went over the sequence in his head over and over until he managed to wrap his mind around the hypothesis of Sadako’s birth and growth. The theory accorded with what he himself had experienced.
But what about the following days? Having reached adulthood in a week, her lifespan would have been just a few more weeks unless she somehow didn’t keep on aging at the same rate. Sadako had come back to life at the beginning of last November, ten weeks ago. And yet her skin retained the youthfulness of a girl of nineteen. Perhaps maturation for her meant simply reaching the age she’d been at when she died?
Miyashita came back, shaking his wet hands, and immediately spoke. “One other thing we shouldn’t forget is the vital role of the smallpox virus in all this.”
“Yeah, well, Sadako and the smallpox virus seem to be in league alright.”
Just before her death, Sadako had contracted the virus from Jotaro Nagao. It seemed that she’d somehow blended with it there at the bottom of the well, over a long period of time, until the mixture had achieved full ripeness. Two beings hounded to untimely extinction had exacerbated each other’s potency in their mutual desire to come back to life someday.
“Now, is it true that Junichiro Asakawa is going to publish Ring?”
“Yup. Shotoku already has it listed in a brochure of upcoming releases.”
“Okay. Sadako and the smallpox virus. Those two threads were twisted into one in the form of that
killer videotape. Now they’re coming apart, evolving back into two separate strands. One is Sadako herself, and the other is Ring.”
Ando didn’t object. A virus was something that inhabited the gray area between life and non-life anyway, something that amounted to little more than information, whose very nature it was to effect dramatic changes in itself in response to its environment. That it should switch from the form of a video to the form of a book didn’t come as much of a shock.
“So that’s why Kazuyuki Asakawa survived so long.”
Finally, that riddle was solved. In other words, there had been two exits. One was Sadako, and the other was the Ring report. And that was why both Mai and Kazuyuki had been spared death by arterial blockage. As long as they had the ability to give birth, so to speak, their lives weren’t to be claimed so easily. It made sense. Just as the ring virus that had invaded Mai’s body had headed for her womb, in Kazuyuki’s body the virus had headed for the brain. It wasn’t really Kazuyuki Asakawa who wrote Ring; he had been forced to write it. Sadako’s DNA entered his brain and made him do it. And that was how he was able to describe things with such video camera-like accuracy. Only his depiction of Sadako, the main subject, was lacking in verisimilitude, according to the logic that dictated that the person looking through the viewfinder won’t appear on film.
Ando and Miyashita fell silent, trying to anticipate what was to come.
Just what did Sadako and Ring have in mind for humanity? Ando and Miyashita didn’t need to wait for the results of their blood tests. They were sure now that they had to find some way to stop Ring from being published. Junichiro simply didn’t understand how much misery the human race would suffer as a result of the book he was putting his name to. He had to be their first point of counterattack. They’d have to persuade him to reverse his decision to publish the book. But would he listen to them? They weren’t sure they could get him to believe their outlandish tale in the first place.