by Kōji Suzuki
Masako was running her fingers in a circle over her kneecap, gradually making the hole bigger. The skin of her leg showed white where it peeked through the rent, so white as to make it a shame to cover it up with stockings.
The hole got bigger. Ando stopped her by laying his hand on top of hers.
He asked her, “What were you saying back there in the theater?” He meant to ask why she was repeating the characters’ lines.
Masako’s reply was: “Take me to a bookstore.”
She liked to deflect his questions that way. She asked Ando to do things far more often than she answered his queries. But of course, Ando was incapable of saying no to her.
He took her to the biggest bookstore in Ginza. Masako flitted from shelf to shelf, in the end spending over an hour in the bookstore reading on her feet. Ando, who didn’t share that habit, ended up wandering around aimlessly until he discovered, next to the registers, a stack of pamphlets from Shotoku, the publisher. Since he’d visited their offices only the other day, and the pamphlets were free, he picked one up.
The pamphlet included a short essay but consisted mainly of ads for future Shotoku releases.
I wonder if Ryuji’s in here? Ando flipped through the pamphlet expectantly. The other day, Ryuji’s editor Kimura had told Ando that Ryuji’s collection of philosophical essays was just about to be published. Ando was hoping to see a friend’s name in print.
But before he could find it, he was dragged out of the bookstore by Masako. “How about another movie?”
Her plea was a mild one, but the way she gripped his arm and pulled him along suggested she wouldn’t take no for an answer. Maybe, while reading in the bookstore, she’d found out about another movie and decided she had to see it. Ando slipped the pamphlet into his coat pocket and asked, “What do you want to see?”
She didn’t answer, but simply squeezed his hand and tugged him forward.
He hung back a bit, saying, “Pushy, aren’t you?” Then he noticed that she was still clutching an event-guide magazine and came to a full stop. Masako hadn’t spent a single yen since the night before. She hadn’t made a move to pay for anything, always leaving it to Ando to pick up the tab. He didn’t imagine for a moment that she’d purchased the magazine with her own money. Indeed, it wasn’t in a bag, and she held it bare rolled up in her hand.
She lifted it.
Ando looked back toward the bookstore. Nobody was coming after them. She’d managed to elude the sharp eyes of the clerks. It was only a three-hundred yen magazine; even if she’d been caught, it wouldn’t have been a big deal. As he let Masako pull him along, Ando was beginning to feel bolder than ever before.
5
When he put the key in the lock he could hear the phone in his apartment ringing. Figuring he wouldn’t make it in time anyway, Ando decided not to hurry. He turned the knob. When friends called, they usually only let the phone ring five or six times, because they knew how small his apartment was. Hence he could usually guess the caller by how long it took him or her to give up. As he’d expected, by the time he got the door open the ringing had stopped, a sure sign of someone who knew him and how he lived. There weren’t too many people who had visited him. It was probably Miyashita, Ando figured, looking at his watch. It was just past eight o’clock in the evening.
He opened the door wider and beckoned Masako inside, then turned on the lights and the heat. Clothing was scattered about exactly as they’d left it that morning. Masako had left her belongings there, seemingly having decided to spend another night with Ando.
Ando’s shoulders and back were stiff from watching movies in the morning and afternoon. He wanted a soak in the tub.
Starting to take off his coat, he found the publisher’s pamphlet in his pocket. He took it out and placed it on the bedside table, thinking to examine it at leisure after a bath. He’d decided to buy Ryuji’s book, and he needed to look up the title and publication date.
He stripped down to his shirt and rolled up his cuffs. He gave the tub a quick rinse and then adjusted the water temperature and started to fill it. It wasn’t a large tub, so it wasn’t long before it was ready. The bathroom was full of steam, and turning on the fan didn’t do much good. He thought he’d have Masako bathe first, so he stuck his head into the other room. She was sitting on the edge of the bed taking off her stockings.
“Would you like to take a bath?”
She stood up. At the same time, the phone rang.
As Ando walked to the telephone, Masako took his place in the bathroom, disappearing behind the accordion-style shower curtain.
It was Miyashita, as he’d expected. As soon as Ando had the receiver to his ear, his friend yelled, “Where the hell have you been all day?”
“At the movies.”
Miyashita obviously hadn’t expected that answer. “At the movies?” he blurted.
“Two of them, in fact.”
“Must be nice not to have a care in the world,” Miyashita sneered in heartfelt disgust. Then he continued with his harangue. “I don’t know how many times I tried to call you.”
“I do go out, you know.”
“Well, whatever. Do you know where I am now?”
Where was Miyashita calling from? It didn’t sound like he was at home. Ando could hear cars. He must have been in a roadside phone booth somewhere.
“Please don’t tell me you’re in the neighborhood and you want to come up?”
Now was a bad time. Masako was in the bath. Ando was prepared to refuse if that was Miyashita’s plan.
“Don’t be an idiot. Think theater, man, the stage.”
“What are you talking about?”
Now it was Ando’s turn to be annoyed. What right did Miyashita have to criticize him for watching movies when he was going to plays? But that wasn’t what Miyashita was up to.
“I’m at the offices of Theater Group Soaring.”
The name rang a bell. Where had he seen it before? He remembered—in Ring. It was the name of the troupe Sadako Yamamura had belonged to prior to her death.
“What the hell are you doing there?”
“Yesterday I realized that the descriptions in Ring were so precise and objective that it was like they’d been observed through the viewfinder of a video camera.”
“Me, too.”
Why were they going through all that again? Ando spotted the Shotoku pamphlet on the table and pulled it over next him so he could take notes on it. It was a habit of his to take notes while he was on the phone; it calmed him down. His customary phone-conversation posture was receiver wedged between his ear and left shoulder, ballpoint pen in right hand.
“Well, I realized today that there was one more thing to check on. I mean, if we wanted to look at faces, we didn’t need to go all the way to Atami, did we?”
Ando was getting impatient. He couldn’t see where Miyashita was going. “Just tell me already.”
Miyashita finally came out with it. “I’m talking about Sadako Yamamura.”
“Come on, she died in 1966.” But wait … Ando suddenly realized why Miyashita had visited the theater group. “The photograph.”
He remembered reading in Ring that Asakawa’s colleague Yoshino had visited the troupe’s rehearsal space and seen Sadako’s portfolio. This was something she’d submitted when she’d joined the troupe, and included two photos, a full-length one and one from the chest up. Yoshino had made copies of them.
“Finally got it, huh? All along, it was easy as pie to feast our eyes on Sadako.”
Ando summoned up his mental image of Sadako. Thanks to Ring, he had quite a strong impression stored away in his brain. Tall and slender, with only a modest bustline but perfectly balanced in her proportions. Her facial features were somewhat androgynous, but she had perfect eyes and a perfect nose, with nothing about them he would change if he could. He imagined her as an unapproachable beauty.
Ando whipped up some courage and asked, “And how about it? Have you gotten them to show you the phot
os?”
Miyashita had probably seen them, and the face in the photos and the one in his mind had probably been identical. That was the reply Ando expected.
But what he heard from the other end of the line was a sigh.
“It’s different.”
“You mean …”
“The face is different.”
Ando didn’t know what to say.
“I don’t know how to put it. The Sadako Yamamura in the photos is not the one I pictured. She’s beautiful, no question, but … How can I put it?”
“What do you mean?”
“What do I mean? Hell, I’m just confused. But I did remember something. I had a friend who was good at drawing people’s portraits, and I asked him once what type of face was the hardest to draw for him. And he told me there wasn’t any particular type of face he couldn’t draw. He said all faces had peculiarities that made them easy to capture in convincing portraits. But if he had to pick one, he said, the hardest type to draw, for him, was his own face. Especially when the self-portraitist is a very self-conscious sort, it’s next to impossible to make the picture match the reality. It always comes out looking like someone else.”
“So?” What did that have to do with the question at hand?
“Nothing, I guess. I was just reminded of him, that’s all. But take the videotape. It wasn’t shot with a camera, right? Those images came from Sadako’s eyes and mind. And in spite of that …”
“What?”
“It captured places and people accurately.”
“We didn’t actually see the video, you know.”
“But we read Ring.”
Ando was getting annoyed. Miyashita seemed to be dancing around the subject. He was like a child who wanted to go somewhere but was afraid to take the first step.
“Look, Miyashita, why don’t you just tell me what’s on your mind?”
Ando could hear Miyashita take a deep breath.
“Did Kazuyuki Asakawa really write Ring?”
Who else could have? Ando started to say, but heard a beep signaling that Miyashita’s phone card was about to run out.
“Crap, my card’s almost used up. Can your fax machine handle photos?” Miyashita spoke fast.
“That’s what the guy said when he sold it to me.”
“Great, I’ll fax them to you. I want you to check right away to see if she’s different from what you imagined, or if I’m just—”
And with that they were cut off.
Ando sat there for a minute with the receiver still on his shoulder, in a daze. The noise of the shower stopped, and the apartment was wrapped in stillness. Feeling a chill breeze, he looked over to see that the window was open a crack, admitting the wintry night air. In the distance, a car horn sounded. The dry, harsh noise testified to how desiccated the outside air was. In contrast, the air inside his apartment was almost wringing with moisture as steam seeped out from the bathroom. Masako was taking a long time.
Ando thought over what Miyashita had said. He could understand his friend’s state of mind. Probably he’d spent the whole day on pins and needles, and rather than just sit around and wonder whether the ring virus had entered his body because he’d read Ring, he’d decided to act. When he’d remembered that the acting troupe had kept photos of Sadako, he’d gone over to check. Surprisingly, the photos hadn’t matched his mental image. Unable to judge whether this was simply due to some blockage on his part, he’d copied the photos, so he could get Ando’s opinion. And now he was going to fax them over.
Ando glanced at the fax machine. No movement yet.
He looked away from it. His eyes came to rest on the publisher’s pamphlet. He picked it up and started to flip through it while he waited. Upcoming publications were listed in the back. Under the heading “New in February” fifteen or so titles were listed, each one followed by the name of the author and a dozen or so words describing the contents. About halfway down Ando saw Ryuji’s name. The title was still The Structure of Knowledge, and the summary said it represented “the cutting edge of contemporary thought”. On the list it was sandwiched between a romance novel and a collection of behind-the-scenes essays about the television industry, making it seem even more eggheaded. But this was his friend’s last work being published posthumously. Ando would give it a read no matter how difficult it was. He circled the entry.
He felt something click in his mind. He couldn’t figure out what. Still holding the pen, he thought hard. It seemed to him that he’d seen a familiar word on that page of the pamphlet. He looked again. The bottom half of the page was taken up with a list, in smaller type, of books coming out in March. He looked at the third title from the end.
And then his eyes grew wide with shock. At first he wondered if it was just a coincidence, but then he saw the name of the author.
New in March:
…
…
RING by Junichiro Asakawa. Bloodcurdling cult horror.
Ando let the pamphlet slip out of his hand. He was going to publish that?
Now he understood why Junichiro had been so standoff-ish that day when Ando had run into him in the Shotoku lounge. He’d decided to tweak his brother’s reportage and publish it as a novel. And since Ando was the one person who knew Junichiro was using his brother’s work without consent, it was no wonder he’d been so cold that day, fleeing after hardly the most perfunctory of greetings. Had they talked for long, the subject of the report would have come up, and his editors might have found out. Junichiro obviously wanted to claim the book as being entirely his own.
“It mustn’t go to press!” Ando cried out loud. At the very least, he had to get Junichiro to delay publication until it could be established that Ring was physically harmless. It was his duty as a medical professional. Tomorrow, he and Miyashita would have their blood tested. It would take several days for the results to come back. If they were positive, if he and Miyashita turned out to be carriers of the ring virus, then publication of that book could have catastrophic consequences. The original videotape could only spread at the rate of one copy at a time. Publication involved numbers of an entirely different scale, ten thousand copies at least. In a worst-case scenario, hundreds of thousands, even millions, of copies would be disseminated throughout the country.
Ando’s teeth chattered as he imagined a huge tsunami. A vast, dark wall of ocean bearing down silently, driving before it a wind that he thought he could feel on him even now. He went to the window and shut it tightly. Standing by the window, he looked back toward the hall. Masako stood there, wrapped in a towel; he saw her face in profile. She was rummaging through her bag, probably for underwear.
The phone rang. Ando picked up the receiver, and when he confirmed that it was an incoming fax, he pushed the start button on the fax machine. Miyashita was sending him the photos.
A few seconds later, the fax machine whirred to life and began printing. Ando stood motionless over the black machine, staring at the sheet slowly emerging from it. He felt someone sneak up behind him and turned to look. It was Masako, wearing only panties. She’d draped the towel over her shoulders and was standing directly behind him. Her face was flushed, and her eyes had a new gleam, so lustrous as to make him want to hold her and kiss her eyelids then and there. She wore a strangely resolute expression.
The fax machine beeped to say it was done printing. Ando tore off the fax, sat down on the bed, and had a look. The transmission consisted of two photos, side by side. The printout wasn’t quite photo quality, but it was clear enough for him to make out Sadako Yamamura’s face and body.
He screamed. The woman in the photos was indeed different from what he’d imagined. But that wasn’t why he’d screamed. The photos on the fax were of the woman standing in front of him now.
She took the fax out of his hands and looked at the photos. Ando stared up at her weakly, like a boy getting a scolding from his mother. Finally he managed to wring words from his throat.
“You’re … Sadako Yamamura.”
Not Masako, not Mai’s sister—those were lies.
Her expression relaxed. Perhaps she found Ando’s consternation funny, for she seemed to be smiling.
Ando’s mind went blank. It was the first time he ever fainted in his almost thirty-five years.
6
Ando was unconscious for less than a minute, but that was enough. With no way to process the facts thrust into his face, he’d had no other option but to stop thinking altogether. Perhaps his consciousness would have been able to deal with it if he’d had a little more time, or more composure to begin with. If he’d even remotely entertained the possibility beforehand, maybe he wouldn’t have had to faint.
But as it was, it came all too suddenly. To find out that a woman who had died twenty-five years ago was standing right in front of him, and remembering making love to her several times the night before … In that instant he’d gone to the brink of insanity, and his brain circuitry had been forced to shut down momentarily. Most people would faint if they got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and turned around to find a dead person standing there. That’s how people escape from horrors presented to them; once you faint, you no longer have to endure the unendurable. Only with that cushion of unconsciousness are we able to prepare ourselves to accept reality.
When consciousness returned to him, Ando thought he could smell burning flesh somewhere. He should have been lying face down on the bed, but somehow he was on his back looking up instead. Had he rolled over himself, or had someone turned him over? Only his upper body was actually on the bed; his legs, though neatly arranged, were hanging out onto the floor. Without otherwise moving a muscle, Ando sniffed the air and listened for sounds. He opened his eyes a slit. He had no intention of reawakening all his senses at once. He meant to ease himself into acceptance. Otherwise he’d probably suffer the same reaction all over again.
He could hear water spurting from a faucet. The sound probably came from the bathroom, but it sounded like the distant burbling of a brook. The noise of the water hid the night sounds of the city. Normally he should have been able to hear the cars rushing by on the Metropolitan Expressway. He eased his eyes open. In the middle of the ceiling two twenty-watt fluorescent bulbs glowed, casting a bright light over the whole room.