The Complete Ring Trilogy

by Kōji Suzuki

  Kaoru imagined his father’s every little movement, tracing each one in his mind. Now he was turning off the ignition, now he was standing in the hall in front of the elevator with his helmet tucked under his arm, now he was looking up at the floor indicator lights.

  Kaoru counted to see how long it took him to get to the twenty-ninth floor. The elevator door opened and his father strode quickly down the carpeted corridor. He stood in front of the door to apartment 2916. He fished his card-key from his pocket and inserted it …

  Imagined motions and sounds were replaced by real ones starting with the click of the front door opening. He felt a palpable moment of precariousness, caught between imagination and reality, and a cry rose within his breast.

  It was Dad after all!

  Kaoru wanted to jump up and go to greet his father, but he forced himself to hold back. He wanted to try and forecast what his father would do now.

  Hideyuki seemed to be walking down the hall in the apartment with no care for who might be trying to sleep. The helmet under his arm banged loudly against the wall. His humming was nothing short of its normal volume. At the best of times, Hideyuki seemed to make more than the usual amount of noise when he moved. Maybe it was because he radiated so much energy.

  Suddenly Kaoru found himself unable to read what his father would do next. All sound stopped, and he had no idea where his father was. His mind was a blank, but then the sliding door to the room where he slept was flung roughly open. Without warning, light from the hall flooded the room. Not that it was that bright, but still Kaoru had to narrow his eyes against it. He hadn’t foreseen this. Hideyuki walked onto the tatami mats until he was right next to Kaoru’s futon. Then he knelt and brought his mouth close to his son’s ear.

  “Hey, kiddo, wake up.”

  Kaoru pretended he’d just this minute woken up, saying, “Oh, Dad. What time is it?”

  “One in the morning.”

  “Huh.”

  “C’mon, wake up.”

  This happened a lot to Kaoru—getting dragged out of bed in the middle of the night so he could keep his dad company over beer, conversing till dawn. Kaoru would always end up missing school the next day, sleeping the whole morning away.

  Last week he’d been late for school twice on account of his father. Hideyuki evidently didn’t think much of what his son was studying in elementary school. Kaoru often found himself exasperated at his father’s lack of common sense: to a kid, school wasn’t just a place to study, it was also a place to play. His dad didn’t seem to get that.

  “I want to go to school tomorrow.”

  Kaoru whispered so as not to wake his mother, sleeping next to him. He didn’t mind getting up to talk—in fact, he’d like nothing better—but he wanted to make it plain that it shouldn’t go too late.

  “Pretty responsible for a kid. Who do you take after, anyway?” With a devil-may-care tone in his voice, he ignored Kaoru’s efforts to keep the noise down. Frustrated, Kaoru leapt out of his futon. If he didn’t get Dad out of the room now, he’d wake Mom up.

  Yeah, who did he take after? In terms of facial features, Kaoru and his father sure didn’t have much in common. In terms of personality, too, Kaoru was a lot more sensitive—high-strung, even—than his rough-and-tumble father. Of course, he was still a child, but still, Kaoru was sometimes puzzled by how little he and his father resembled each other, outwardly or inwardly.

  Kaoru put his hands on his father’s back and pushed him across the room into the hall. Then he kept pushing him until they’d made it to the living room, at which point he sighed and said, “Boy, you’re heavy,” and stopped.

  If his son was going to push, Hideyuki was going to lean back, which he did, putting up a playful resistance which he supplemented with a forceful fart and a vulgar laugh. Then he noticed that where Kaoru had shoved him to was right next to the kitchen counter: as if he’d just remembered something, he walked over to the refrigerator and opened it.

  He took out a beer, poured some in a glass, and held it out to the still-panting Kaoru.

  “You want some too?”

  Hideyuki hadn’t stopped for a drink on the way home. He was stone-cold sober. This was the first alcohol he’d seen today.

  “No thanks. Mom’ll get mad at you again.”

  “Stop being so responsible.”

  Hideyuki took a showy swig and wiped his mouth. “I guess when a kid’s got a dad like me, he’s got to have his shit together, huh?”

  With an audible gulp Hideyuki drained his second glass, and in no time he’d finished the bottle.

  “I’ll tell you, this stuff tastes best when I’m looking at you, kiddo.”

  For his part, Kaoru didn’t mind keeping his father company when he was drinking. His father took such obvious pleasure in his alcohol that Kaoru had fun just watching him. As the fatigue of the day’s work left his father, Kaoru’s mood, too, lightened.

  Kaoru went to the fridge, got another bottle, and filled his father’s glass.

  But instead of saying “thanks,” Hideyuki issued his son an order.

  “Hey, kiddo, go wake up Machi.”

  Hideyuki was referring, of course, to Kaoru’s mother.

  “No way. Mom’s asleep. She’s tired.”

  “So am I, but do you see me sleeping?”

  “But you’re up ’cause you want to be.”

  “Never mind that, just go wake her up.”

  “Do you need her for something?”

  “Yeah. I need her to drink beer.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t want to drink.”

  “’s alright. Tell her I want her and she’ll come running.”

  “We don’t need her. We’re okay, just the two of us, aren’t we? Besides, there’s something I want to ask you.”

  “Gimme a break. I’m asking you here. We don’t want Machi to feel left out, do we?”

  “This always happens …”

  Kaoru headed for the bedroom, dragging his feet. For some reason it always fell to Kaoru to wake his mother. Supposedly his father had tried it once a few years ago, and she’d reacted very badly; now he was gun-shy.

  In the Futami household, Dad always got his way in the end. Not because Hideyuki exercised his patriarchal authority, but rather because, of the three of them, he was the most juvenile.

  Kaoru respected his father’s talent as a scientist. But he couldn’t help noticing that he was distinctly lacking as a grown-up. Kaoru wasn’t sure exactly what his father was missing, but his child’s mind figured that if growing up was a process of eliminating childishness in favor of adult wisdom, then it was precisely that function that his father lacked.

  3

  He hated to disturb his mother’s peaceful slumber. Kaoru went to the bedroom door and hesitantly slid it open. But Machiko was already sitting up in her futon, running her fingers through her hair. Kaoru didn’t need to wake her up—his father’s noisy homecoming had taken care of that.

  “Oh, Mom. Sorry.” He was apologizing for his father.

  “That’s alright.” The expression in her eyes was as gentle as ever.

  Kaoru’s mother almost never scolded him. Probably because he never asked for anything unreasonable, she’d always given him what he wanted. Though he was still a child, he could tell from her words and actions how absolutely she relied on him; it made him happy, but also gave him a feeling of grave responsibility.

  The Futami Family Three-Way Deadlock, was how Kaoru thought of his and his parents’ relationship. It was just like a game of rock-scissors-paper—each of them had someone they could always beat, and someone they’d always lose to.

  Kaoru was strong against his mother, but weak when it came to his father. So he’d always end up going along with his father’s unreasonable courses of action, doing whatever he was told. Hideyuki was strong enough vis-à-vis his son that he could treat him high-handedly, but somehow he couldn’t manage such a firm front with his wife. When his wife was in a bad mood, he seemed to pale and shrink
.

  So he had to fob the task of waking his sleeping wife off on his son. Kaoru’s mother, meanwhile, was lenient with her son’s demands, but could at times respond severely to her husband’s impossible behavior, scolding him as she would a child.

  His father would sometimes boast about how this marvelous balance of power maintained harmony in the family. He’d joke about their relationship pseudo-scientifically, calling their family a “self-sustaining structuralization of chaos”. The peculiar situation wasn’t the result of intent on anybody’s part—it had arisen naturally through the interaction and altercations of the three parties involved.

  “What’s Hide doing?” Machiko scratched her neck and ran her fingers slowly through her hair.

  “Drinking beer.”

  “At this late hour? He’s hopeless.”

  “He wants to know if you’ll join him.”

  Machiko stood up, laughing through her nose.

  “I wonder if he’s hungry.”

  “I don’t know. Probably he just wants to see you, don’t you think?”

  Kaoru said it with a straight face, but Machiko just laughed, as if to say, You don’t know what you’re talking about.

  But Kaoru was already quite aware of his parents’ erotic side.

  One night three months ago—a night in mid-June, a rare dry night in the middle of the rainy season, hot enough to forebode the tropical nights to come—Kaoru had been shocked to run into his father in the kitchen in an unexpected state.

  That night Kaoru had been shut in his room using his computer, when his thirst finally became too great to ignore. He’d gone to the kitchen to get some mineral water. His parents had apparently shut themselves in their separate rooms, saying they had work to do, and the apartment was quiet. His parents often went to their rooms to work and fell asleep like that. Kaoru had expected it to be the same that night. He didn’t realize they’d been in the same room after all.

  He didn’t turn on the light. He stood there in the darkness and poured some mineral water into a glass, and then popped a piece of ice into his mouth.

  Then he opened the refrigerator door again to put the plastic bottle back in, and that was when he found himself facing Hideyuki, who had suddenly entered the kitchen. The light from the refrigerator shone on his father’s naked body.

  Hideyuki jumped, but in surprise, not embarrassment.

  “I didn’t know you were there,” he said, and with no thought for his nakedness he grabbed Kaoru’s glass from him and gulped down its contents.

  What surprised Kaoru was not only that his father was completely unclothed, but that his genitalia was larger than it normally was. It was covered with some sort of thin bodily fluid, and it gleamed slickly. It always hung limply when Kaoru and his father were in the bath together. But now it arched and pulsed, exuding the confidence of having fulfilled its role as a part of its owner’s body.

  The whole time his father was drinking the mineral water, Kaoru couldn’t tear his gaze from it.

  “What’re you looking at? Jealous?”

  “Unh-uh.”

  Kaoru’s reply was blunt. Hideyuki bent over a bit and placed the tip of his right index finger on the tip of his member. With it he took up a single drop of semen and held it out before Kaoru’s eyes.

  “Look, kiddo, it’s your ancestors,” he remarked, with mock seriousness. Then he wiped his fingertip on the edge of the sink against which Kaoru was leaning.

  “Eww,” said Kaoru, twisting away, but he kept staring at the white droplet on the edge of the sink.

  He didn’t know how he should react. Hideyuki turned his back on him and disappeared into the bathroom. After a while, from the open door came the sound of urination, forced, irregular bursts.

  Sometimes Kaoru didn’t know if his father was stupid or clever. Sure, he was an excellent computer scientist, but sometimes he did things that were worse than childish. Kaoru respected his father alright, but watching him made him nervous. He could understand his mother’s sufferings.

  So ran his thoughts as he stared at what his father had called his “ancestors”.

  The sperm swimming in the tiny droplet gradually died as the stainless steel stole heat from them. They were, of course, invisible to the naked eye, but Kaoru found himself quite aware of the actions of the herd—he could quite easily imagine the faces of each one of them as it died and contributed its corpse to the growing layer of dead.

  These sperm, born of meiosis inside his father, held, as did his mother’s eggs, half the number of chromosomes contained within the cells of his body. Together they made a fertilized egg, only then supplying the total number of chromosomes necessary for a cell. But it didn’t follow that a sperm was merely half a person. Depending on how you looked at it, the sperm and the egg were the body’s basic structural units. Only reproductive cells could be said to have continued uninterrupted since the inception of life—it wasn’t too much of a stretch to say they possessed a kind of immortality.

  All that aside, to have a chance to leisurely observe his father’s sperm was something he’d never dreamed of. Right here in front of him was the source of the life form that he knew as himself.

  Was I really born from something this tiny?

  He stood there mystified and mute. These sperm hadn’t existed anywhere until they’d been made within his father’s body. Created from nothingness by means of that mysterious power only life possessed.

  So caught up was he in his examination that Kaoru didn’t notice when his father finished urinating and rejoined him.

  “What are you doing, kiddo?” He seemed to have already forgotten his own prank.

  “Observing your … things,” said Kaoru, not looking up. Hideyuki finally realized what his son was looking at and gave a curt laugh.

  “What kind of idiot would stare at a thing like that? Shame on you.”

  Hideyuki grabbed a dishtowel, wiped up the semen, and then dropped the dishtowel in the sink. As he did so, the image of life that Kaoru had been constructing fled with its tail between its legs.

  He suddenly had an awful premonition, as he imagined his own body being wiped up with a rag and tossed away.

  So his parents’ secret life, something not for him to come in contact with, became, under the influence of his father’s attitude, something subject to no taboo whatsoever. Kaoru remembered that incident three months ago as if it were last night.

  Of course, Machiko had no way of knowing what mischief her husband had worked on her son as he went about opening the refrigerator and using the bathroom. Had she known, her embarrassment would no doubt have lit a bonfire of anger within her; no doubt she would have refused to speak to her husband for some time. Probably tonight she would have been in no mood to get up and fix him a snack.

  “What am I going to do with him?” she muttered again and again; still, she fixed her hair with a will, and refastened her misaligned pajama buttons. Kaoru found it a pleasant, warm sight.

  4

  Kaoru’s mother put on slippers and headed for the living room, and he followed her.

  “Sorry to get you out of bed,” Hideyuki said to Machiko.

  “That’s okay. I’ll bet you’re hungry, aren’t you?”

  “A little.”

  “Why don’t I make something?”

  Machiko was already heading for the kitchen, but Hideyuki stopped her, holding out a glass of beer.

  “Have a drink first.”

  Machiko accepted the glass and took a few sips. She didn’t like carbonated beverages, so it was impossible for her to down a beer in one gulp. That didn’t mean she wasn’t a drinker, though—she was above average when it came to holding her liquor.

  When he’d seen that his wife had settled down with her beer, Hideyuki finally loosened his necktie. As a researcher, he was under no special requirement to wear a tie to work. Still, every day he put on a suit and buttoned the top button of his shirt before getting on his motorcycle to go to the lab. No doubt the sight of h
im in a suit riding an off-road bike struck people as peculiar, but that didn’t bother Hideyuki in the least.

  Kaoru’s mother poured some oil into a frying pan and started warming up some sausages, and his father stood next to her and began reporting to her on his day in the lab. Oblivious to the fact that she hadn’t asked him, he recounted the day’s events with brio, mentioning coworkers by name, sometimes with a disparaging comment. Kaoru began to feel bored as his parents receded into their own world, seeming to forget his presence beside them.

  Then Machiko noticed him, and in her considerate way changed the subject. “By the way, Kaoru, why don’t you show your father what you showed me?”

  “Huh? What?” He’d been taken by surprise.

  “You know, those gravitational anomaly thingies.”

  “Oh, those.” Kaoru took the two pages out of the dish cupboard where he’d put them away and handed them to Hideyuki.

  “You’ll be amazed at what he’s discovered,” his mother said, but Kaoru didn’t feel it was that great a discovery.

  “What’s this?” said Hideyuki, holding the printouts up to his face. He gazed at the first one, with its contour lines and their positive and negative numbers, and within a few seconds had grasped its meaning.

  “I get it, this is a map of the earth’s gravitational anomalies.”

  He turned his gaze to the second page, and this time he didn’t have such an easy time figuring it out. He frowned. Hideyuki already had a geological map of the earth stored in his brain, but try as he might he couldn’t figure out what the black marks on this map meant. He tried several guesses connected with gravitational anomalies, such as subterranean mineral deposits, before giving up and turning to his son.

  “Alright, you got me. What is this?”

  “The earth’s longevity zones.”

  “Longevity zones?” No sooner had he heard the words than Hideyuki placed the maps over one another and looked at them anew.

  “Would you look at that. The longevity zones are only found in places with high negative gravitational anomalies.”

  Kaoru was impressed, as usual. His father’s mental quickness was one of the reasons why he enjoyed their discussions so much. “That’s right!” he said, his excitement lending his words added emphasis.