Ring

by Kōji Suzuki

  "Eh?" he replied, suddenly alert, wondering how the cabby knew his profession.

  "You're a reporter, right? For a newspaper."

  "Yeah. Their weekly magazine, actually. But how did you know?"

  Kimura had been driving a taxi for nearly twenty years and he could pretty much guess a fare's occupation depending on where he picked him up, what he was wearing, and how he talked. If the person had a glamorous job and was proud of it, he was always ready to talk about it.

  "It must be hard having to be at work this early in the morning."

  "No, just the opposite. I'm on my way home to sleep."

  "Well, you're just like me then."

  Asakawa usually didn't feel much pride in his work. But this morning he was feeling the same satisfaction he'd felt the first time he'd seen an article of his appear in print. He'd finally finished a series he'd been working on, and it had drawn quite a reaction.

  "Is your work interesting?"

  "Yeah, I guess so," said Asakawa, noncommit-tally. Sometimes it was interesting and sometimes it wasn't, but right now he couldn't be bothered to go into it in detail. He still hadn't forgotten his disastrous failure of two years ago. He could clearly remember the title of the article he'd been working on:

  "The New Gods of Modernity."

  In his mind's eye he could still picture the wretched figure he had cut as he'd stood quaking before the editor-in-chief to tell him he couldn't go on as a reporter.

  For a while there was silence in the taxi. They took the curve just left of Tokyo Tower at a considerable speed. "Excuse me," said Kimura, "should I take the canal road or the No. 1 Keihin?" One route or the other would be more convenient depending on where they were going in Kita Shinagawa.

  "Take the expressway. Let me out just before Shinbaba."

  A taxi driver can relax a bit once he knows precisely where his fare is going. Kimura turned right at Fuda-no-tsuji.

  They were approaching it now, the intersection Kimura had been unable to put out of his mind for the past month. Unlike Asakawa, who was haunted by his failure, Kimura was able to look back at the accident fairly objectively. After all, he hadn't been responsible for the accident, so he hadn't had to do any soul-searching because of it. It was entirely the other guy's fault, and no amount of caution on Kimura's part could have warded it off. He'd completely overcome the terror he had felt. A month… was that a long time? Asakawa was still in thrall to the terror he'd known two years ago.

  Still, Kimura couldn't explain why, every time he passed this place, he felt compelled to tell people about what had happened. If Kimura glanced in his rearview mirror and saw that his fare was sleeping then he would give up, but if not, then he'd tell every passenger without exception everything that had occurred. It was a compulsion. Every time he'd go through that intersection he was overcome by a compulsion to talk about it.

  "The damnedest thing happened right here about a month ago…"

  As though it had been waiting for Kimura to begin his story, the light in the intersection changed from yellow to red.

  "You know, a lot of strange things happen in this world."

  Kimura tried to catch his passenger's interest by hinting in this way at the nature of his story. Asakawa had been half-asleep, but now he lifted his head suddenly and looked around him frantically. He had been startled awake by the sound of Kimura's voice and was now trying to figure out where they were.

  "Is sudden death on the increase these days? Among young people, I mean."

  "Eh?" The phrase resonated in Asakawa's ears. Sudden death… Kimura continued.

  "Well, it's just that… I guess it was about a month ago. I'm right over there, sitting in my cab, waiting for the light to change, and suddenly this motorbike just falls over on me. It wasn't like he was moving and took a spill-he was standing still, and suddenly, wham! And what do you think happened next? Oh, the driver, he was a prep school kid, 19 years old. He died, the idiot. Surprised the hell out of me, I can tell you that. So there's an ambulance, and the cops, and then my cab-he'd banged into it, see. Quite a scene, I tell ya."

  Asakawa was listening silently, but as a ten-year veteran reporter he'd developed an intuition about things like this. Instinctively, he made note of the driver's name and the name of the cab company.

  "The way he died was a little weird, too. He was desperately trying to pull off his helmet. I mean, just trying to rip it off. Lying on his back and thrashing around. I went to call the ambulance and by the time I got back, he was stiff."

  "Where did you say this happened?" Asakawa was fully awake now.

  "Right over there. See?" Kimura pointed to the crossing in front of the station. Shinagawa Station was located in the Takanawa area of Minato Ward. Asakawa burned this fact into his memory. An accident there would have fallen under the jurisdiction of the Takanawa precinct. In his mind he quickly worked out which of his contacts could give him access to the Takanawa police station. This was when it was nice to work for a major newspaper: they had connections everywhere, and sometimes their ability to gather information was better than the police bureau's.

  "So they called it sudden death?" He wasn't sure if that was a proper medical term. He asked in a hurry now, not even realizing why this accident was striking such a chord with him…

  "It's ridiculous, right? My cab was totally stopped. He just went and fell on it. It was all him. But I had to file an accident report, and I came this close to having it show up on my insurance record. I tell ya, it was a total disaster, out of the blue."

  "Do you remember exactly what day and time this all happened?"

  "Heh, heh, you smell a story? September, lemme see, fourth or fifth must've been. Time was just around eleven at night, I think."

  As soon as he said this, Kimura had a flashback. The muggy air, the pitch-black oil leaking from the fallen bike. The oil looked like a living thing as it crept toward the sewer. Headlamps reflected off its surface as it formed viscous droplets and soundlessly oozed into the street drain. That moment when it had seemed like his sensory apparatus had failed him. And then the shocked face of the dead man, head pillowed on his helmet. What had been so astonishing, anyway?

  The light turned green. Kimura stepped on the gas. From the back seat came the sound of a ballpoint pen on paper. Asakawa was making notes. Kimura felt nauseated. Why was he recalling it so vividly? He swallowed the bitter bile that had welled up and fought off the nausea.

  "Now what did you say the cause of death was?" asked Asakawa.

  "Heart attack."

  Heart attack? Was that really the coroner's diagnosis? He didn't think they used that term anymore.

  "I'll have to verify that, along with the date and time/' murmured Asakawa as he continued to make notes. "In other words, there were absolutely no external injuries?"

  "Yeah, that's right. Absolutely none. It was just the shock. I mean… I'm the one who oughta be shocked, right?"

  "Eh?"

  "Well, I mean… The stiff, he had this look of complete shock on his face."

  Asakawa felt something click in his mind; at the same time a voice in him denied any connection between the two incidents. Just a coincidence, that's all.

  Shinbaba Station on the Keihin Kyuko light-rail line loomed up in front of them.

  "At the next light turn left and stop there, please."

  The taxi stopped and the door opened. Asakawa handed over two thousand-yen notes along with one of his business cards. "My name's Asakawa. I'm with the Daily News. If it's all right with you, I'd like to hear about this in more detail later."

  "Okay by me," said Kimura, sounding pleased. For some reason, he felt like that was his mission.

  "I'll call you tomorrow or the day after."

  "Do you want my number?"

  "Never mind. I wrote down the name of your company. I see it's not far away."

  Asakawa got out of the taxi and was about to close the door when he hesitated for a moment. He felt an unnameable dread at the th
ought of confirming what he'd just heard. Maybe I'd better not stick my nose into anything funny. It could just be a replay of the last time. But now that his interest had been aroused, he couldn't just walk away. He knew that all too well. He asked Kimura one last time:

  "The guy-he was struggling in pain, trying to get his helmet off, right?"

  3

  Oguri, his editor, scowled as he listened to Asakawa's report. Suddenly he was remembering what Asakawa had been like two years ago. Hunched over his word processor day and night like a man possessed, he'd labored at a biography of the guru Shoko Kageyama, incorporating all his research and more. Something wasn't right about him then. So bedeviled was he that Oguri had even tried to get him to see a shrink.

  Part of the problem was that it had been right then. Two years ago the whole publishing industry had been caught up in an unprecedented occult boom. Photos of "ghosts" had swamped the editorial offices. Every publisher in the country had been deluged with accounts and photographs of supernatural experiences, every one of them a hoax. Oguri had wondered what the world was coming to. He had figured that he had a pretty good handle on the way the world worked, but he just couldn't think of a convincing explanation for that kind of thing. It was utterly preposterous, the number of "contributors" that had crawled out of the woodwork. It was no exaggeration to say that the office had been buried daily by mail, and every package dealt with the occult in some way. And it wasn't just the Daily News company that was the target of this outpouring: every publisher in Japan worthy of the name had been swept up in the incomprehensible phenomenon. Sighing over the time they were wasting, they'd made a rough survey of the claims. Most of the submissions were, predictably, anonymous, but it was concluded that there was no one out there who was sending out multiple manuscripts under assumed names. At a rough estimate, this meant that about ten million different individuals had sent letters to one publisher or another. Ten million people! The figure was staggering. The stories themselves weren't nearly as terrifying as the fact that there were so many of them. In effect, one out of ten people in the country had sent something in. Yet not a single person in the industry, nor their families and friends, was counted among the informants. What was going on? Where were the heaps of mail coming from? Editors everywhere scratched their heads. And then, before anyone could figure it out, the wave began to recede. The strange phenomenon went on for about six months, and then, as if it had all been a dream, editorial rooms had returned to normal, and they no longer received any submissions of that nature.

  It had been Oguri's responsibility to determine how the weekly of a major newspaper publisher should react to all this. The conclusion he came to was that they should ignore it scrupulously. Oguri strongly suspected that the spark which had set off the whole thing had come from a class of magazines he routinely referred to as "the rags". By running readers' photos and tales, they'd stoked the public's fever for this sort of thing and created a monstrous state of affairs. Of course Oguri knew that this couldn't quite explain it all away. But he had to approach the situation with logic of some sort.

  Eventually the editorial staff from Oguri on down had taken to hauling all this mail, unopened, to the incinerator. And they dealt with the world just the way they had, as if nothing untoward were happening. They maintained a strict policy of not printing anything on the occult, turning a deaf ear to the anonymous sources. Whether or not that did the trick, the unprecedented tide of submissions began to ebb. And, of all times, it was then that Asakawa had foolishly, recklessly, run around pouring oil on the dying flames.

  Ogurivfixed Asakawa with a dour gaze. Was he going to make the same mistake twice?

  "Now listen, you." Whenever Oguri couldn't figure out what to say, he started out like this. Now listen, you.

  "I know what you're thinking, sir."

  "Now, I'm not saying it's not interesting. We don't know what'll jump out at us. But, look. If what jumps out at us looks anything like it did that other time, I won't like it very much."

  Last time. Oguri still believed that the occult boom two years ago had been engineered. He hated the occult for all he'd gone through on account of it, and his bias was alive and kicking after two years.

  "I'm not trying to suggest anything mystical here. All I'm saying is that it couldn't have been a coincidence."

  "A coincidence. Hmm…" Oguri cupped a hand to his ear and once again tried to sort out the story.

  Asakawa's wife's niece, Tomoko Oishi, had died at her home in Honmoku at around 11 p.m. on the fifth of September. The cause of death was "sudden heart failure". She was a high school senior, only seventeen. On the same day at the same time, a nineteen-year-old prep school student on a motorcycle had died, also of a cardiac infarction, while waiting for a light in front of Shinagawa Station.

  "It sounds to me like nothing but coincidence. You hear about the accident from your cab driver, and you remember your wife's niece. Nothing more than that, right?"

  "On the contrary," Asakawa stated, and paused for effect. Then he said, "The kid on the motorcycle, at the moment he died, was struggling to pull off his helmet."

  "… So?"

  "Tomoko, too-when her body was discovered, she seemed to have been tearing at her head. Her fingers were tightly entwined in her own hair."

  Asakawa had met Tomoko on several occasions. Like any high school girl, she paid a lot of attention to her hair, shampooing it every day, that sort of thing. Why would a girl like that be tearing out her precious hair? He didn't know the true nature of whatever it was that had made her do that, but every time Asakawa thought of her pulling desperately at her hair, he imagined some sort of invisible thing to go along with the indescribable horror she must have felt.

  "I don't know… Now listen, you. Are you sure you're not coming at this with preconceptions? If you took any two incidents, you could find things in common if you looked hard enough. You're saying they both died of a heart attack. So they must have been in a lot of pain. So she's pulling at her hair, he's struggling with his helmet… It actually sounds pretty normal to me."

  While he had to recognize that this was a possibility, Asakawa shook his head. He wasn't going to be defeated so easily.

  "But, sir, then it would be the chest that hurt. Why should they be tearing at their heads?"

  "Now listen, you. Have you ever had a heart attack?"

  "Well… no."

  "And have you asked a doctor about it?"

  "About what?"

  "About whether or not a person having a heart attack would tear at his head?"

  Asakawa fell silent. He had, in fact, asked a doctor. The doctor had replied, I couldnrt rule it out. It was a wishy-washy answer. After all, the opposite sometimes happens. Sometimes when a person experiences a cerebral hemorrhage, or bleeding in the cerebral membrane, they feel stomach discomfort at the same time as a headache.

  "So it depends on the individual. When there's a tough math problem, some people scratch their heads, some people smoke. Some people may even rub their bellies." Oguri swiveled in his chair as he said this. "The point is, we can't say anything at this stage, can we? We don't have space for that stuff. You know, because of what happened two years ago. We won't touch this kind of thing, not lightly. If we felt fine about specu-lating in print, then we could, of course."

  Maybe so. Maybe it was just like his editor said, it was a freak coincidence. But still-in the end the doctor had just shaken his head. He'd pressed the doctor-do heart attack victims really pull out their own hair? And the doctor had just frowned and said, Hmmm. His look said it all: none of the patients he'd seen had acted like that.

  "Yes, sir. I understand."

  At the moment there was nothing to do but retreat meekly. If he couldn't discover a more objective connection between the two incidents, it would be difficult to convince his editor. Asakawa promised himself that if he couldn't dig up anything, he'd just shut up and leave it alone.

  4

  Asakawa hung up the phone and
stayed there like that for a while, motionless, his hand still on the receiver. The sound of his own unnecessarily excited voice, hanging on the other person's reaction, still echoed in his ears. He had a feeling he wasn't going to be able to do this. The person on the other end had taken the phone from his secretary with a suitably pompous tone, but as he'd listened to Asakawa's proposal the tone of his voice had softened somewhat. At first he'd probably thought Asakawa was calling about advertising. Then he'd done some quick calculating and realized the potential profit in having an article written profiling him.

  The "Top Interview" series had begun running in September. The idea was to spotlight a CEO who had built up his company on his own, focusing on the obstacles he'd overcome and how. Considering that he'd actually succeeded in getting an appointment to do the interview, Asakawa should have been able to hang up the phone with a little more satisfaction. But something weighed on him. All he'd hear from this philistine were the same old corporate war stories, boasts about what a genius he was, how he'd seized his opportunities and clawed his way to the top… If Asakawa didn't thank him and stand up to leave, the tales of valor would go on forever. He was sick of it. He detested whoever had come up with this project. He knew, all too well, that the magazine had to sell ad space to survive, and that this kind of article laid the necessary groundwork for that. But Asakawa himself didn't much care if the company made money or lost it. All that mattered to him was whether or not the work was engaging. No matter how easy a job was physically, if it didn't involve any imagination, it usually ended up exhausting you.

  Asakawa headed for the archives on the fourth floor. He needed to do some background reading for the interview tomorrow, but more than that, there was something that was bothering him. The idea of an objective, causal relationship between those two incidents fascinated him. And then he remembered. He didn't even know how to begin, but a certain question had come to him in the furtive moment that his mind had wrested free of the voice of the philistine.