Ring

by Kōji Suzuki

  "Long, long ago Marshy-land was called Marshy-beach, because the reed-thick marshes stretched all the way down to the seashore."

  As he read aloud, Asakawa felt tears well up in his eyes. He wanted to make his wife's dream come true. He really did. But he only had four days left. Would his wife be able to cope when he died of unknown causes? She didn't yet know how fragile her dream was, how soon it would come crashing down.

  By 9 p.m. Shizu and Yoko were asleep as usual. Asakawa was preoccupied by the last thing Ryuji had brought up. Why did he keep replaying the scene with the baby? And what about that old woman's words-"Next year you're going to have a child." Was there a connection between the baby boy and the child the old woman mentioned? And what about the moments of total blackness? Thirty-odd times they occurred, at varying intervals.

  Asakawa thought he'd watch the video again, to try and confirm this. Ryuji had been looking for something specific, no matter how capricious it had seemed at the time. Ryuji had great powers of logic, of course, but he also had a finely tuned sense of intuition. Asakawa, on the other hand, specialized in the work of dragging out the truth through painstaking investigation.

  Asakawa opened the cabinet and picked up the videotape. He went to insert it into the video deck, but just at that moment, he noticed something that stayed his hand. Wait a minute, something's not right. He wasn't sure what it was, but his sixth sense was telling him something was out of the ordinary. More and more he was sure that it wasn't just his imagination. He really had felt something was funny when he touched the tape. Something had changed, ever so slightly.

  What is it? What's different? His heart was pounding. This is bad. Nothing about this is getting any better. Think, man, try to remember. The last time I watched this… I rewound it. And now the tape's in the middle. About a third of the way through. That's right about where the images end, and it hasn 't been rewound. Somebody watched it while I was away.

  Asakawa ran to the bedroom. Shizu and Yoko were asleep, all tangled up together. Asakawa rolled his wife over and shook her by the shoulder.

  "Wake up. Shizu! Wake up!" He kept his voice low, trying not to awaken Yoko. Shizu twisted her face into a scowl and tried to squirm away.

  "I said, wake up!" His voice sounded different from usual.

  "What… what's wrong?"

  "We have to talk. Come on."

  Asakawa dragged his wife out of bed and pulled her into the dining room. Then he held the tape out to her. "Did you watch this?"

  Taken aback by the ferocity of his tone, Shizu could only look back and forth from the tape to her husband's face. Finally, she said, "Was I not supposed to?"

  What're you so mad about? she thought. Here it is Sunday, and you're off somewhere, and I'm bored. And then there was that tape you and Ryuji were whispering over, so I pulled it out. But it wasn 't even interesting. Probably just something the boys in the office cooked up anyway. Shizu remained silent, only talking back in her mind. There's no call for you to get so upset about it.

  For the first time in his married life, Asakawa felt a desire to hit his wife. "You… idiot!" But somehow he managed to resist the urge and just stood there, fist clenched. Calm down and think. It's your own fault. You shouldn't have left it where she could see it. Shizu never even opened mail addressed to him; he'd figured it was safe just leaving the tape in the cabinet. Why didn’t I hide it? After all, she came in the room while Ryuji and I were watching it. Of course she'd be curious about it. I was wrong not to hide it.

  "I'm sorry," Shizu mumbled, discontentedly.

  "When did you watch it?" Asakawa's voice shook.

  "This morning."

  "Really?"

  Shizu had no way of knowing how important it was to know exactly when she watched it. She just nodded, curtly.

  "What time?"

  "Why do you ask?"

  "Just tell me!" Asakawa's hand started to move again.

  "Around ten-thirty, maybe. It was right after Masked Rider ended."

  Masked Rider? That was a children's show. Yoko was the only one in the family who'd have any interest in that. Asakawa fought desperately to keep from collapsing.

  "Now, this is very important, so listen to me. While you were watching this video, where was Yoko?"

  Shizu looked like she was about to burst into tears.

  "On my lap."

  "Yoko, too? You're saying both of you… watched… this video?"

  "She was just watching the screen flicker-she didn't understand it."

  "Shut up! That doesn't matter!"

  This was no longer just a matter of destroying his wife's dreams of a house in the suburbs. The entire family was threatened now-they could all perish. They'd all die an utterly meaningless death.

  As she observed her husband's anger, fear, and despair, Shizu began to realize the seriousness of the situation. "Hey… that was just a… a joke, right?"

  She recalled the words at the end of the video. At the time she'd dismissed them as just a tasteless prank. They couldn't be real. But what about the way her husband was acting?

  "It's not for real, right? Right?"

  Asakawa couldn't respond. He merely shook his head. Then he was filled with tenderness for the ones who now shared his fate.

  5

  October 15-Monday

  Every morning when he woke up now, Asakawa found himself wishing that it had all been a dream. He called a rent-a-car place in the neighbourhood and told them that he'd be in on schedule to pick up the car he'd reserved. They had his reservation on file, no mistake. Reality marched on without a break.

  He needed a way to get around if he was going to try and find out where that broadcast had originated. It would be too hard to break in on TV frequencies with an off-the-shelf wireless transmitter; he figured that it had to have been done with an expertly modified unit. And the image on the tape was clear, with no interference. That meant that the signal had to have been strong, and close. With more information he might have been able to establish the area in which the broadcast was receivable, and thus to pinpoint the point of origin. But all he had to go on was the fact that the television in Villa Log Cabin B-4 had picked up the transmission. All he could do was go there, check out the lay of the land, and then start going over the area with a fine-toothed comb. He had no idea how long it would take. He packed enough clothes for three days. He certainly wouldn't need any more than that.

  He and Shizu looked at each other, but Shizu didn't say anything about the video. Asakawa hadn't been able to think of a good lie, and so he'd let her go to bed with only the vaguest of excuses about the threat of death in a week. For her part, Shizu seemed to fear finding out anything specific, and seemed happy to let things remain ambiguous and unexplained. Rather than questioning him like she usually would, she seemed to guess at something on her own that made her keep an eerie silence. Asakawa didn't know exactly how she was interpreting things, but it didn't seem to assuage her uneasiness. As she watched her usual morning soap opera on TV she seemed extraordinarily sensitive to noises from outside, starting from her seat any number of times.

  "Let's just not talk about this, okay? I don't have any answers for you. Just let me handle it." This was all Asakawa could think to say to calm his wife's anxieties. He couldn't allow himself to appear weak to his wife.

  Just as he was stepping out of the house, as if on cue, the phone rang. It was Ryuji.

  "I've made a fascinating discovery. I want you to tell me what you think." There was a hint of excitement in Ryuji's voice.

  "Can't you tell me about it over the phone? I'm supposed to go pick up a rental car."

  "A rental car?"

  "You're the one who told me to find out where the broadcast originated from."

  "Right, right. Listen, put that on the back burner for a while and get over here. Maybe you don't have to go looking for an antenna after all. Maybe that whole premise will just crumble away."

  Asakawa decided to pick the car up first anyway, so t
hat if he still needed to go to South Hakone Pacific Land, he could leave straight from Ryuji's place.

  Asakawa parked the car with two wheels up on the sidewalk and banged on Ryuji's door.

  "Enter! It's unlocked."

  Asakawa jerked the door open and deliberately stomped through the kitchen. "So what's this big discovery?" he asked, forcefully.

  "What's eating you?" Ryuji glanced over from where he sat, cross-legged on the floor.

  "Just hurry up and tell me what you've found!"

  "Relax!"

  "How am I supposed to relax? Just tell me, already!"

  Ryuji held his tongue for a moment. Then, gently, he asked, "What's wrong? Did something happen?"

  Asakawa plopped himself down in the middle of the floor, clenching his hands on his knees. "My wife and… my wife and daughter watched that piece of shit."

  "Well, that's a hell of a thing. I'm sorry to hear that." Ryuji watched until Asakawa began to regain his composure. The latter sneezed once and blew his nose loudly.

  "Well, you want to save them too, don't you?"

  Asakawa nodded his head like a little boy.

  "Well then, all the more reason to keep a cool head. So I won't tell you my conclusions. I'll just lay out the evidence. I want to see what the evidence suggests to you first. That's why I couldn't have you excited like that, see."

  "I understand," Asakawa said, meekly.

  "Now go wash your face or something. Pull yourself together."

  Asakawa could cry in front of Ryuji. Ryuji was the outlet for all the emotions he couldn't break down and show his wife.

  He came back into the room, wiping his face with a towel, and Ryuji held out a piece of paper. On it was a simple chart:

  1) Intro 83seconds [0] abstract

  2) Red fluid 49 [0] abstract

  3) Mt Mihara 55 [11] real

  4) Mt Mihara erupting 32 [6] real

  5) The word 'mountain' 56 [0] abstract

  6) Dice 103 [0] abstract

  7) Old woman 111 [0] abstract

  8) Infant 125 [33] real

  9) Faces 117 [0] abstract

  10) Old TV 141 [35] real

  11) Man's face 186 [44] real

  12) Ending 132 [0] abstract

  Some things were clear at a glance. Ryuji had broken down the video into separate scenes.

  "Last night I suddenly got the idea for this. You see what it is, right? The video consists of twelve scenes. I've given each one a number and a name. The number after the name is the length of the scene in seconds. The next number, in brackets, is-are you with me?- the number of times the screen goes dark during that scene."

  Asakawa's expression was full of doubt.

  "After you left yesterday I started to examine other scenes besides the one with the infant. To see if they had any of these instants of darkness, too. And, lo and behold, there were, in scenes 3, 4, 8, 10, and 11."

  "The next column says 'real' or 'abstract.' What's that?"

  "Broadly speaking, we can divide the twelve scenes into these two categories. The abstract scenes, the ones like images in the mind, what I suppose we could almost call mental landscapes. And the real ones, scenes of things that really exist, that you could actually look at with your eyes. That's how I divided them up."

  Here Ryuji paused for a second.

  "Now, look at the chart. Notice anything?"

  "Well, your black curtain only comes down on the 'real' scenes."

  "Right. That's absolutely right. Keep that in mind."

  "Ryuji, this is getting annoying. Hurry up and tell me what you're driving at. What does this mean?"

  "Now, now, hold your horses. 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."

  "Okay, okay. Get on with it."

  "Alright: the black curtain only appears when the screen is showing real landscapes. We've established that. Now, cast your mind back on the sensations you felt the first time you saw these images. We discussed the scene with the infant yesterday. Anything besides that? What about the scene with all the faces?"

  Ryuji used the remote to find the scene. "Take a good, long look at those faces."

  The wall of dozens of faces slowly retreated, the number swelling into the hundreds, the thousands. When he looked closely at them, each one seemed different, just like real faces.

  "How does this make you feel?" Ryuji asked.

  "Like somehow I'm the one being reproached. Like they're calling me a liar, a fraud."

  "Right. As it happens, I felt the same thing- or, at least, what I felt was very similar to the sensation you're describing."

  Asakawa tried to concentrate his nerves on where this fact led. Ryuji was awaiting a clear response.

  "Well?" asked Ryuji again.

  Asakawa shook his head. "It's no good. I've got nothing."

  "Well, if you had the leisure to spend more time thinking about it, you might notice the same thing I did. See, both of us have been thinking that these images were captured by a TV camera, in other words by a machine with a lens. No?"

  "They weren't?"

  "Well, what's this black curtain that momentarily covers the screen?"

  Ryuji advanced the film frame by frame until the screen went black. It stayed black for three or four frames. If you calculated one frame at a thirtieth of a second, then the darkness lasted for about a tenth of a second.

  "Why does this happen in the real scenes and not the imagined ones? Look more closely at the screen. It's not completely black."

  Asakawa brought his face closer to the screen. Indeed, it wasn't totally dark. Something like a faint white haze hung suspended within the darkness.

  "A blurred shadow. What we have here is the persistence of vision. And as you watch, don't you get an incredible sense of immediacy, as if you're actually a participant in the scene?"

  Ryuji looked Asakawa full in the face and blinked once, slowly. The black curtain.

  "Eh?" murmured Asakawa, "Is this… the blink of an eye?"

  "Exactly. Am I wrong? If you think about it, it's consistent. There are things we see with our eyes, but there are also scenes we conjure up in our minds. And since these don't pass through the retina, there's no blinking involved. But when we actually look with our eyes, the images are formed according to the strength of the light that hits the retina. And to keep the retina from drying out, we blink, unconsciously. The black curtain is the instant when the eyes shut."

  Once again, Asakawa was filled with nausea. The first time he'd finished watching the video he'd run to the toilet, but this time the evil chill was even worse. He couldn't shake the feeling that something had climbed into his body. This video hadn't been recorded by a machine. A human being's eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin-all five senses had been used to make this video. These chills, this shivering, were from somebody's shadow sneaking into him through his sense organs. Asakawa had been watching the video from the same perspective as this thing within him.

  He mopped his brow again and again, but still it was damp with cold sweat.

  "Did you know-hey, are you listening? Individual differences aside, the average man blinks twenty times a minute, and the average woman fifteen times. That means that it might have been a woman who recorded these images."

  Asakawa couldn't hear him.

  "Heh, heh, heh. What's the matter? You look like you're dead already, you're so pale," Ryuji laughed. "Look on the bright side. We're one step closer to a solution now. If these images were collected by the sense organs of a particular perso
n, then the charm must have something to do with that person's will. In other words: maybe she wants us do something."

  Asakawa had temporarily lost his faculty of reason. Ryuji's words vibrated in his ears, but their meaning didn't make it to his brain.

  "At any rate, we now know what we have to do. We have to find out who this person is. Or was. I think he or she is probably no longer with us. And then we have to find out what this person desired while he or she was still alive. And that'll be the charm that will allow us to go on living."

  Ryuji winked at Asakawa, as if to say, how'm I doin'?

  Asakawa had left the No. 3 Tokyo-Yokohama Freeway and was now heading south on the Yokohama-Yokosuka road. Ryuji had reclined the passenger seat and was sleeping a perfect, stress-less sleep. It was almost two in the afternoon, but Asakawa wasn't the least bit hungry.

  Asakawa reached out a hand to wake Ryuji, but then pulled it back. They weren't at their destination yet. Asakawa didn't even really know what their destination was. All Ryuji had done was tell him to drive to Kamakura. He didn't know where they were going or why they were going there. It made him a nervous, irritable driver.

  Ryuji had packed in a hurry, saying he'd explain where they were going once they were in the car. But once underway, he'd said, "I didn't sleep last night-don't wake me till Kamakura," and then he'd promptly gone to sleep.

  He exited the Yokohama-Yokosuka road at Asahina and then took the Kanazawa road five kilometres until they reached Kamakura Station. Ryuji had been asleep for a good two hours.

  "Hey, we're here," said Asakawa, shaking him. Ryuji stretched his body like a cat, rubbed his eyes with the backs of his hands, and shook his head rapidly from side to side, lips flapping.