S

by Kōji Suzuki

  A dozen dictionaries surrounded a laptop on a fairly large desk by the balcony door.

  On one side of a mini-kitchen was a small two-door refrigerator, with a wardrobe right next to it. Its doors were closed, preventing them from learning what types of clothes were stored inside. The cabinets contained few dishes, and here and there were signs of the occupant’s frugal lifestyle.

  Beyond the bookshelves lined up all the way to the entryway was a cheap colored box, and heaps of books were visible in between this colored box and a shoebox. Takanori leaned in even closer, trying to count the number of volumes.

  Seventeen. The books were bundled together with vinyl rope tied in a cross shape.

  All seventeen of them bore the same title: Ring.

  “It’s perfectly clear, all of them are the first edition of the book,” Kihara explained to Takanori, who was speechless with shock. “I know because Ring had a different jacket starting with the reprint. Only the first edition had the image of a woman’s hand holding out a videotape. You can tell just by looking.”

  “Ring…Do you know what the book’s about, Mr. Kihara?”

  “I haven’t read it. But it’s fairly well known, and hard to find.”

  “Is it a novel?”

  “No, it’s supposed to be nonfiction.” The genre was Kihara’s specialty, so of course he would know about the book.

  “But how is it connected to the Kashiwada case?”

  “I can’t really say, at this point. I’m going to be looking into that next. It was published right around when you were born, or possibly before, so you probably don’t remember. If you don’t mind my asking, how old are you?”

  “I’m twenty-eight.”

  “It was a quarter of a century ago, so I’m not surprised you don’t know. There was this urban legend about a videotape that was utterly cursed, and anyone who watched it would die in a bizarre way one week later. The story was circulated as if it were true.”

  Takanori would have been only two and had no clear recollection of those times, but back when he was in elementary school, he’d caught the lingering scent of the rumor. A demonic videotape that killed the viewer after one week…Yes, he felt certain that it had been regarded as a new incarnation of chain letters.

  “Yeah, I kind of remember something. I seem to recall my friends and I talking about it just after I entered elementary school…”

  Indeed, it felt as though he’d caught the tail end of the urban legend as it was going away.

  “The inspiration for it was this book,” Kihara said. “Supposedly, a weekly magazine reporter named Kazuyuki Asakawa met with an untimely death after compiling exhaustive notes about a certain case, and his brother, who worked at a publishing company, released them in book form. Sure, it’s an unlikely story. Probably drummed it up to get attention. My assumption is that it’s a fictional work repackaged as nonfiction.”

  “I see. I’ll read it right away.”

  “Well, it’s a hard book to get your hands on. There were only 5,000 copies printed of the first edition. Including the second through the fifth reprints, only 22,000 copies sold before it went out of print. Then it was published as a paperback two years later, and a total of six runs sold 62,000 copies before going out of print in 1999. That means all together there were 84,000 copies of the original and paperback versions for sale, so it did okay overall. What’s strange is that the first edition is the only one to have nearly disappeared from the market. That said…take another look at this.”

  Kihara showed him one of the photos again, pointing to the stack of books placed beside the colored box at the entryway.

  “Kashiwada had a total of seventeen copies in his apartment, right?” Takanori said.

  “Look very closely. What impression do you get from this stack of books?”

  All seventeen of them were neatly bundled together with vinyl rope tied into a cross shape. It almost looked like what people did when they were throwing out a bunch of newspapers or magazines.

  “Could he have been planning to burn them as garbage?”

  “That’s what I thought, too. By all appearances, it looks like he was going to get rid of them. But why? I can’t understand why he’d want to throw away books that were so rare. If he’d sold them at an online auction he could’ve gotten over ten times the original price, no question. Instead he bound them with vinyl rope and left them at the entryway like they were about to be tossed out. Don’t you think that’s a crude way to treat something so valuable?”

  When he put it that way, Takanori had to agree. Why would someone needlessly discard books that could fetch a high price at a used bookstore? With seventeen copies, Kashiwada couldn’t have been unaware of the books’ value.

  Takanori asked, “Had he ever been involved with a publishing company?”

  If Kashiwada had worked at the publisher of Ring, it wouldn’t be that odd for him to own so many copies of the same book.

  “No, he never belonged to any publishing house. For my part, I’m planning to pursue this avenue. Kazuyuki Asakawa—the author of the notes—may be dead, but his brother Junichiro might still be alive. Besides that, I’m thinking of tracking down some of the people who were involved in publishing Ring to ask them about it.”

  “If you do learn something—even something trivial—please let me know as soon as you find out. I’ll get here right away.”

  At that moment, Takanori’s best bet was Kihara’s talent for ferreting out information, which he’d cultivated over many years.

  While the paperback in Takanori’s hands wasn’t especially valuable, in terms of learning what the book was about, it’d do just fine.

  It was a story about a cursed videotape that killed those who watched it one week later…Before reading it, Takanori already doubted the book’s credibility. Still, he told himself to remain calm and composed no matter what details he found.

  The urge to laugh off this story as a likely fabrication clashed with a sense of caution that he’d best not dismiss any non-scientific phenomena. The conflicting emotions mingling inside him made his vessels throb.

  He made up his mind and flipped open the cover, and immediately he was shocked stiff by an enormous eye.

  Inside the cover was a color illustration with a motif of eyeballs. Within a black frame that resembled a memorial photo were countless eyeballs on a yellow and orange background.

  A complete picture of a human eye popped out from the background in the middle of the upper part of the page. In between the upper and lower eyelids, the iris was looking straight out at him. For some reason, one part of the lower lid was cut, giving it the shape of a severed ring.

  Fighting an oppressive feeling that someone was watching him, Takanori began to read the main text.

  6

  “It all started with a single videotape.”

  So read one of the catchphrases on the band of the paperback.

  “This is a true account.”

  The second catchphrase insisted that its content was based on a true story.

  Simply put, that meant what was written in the book was a report of actual events resulting from a single videotape.

  Takanori turned the pages of Ring. At no other time in his life had he read a book with such intense concentration.

  The narrator was a man named Kazuyuki Asakawa, a weekly magazine reporter. Encountering some mysterious incidents and investigating their causes, and forced into an inescapable situation, he’d compiled his experiences into a text. At the end of summer a quarter-century ago…

  Asakawa learned that by coincidence, four teenage boys and girls had met with unnatural deaths in Tokyo and Kanagawa, on the same day, at the same time, and for reasons unknown.

  Given that they’d died at the same time though in different places, he surmised that the four of them had some point in common.

  At first, Asakawa imagined that perhaps the four teens had been at the same location and contracted food poisoning, or some new type of virus�
��something of that nature.

  As he pursued his investigation, he uncovered that the four had been friends, and one week prior to their deaths they’d spent the night in Building B-4 at a rental cottage called Villa Log Cabin in South Hakone Pacific Land.

  Having read that far in one sitting, Takanori stopped flipping the pages and looked up.

  He remembered the name South Hakone Pacific Land distinctly. That was the first place to which the car navigation had mistakenly guided him and Akane.

  Asakawa had gone alone to South Hakone Pacific Land in a rental car at nighttime in the rain, which was utterly unlike the sunny weather that afternoon when Takanori and Akane had taken their drive. Nonetheless, the writer’s description of the scenery vividly conjured the mountain roads leading to the villa. Both sides of the narrow path winding its way through the terraced fields were covered with tall grasses, grown thick like willows, such that here and there the road had been like a tunnel.

  After inquiring at the information center, Asakawa proceeded to the left in his car.

  Takanori remembered that road. It was exactly the same one they’d been led down by the car navigation.

  Later, Asakawa parked in the lot in front of the building manager’s office at Villa Log Cabin.

  Takanori knew that there were no longer any structures onsite. The several cottages had been demolished, with the gentle slope leading into the ravine now a grassy plain. And about a hundred feet from the road, there was a lonely old well.

  Poking out from the bushes, the well appeared like a deformed gravestone, or like a human being whose torso was buried in the earth, with only the neck sticking out. When he’d taken a step back, and then another, Takanori had felt goose bumps on both his arms.

  Where were the well and the cottage in relation to each other back when Asakawa visited? he wondered, but putting that question aside for the moment, he read on.

  Asakawa concluded that what linked the four teenagers was a videotape they discovered at Villa Log Cabin and that the images on the tape caused their unnatural deaths. The video consisted of a series of eerie, fragmented scenes and didn’t make much sense, but the final part warned, Those who have viewed these images are fated to die at this exact hour one week from now. A bit that described how you could escape death had been taped over and erased.

  Apparently, the four teens had watched the video in that room and mischievously decided to erase the scene explaining how to avoid dying one week later. Then they’d left the tape behind for the next guest to watch.

  Though they’d seen the images on the tape, they hadn’t acted on the key to avoiding their fate. Not only had they not believed the warning, they’d taken a mocking attitude.

  Having watched the video purely by chance, Asakawa was stricken with panic. He knew that the warning on the video was genuine. Were he to do nothing, he would surely meet the same fate as those four teenagers. At that point, he couldn’t simply laugh off the supernatural as being unscientific.

  Asakawa returned to Tokyo, and judging that he couldn’t handle the situation on his own, he turned to an old friend from high school. This friend’s name was Ryuji Takayama. Famous since high school for his smarts, he was an oddball. After graduating from his college’s medical department, he switched his focus to end up as a lecturer in philosophy. He was also highly knowledgeable about paranormal phenomena, and was fearless. To get to the bottom of the mystery, Asakawa absolutely needed his help.

  After listening to Asakawa’s story, Ryuji scoffed through his nose. “Okay, just show me the tape,” he said, displaying not the slightest fear of death, determined to confront this occult phenomenon.

  As soon as he received a copy of the tape made by Asakawa, Ryuji went about logically analyzing the video, which at first glance seemed preposterous.

  Meanwhile, misfortune befell Asakawa’s wife and young daughter: they accidentally watched the video. Now Asakawa was forced to battle an unknown terror to save not only his own life but those of his wife and daughter.

  Takanori understood how Asakawa felt so well that it hurt.

  Heedless of Asakawa’s agony, Ryuji went on analyzing the video with great excitement.

  The first problem was the origin of the videotape. Why had something like it been created? Elucidating the reason was the key to canceling out the fate of dying one week later, he surmised.

  He tabulated all the disjointed scenes, finding twelve in all, and further managed to divide them into two major groups. One consisted of abstract scenes depicting what could be considered imaginary landscapes. The other comprised actual scenes that seemed to be reflected on retinas. And he noticed a feature found only in the realistic scenes: brief moments where the screen went totally black appeared at roughly equal intervals.

  Ryuji speculated that these instants looked rather like the blinking of an eye and concluded that scenes actually witnessed by somebody, along with imaginary scenery harbored in that person’s mind, had been projected onto the videotape.

  If the images really were mentally projected, that person possessed extraordinary occult powers and would surely have drawn considerable attention. Reinvestigating the data on persons with paranormal abilities in Japan, Ryuji eventually tracked down a woman who could well have projected the images.

  Her name was Sadako Yamamura.

  Ryuji and Asakawa began looking into the life of this Sadako, who was closely connected to the demonic videotape. She’d been born in 1947 on the island of Izu Oshima as the daughter of Shizuko Yamamura—a psychic of unparalleled spiritual power—and a psychologist named Heihachiro Ikuma. After graduating high school she’d gone to Tokyo and joined “Theater Group Soaring” as an actress.

  With her graceful features, she’d cut a brilliant figure in the group, but before realizing her ambitions, she had disappeared without a trace.

  But where?

  As they tried everything possible to find out, Ryuji and Asakawa learned that a tuberculosis sanitarium had once stood where South Hakone Pacific Land was located. Sadako’s father had been a patient at the facility.

  Ryuji uncovered that tragedy had struck Sadako on a visit to her father. Raped by a man named Nagao—a doctor at the facility who’d also been the last carrier of the smallpox virus—she’d been thrown down a well.

  Takanori looked up from the book again and pictured how the area had transformed over time.

  Beginning as a tuberculosis sanitarium, it had turned into Villa Log Cabin of the South Hakone Pacific Land resort, and now there was only a gently sloping grassy field…Yet, throughout, the well alone had remained, hiding in the shrubs in the backyard of the sanitarium and lying low beneath Villa Log Cabin.

  Tossed into that well, Sadako Yamamura met an untimely end when she was only twenty or so. It must have taken a while for death to visit her, and during that time she nurtured a deep-seated grudge, filling the small, sealed, saturated space with it.

  Takanori remembered vividly how a sinister air, carried by a tepid breeze, had crawled out from the gap between the concrete lid and the stones and swayed the grass before swirling up and stroking his legs.

  The demonic video had been born in Building B-4 of Villa Log Cabin, situated directly above the old well.

  The living room had been above the floorboards, and the TV and video recorder had been in the corner. Sadako’s grudge had soaked into a videotape that had been inserted with the record mode on.

  Considering the circumstances, Ryuji and Asakawa assumed that the way to escape death one week later was to dredge up Sadako’s bones—in order to give them a proper burial for the repose of her soul.

  Ten p.m. that night—that was when Asakawa’s time would run out.

  The two of them went beneath the cottage, lifted the concrete lid, and climbed down to the bottom of the well to scoop out the muddy water with buckets.

  Takanori wasn’t claustrophobic but felt suffocated just reading the scene. Could someone really climb down a rope into a hole barely big enough
for a person to fit and bring up muddy water? He shuddered to think of it. Even if you had to in order to save your family, it wouldn’t be easy. In fact, his imagination was resisting the possibility that he, too, could face such a terrible choice.

  Yet Ryuji did precisely that out of a superhuman fearlessness and curiosity, and Asakawa braved his harsh predicament determined to save his wife and daughter.

  Their effort paid off, with Asakawa discovering Sadako’s skull amid the mud, scooping it up, and bringing it out into the open air above.

  Even after his time had run out, he remained alive. Believing they had solved the mystery, he and Ryuji brought Sadako’s remains to her family home in Oshima and laid her to rest.

  They thought the case was closed. But it wasn’t as simple as that.

  The next night, when his time was up, Ryuji met an unnatural death in his apartment. His body was found by a student of his, a young woman named Mai Takano.

  Paralyzed with shock, Asakawa’s mind practically shut down. He had no idea why Ryuji had died. Hadn’t the curse been expiated when they solved the mystery of the videotape? If they failed to solve it, why was he still alive?

  There was but one logical conclusion.

  The way to escape the tape’s diabolical power didn’t lie in bringing up Sadako’s bones and performing that service for her soul. During his week, Asakawa had unwittingly done what the demonic tape had instructed him to do.

  What was the act that he had taken but Ryuji had failed to that ended up satisfying the videotape’s desire?

  Asakawa desperately tried to recall all the things he’d done the previous week.

  He found his clue in the concept of a virus. Since the start of this case, he’d sensed that a virus was somehow involved. Plus, this Nagao person who’d murdered Sadako had been Japan’s last smallpox carrier. The virus’ drive could have blended with Sadako’s supernatural powers in her physical form.

  Viruses propagated with the help of their infected hosts. If that drive applied to the videotape, then one possible answer was apparent. Perhaps the cursed videotape’s wish had been for someone to copy it and show it to a third party who had yet to watch it.