by Kōji Suzuki
Previously, a film had been scrapped when a scandal threatened to turn into a criminal case. If the same formula applied to this occasion as well…
Takanori wondered whether a specific crime might be hiding behind all these various events.
But first, he needed to test his hypothesis that Kiyomi’s son was this Hiroyuki Niimura.
Once all the actors and staff finished expressing their enthusiasm and expectations for Studio 104, the host proceeded to the next segment, questions from the media.
“Now, are there any questions?”
Right away, some people in the front row raised their hands, and the questions shifted the discussion to the romance scandal of the female lead, Yoko Aso. It seemed that the same questions were coming from multiple persons, and all of them were focused on her.
With press conferences, most of the questions tended to be pointed at the actors, so the director and producer could take a back seat and let their minds wander. Barraged by the reporters, Aso was fumbling her answers and inviting sniggers from the audience. Seeing this from the corner of her eyes, and equipped with the wisdom of age, Kiyomi tried to take on the role of mediator.
“I think that’s quite enough bullying for this young girl. Why don’t you try someone a little more seasoned?”
This is my first and last chance to find out if Hiroyuki Niimura is Kiyomi Sakata’s son—I can’t miss it.
Timing it just right, Takanori strained his voice.
“Miss Sakata, how is Hiroyuki doing?”
The smile on her face froze, and her narrow, carefully maintained eyebrows rose gradually. She held her breath and kept her body completely still. Glaring around the hall as if shining a searchlight, she scanned for the source of the voice, and when she got to Takanori she fixed her eyes on him.
Her consternation was so fierce that just looking at her made him sorry. Restoring a cheerful mood back to the hall was now utterly out of the question. Kiyomi Sakata tapped her chest lightly and blinked repeatedly, and her breathing grew heavier and heavier. Unable to come up with something clever to say to create a smokescreen, she released Takanori from her gaze and glanced up at the ceiling.
“I don’t remember the names of men from my past,” she said, barely getting the words out in a hoarse voice.
“Who’s this Hiroyuki?” Yoneda whispered, poking Takanori with his elbow.
Takanori was convinced.
No mistake. That was almost a confession.
Hiroyuki Niimura indeed was the son she’d given birth to as a teenager.
Niimura’s existence was a bomb laden with the power to destroy everything in Kiyomi’s life.
3
Until a little while ago, Akane was lying down on bed and talking about what had happened at school that day. Miss Ohashi had been chosen to lead the summer mountain-climbing class, and now she was nagging Akane relentlessly. Even as Akane complained to Takanori, the span between the words coming from her mouth lengthened little by little, and once she was fast asleep, her nose started emitting a tiny snore.
It seemed as though she’d timed it, quietly falling asleep with Takanori’s right arm as her pillow just as the hands of the clock struck midnight. He felt a slight change when she transitioned from being awake and entered into the dream world.
Whether or not you could fathom the recesses of your partner’s heart determined the depth of your love.
Seeing that Akane had fallen into a deep sleep, Takanori slid his right arm out from between the back of her head and the pillow. Lifting his upper body a bit and keeping that pose, he continued to gaze upon her sleeping face.
Despite his fatigue, sleep seemed unlikely to visit him anytime soon. On the contrary, he grew only more and more alert, and from his toes to his hips and back, intermittent chills were running through his body.
When his left hand touched her hair, Akane smiled faintly and brought her face towards him. She wasn’t awake, merely getting closer to him unconsciously.
From the gap of the man’s shirt she had on, her well-rounded breasts were peeking out, while her belly underneath was covered by a towel blanket. Growing inside was a life almost three months old. A little while longer and it would probably be visible on an ultrasound scan.
His heart was in chaos. The vision of his future, which had been so clear until yesterday, was now shrouded in a haze and being shut off behind a black veil.
Takanori had no idea what he should do next. As he sighed, tears began welling up in his eyes, but he stifled them.
The information he’d received from Kihara that evening was hitting him slowly but steadily. Viewed according to a certain hypothesis, several puzzles that the writer had compiled and set aside looked to be connected by a single line. No matter how Takanori rearranged them, they appeared to lead only one way.
Their fourth meeting had been held at a location other than Kihara’s office. On the way back from visiting one Professor Miyashita of the Department of Pathology at K University’s Faculty of Medicine and hearing what he had to say, Kihara had dropped by a family restaurant and called upon Takanori, realizing that his home was nearby. Takanori had rushed over there and gotten the latest info.
A former colleague of Mitsuo Ando’s, Professor Miyashita was the pathologist who’d performed the biopsies on the videotape’s victims twenty-five years ago.
The professor had been reticent at first, but then he’d opened up. Starting out by saying that the matter was all over and done with, he’d provided a full account of those bizarre, quarter-century-old events.
His story was a continuation of what Takanori had heard from his father the previous day at the hospital director’s office.
Apart from the parts that overlapped, when Takanori sorted out Professor Miyashita’s story, what caught his attention besides the keyword “virus” was the phrase “mutation.”
The ring-shaped virus produced a sarcoma in the coronary artery. However, the S-shaped virus, a broken ring, had been stripped of that effect. That was just as Mitsuo had related. Yet the suggestion that the S-shaped virus posed no danger whatsoever was a lie.
According to Miyashita’s explanation, a mutation had given rise to a new effect.
Miyashita had explained the odd phenomenon using the autopsy results for Mai Takano as an example.
A student of Ryuji Takayama’s, Mai Takano had watched the images projected by Sadako Yamamura’s mind, and yet certain physical features had rendered her immune from the effects of the ring virus. In the end, though, she’d fallen into a drain ditch on the roof of a building and died an untimely death. As the medical examiners who performed her autopsy, Professor Miyashita and Mitsuo Ando detected something unusual afoot. There were signs that while she was stuck in that ditch, Mai Takano had given birth. Moreover, Mitsuo Ando was certain that Mai was a virgin. Thus, the question became: how had she become pregnant, and to what had she given birth?
The hint lay in the shapes of the ring virus and the S-shaped virus. Finding the form of the S-shaped virus reminiscent of a sperm cell, Mitsuo Ando had looked into Mai’s activity during her lifetime and surmised that she might have been ovulating when she watched the images on the videotape. Assuming that the ring virus targeted the coronary artery for attack, the S-shaped virus—as its very shape suggested—might well have targeted a woman’s uterus. That was why Mai had been immune from the effects of the video. Instead, an egg newly released into her womb had been invaded by the S-shaped virus, and presenting symptoms of pregnancy in the span of just one week, she had given birth at the bottom of a ditch without anybody knowing.
This had not been a normal baby. The child whom she’d birthed was Sadako Yamamura.
It was Sadako who had originally projected the images onto the videotape. Her genetic information, imbued with extraordinary occult power, might have survived inside the virus in the form of video data, or so Professor Miyashita had suggested.
To make matters worse, in a brief time, the medium itself had also
undergone a change, in concert with the virus, which had mutated and found a new target of attack. Like a snake wriggling its body and shedding its skin, perhaps the virus had experienced a bewildering transmutation and altered the medium so as to prolong its own life.
Initially, the medium had been the images on the videotape. Those who saw the images became hosts to the ring virus in their bodies. Yet after the tape was eradicated, the medium responsible for propagating the virus had transformed into written matter, namely Ring.
A quarter-century ago, Professor Miyashita and Mitsuo Ando had contemplated how this situation would unfold and presaged the end of the world.
This document called Ring was written by Kazuyuki Asakawa, and his brother Junichiro had proceeded to publish it. What was more, plans had been made to turn it into a film, and a studio had taken steps toward doing so. With this change in medium from a book to a movie, the contagion would have spread much faster than by videotape, at an almost incomparable speed.
What was the fate of the infected? An ovulating woman who came into contact with the medium—in other words, who read Ring or watched the film version—would get pregnant without sexual reproduction and give birth to Sadako.
Professor Miyashita and Mitsuo Ando feared that the individual known as Sadako Yamamura would explosively multiply and thereby deprive the natural world of its diversity, leading the world toward extinction.
However, things had somehow proceeded down a different path, contrary to their prediction, and the threat of the virus had suddenly subsided.
Though it was unclear how it had happened, the plans to make the film had fallen apart and the first edition of Ring had vanished from the market, and the nightmare of Sadako spreading throughout the world had been averted.
Even after that, as far as they knew, there had been no abnormal incidents indicating the effects of the S-shaped virus, and they’d been forced to conclude that the case was closed.
That was why Professor Miyashita had prefaced everything with the remark that it was all over. If it were an ongoing issue, he would have kept his mouth shut so as not to cause society-wide panic.
After the series of cases surrounding the cursed videotape had retreated into the distant past, everything felt like a dream when the professor thought back on it. As the nightmare receded, its credibility faded away, until finally he felt more at ease talking about it as if it had all happened to somebody else.
Spreading out the microscope photographs of the ring virus and S-shaped virus on the table of the family restaurant and looking around, however, Kihara had lowered his voice and said he didn’t believe the evil of the virus had been contained.
Takanori felt the same way and was beginning to think that it hadn’t ended at all—it was more fitting to say that it had been smoldering.
There is a novella by a certain famous author about an old man who spends one night watching a nude young woman sleeping beside him. While the old man appreciates the woman’s youthful form, beyond her he sees the shadow of his own death drawing near.
Looking at Akane’s face while she slept, Takanori tried to recall the story. He wasn’t sure which one had died at the end, the old man or the young woman, but one thing he couldn’t forget was its dense, wafting image of death.
Takanori asked himself, Can I really love her from the bottom of my heart?
Having just seen the microscope pics of the virus, he remembered the shape so clearly and felt uneasy, as if the virus had arisen and was spreading in his body. Triggered by the images in the photos, perhaps the virus had proliferated and was now crawling in the folds of his brain…Its wicked hope to strike on a woman’s ovulation date showed how truly sinister it was.
After meeting with Kihara, Takanori had gone on thinking about it the whole time on the way home. It was apparent to him that Kihara had thought along similar lines and reached the same conclusion, but he’d refrained from spelling it out.
No matter how they connected the dots, there was only one line that they could see, and it seemed that no other interpretation was tenable.
Kashiwada had killed four young girls, but his motive remained totally unknown. Not even the prosecution had believed that he’d murdered for pleasure to satisfy abnormal sexual urges.
In the home of the condemned Kashiwada, there’d been seventeen first-edition copies of Ring bundled up and left at the entryway.
The birthdays of the girls he’d slain were concentrated in a short span of roughly half a year, from the summer of 1991 to the spring of 1992. On top of that, all of the girls had looked so alike.
The first edition of Ring had been published in June 1991.
Three of the four girls killed by Kashiwada had been born to single mothers.
All of the girls had breathed their last leaning against a tree trunk, with their underwear removed, but their bodies had been neatly arranged, imparting an impression of some kind of ritual.
When these background facts were linked together, they spun a coherent story.
The horrible effects of the S-shaped virus as mediated by the first edition of Ring hadn’t subsided but hidden and festered. Almost twenty-five years ago, women who’d read Ring while they were ovulating had actually given birth due to the effects of the virus. Some of the children might have been aborted, but at least four of them had been born into this world.
What the young female victims had in common was that every one of them was Sadako.
And now Kashiwada’s motive was clear as well.
He was hunting Sadako.
Kashiwada had wanted to eradicate all the Sadakos who’d been born into the world, and he’d searched for the girls one after another and killed them all.
Yet the story wasn’t over. A crucial fact was lying in wait for Takanori.
The fifth victim, who had nearly been killed by Kashiwada, was sleeping beside him now. The only Sadako left in this world…was Akane.
Can I really love this woman with all my heart?
He repeated this same question over and over.
Was he really going to be part of the same family tree as such a deformity of a woman, who had died time and again only to come back from the dead? Was he really to be her husband and the father of their child?
What am I supposed to do? Somebody please tell me the answer, Takanori silently screamed.
Then, even though she seemed to be asleep, both of Akane’s arms moved. Behind Takanori’s back her hands linked, and he found himself getting pulled to her with great force. He was now on top of Akane, in her embrace. Holding him affectionately from beneath, she put her lips close to his ears.
He felt a subtle breath on his earlobe, and then came her words.
“Tak, you don’t have to suffer alone. I can help you. Believe me. I have that power…”
You’re right about that, he thought. Akane did have the power, the same extraordinary power that Takanori feared.
4
Akane was an early riser. At 7 a.m., she was out the door and headed to the school.
Having tossed and turned the night before, Takanori awoke feeling like he hadn’t slept at all, and when he looked beside him Akane was gone. His clock showed it was past seven.
Perhaps Akane had used that sliver of a moment when he’d drifted off as her cue to leave. He almost suspected that it meant she was trying to be considerate, to avoid an awkward moment.
It was possible that Akane would never come home, and this thought nearly became a desire, but he banished it before it could take root in his heart. Takanori considered indulging in the now vast bed to catch a few more winks, but with little chance of falling asleep, he promptly abandoned the idea and instead hopped in the shower.
He grabbed a glass of milk and a banana for breakfast and proceeded to drink two cups of coffee.
February 25th next year. That was the expected due date for their child.
As he tried to picture the infant’s face, those of the girls who’d fallen victim to Kashiwada came an
d went, one after another.
The alternative—not having the child—wasn’t unthinkable. If he was going to ask Akane to get an abortion and leave her, he needed to go about it immediately. Yet how would he explain his reason for leaving?
It was impossible for Takanori to dump his lover because she was Sadako. Akane was completely blameless. The same went for Akane’s mother, too.
Takanori wanted to know how Akane had come to be born. Her mother had given birth to Akane without knowing who the father was, and she’d died when Akane was around three. As for whether her birth had truly been caused by her mother’s reading Ring on her ovulation date, or whether there’d been some other mechanism at work, he couldn’t say.
Takanori remembered that the photos of those who’d been involved with Ring were still in the large brown envelope, sandwiched in the file. After seeing them once in Kihara’s office, he had yet to take a look at the pictures in his apartment.
Dwelling on the victims’ faces’ resemblance to Akane’s, Takanori took all of the girls’ pictures out from the envelope and lined them up on the table.
All four girls did look so much alike. Each one was pretty enough to catch a person’s glance. Due to the differences in their hairstyles and how full their faces were or weren’t, the resemblance wasn’t enough to judge that they were the same people—it merely gave the impression that they were lookalikes. Even though they were born from the same DNA, the environments in which they’d grown up made them all look a bit different.
Akane was a little unlike the girls who’d been killed by Kashiwada. She was one step behind in terms of sheer beauty but was the absolute victor in terms of womanly softness and endowed with a supple charm. Looking at all the female victims, Takanori felt that their faces were perfectly well-proportioned and more neuter in appearance, whereas Akane’s looked perfectly feminine. Maybe it was simply because of the differences between a young girl and an adult woman, or perhaps he was biased because he loved her…