I meant to read Koji Suzuki‘s
Ring shortly after having seen Hideo Nakata’s film adaptation but never got around to it for one reason or another until recently. I read a recommendation somewhere that I cannot recall and found a copy shortly thereafter at a bookstore.
Unsurprisingly I found myself comparing the two works as I read although much of the movie was lost to my memory. Still, I was able to note some major differences.
The tale begins with 17 year-old Tomoko sitting at home alone doing typical teenage things - failing to study for a test, thinking about life after high school, and being mad at her parents. She senses things are not quite right but cannot quite figure it out. She becomes ever more tense and frightened until…
At the same time a young man on a motorcycle falls over at a stoplight manically grabbing at his helmet. A cab driver at the same intersection tries to help by calling for an ambulance but it’s too late.
Kazuyuki Asakawa is a reporter and one day he takes a cab driven by the same driver that witnessed the teenager die on the street and he hears the whole story. His interest is piqued as his neice, Tomoko, died at the same time he did. Asakawa digs deeper and finds that two other teenagers named Haruko and Takehiko also died on the same day and at the same time. The coroner determined the cause of death for all of them was spontaneous heart failure. Asakawa can’t believe that the time and cause of all their deaths could be coincidence.
Asakawa now throws himself into the investigation. He discovers that all four teens knew one another and that they had all stayed at a cabin at a resort called Pacific Island a week before their deaths. And so Asakawa rents that same cabin. His search there is coming up with nothing until he notices that the spine of the guestbook in the cabin has been broken and that the book doesn’t close quite right. He deduces that it was laid open with something on it, namely a videotape that the teens likely rented from the resort office. Asakawa heads over there and grabs the lone tape without a sleeve.
Bringing it back to the cabin, he puts it into the VCR and hits play. He is confronted by words that he can barely make out. “WATCH UNTIL THE END. YOU WILL BE EATEN BY THE LOST…” This warning is followed by a bizarre series of images which includes a mountain, a volcano erupting, an old woman speaking in a strange dialect, and a man having his shoulder gouged. The tapes ends with another warning that says the viewer will die in a week unless he or she follows “these directions exactly” at which point a commercial bursts onto the screen. Asakawa is so perturbed that he immediately rushes back to Tokyo.
Convinced that he has but a week to live, he enlists the help of his friend Ryuji. Ryuji is a strange one. He boasts that he’d like to watch the end of the world just for fun. Even more odd is that he admits to raping women and is seemingly proud of it. However, he is fearless and eagerly watches the tape and he is well-versed in the paranormal. This interest brings them to the archives of a Professor Miura, a physicist who was also preoccupied with the supernatural and had tested people by having them try to create an image on a piece of unexposed film using only supernatural means. Plowing through the archives, Asakawa and Ryuji become convinced that the tape contains the visions of a girl named Sadako Yamamura who died thirty years previously.
SPOILERS!
With time running out, our duo discover that the Pacific Island resort was built on the former site of a tuberculosis sanitarium and that Sadako’s father was a patient there. They track down a doctor who used to work at the sanitarium and he lays out Sadako’s sad history. Sadako was a stunningly beautiful young woman and he sexually assaulted her. The doctor discovered Sadako’s secret - she was a hermaphrodite. She uses her telepathy to tell him that she will kill him and so the doctor kills her before she can do him in. He disposes of her body by throwing it down a well.
Ryuji and Asakawa find the well - it’s directly under the cabin at the resort - and recover Sadako’s remains thinking that a proper burial would allow her spirit to rest and thusly end this nightmare. They are given to a family member of Sadako’s and they think that all is done. However, Ryuji dies a week after having viewed the tape. Asakawa becomes desperate as his wife and daughter have watched it and so he must quickly figure out how to defeat the curse. What he takes to be Ryuji’s spirit guides him to a book on viruses and Asakawa determines that, since he gave a copy to Ryuji and he is still alive, the curse is like a virus and needs to find a new host. Desperately he races a copy of the video over to his in-laws house.
This is the major difference between the novel and films. Instead of an emphasis on technology and having a girl crawl out of a television to kill viewers of the tape after a week, Suzuki makes the curse a more organic entity. The skeptical side of Asakawa at first thought that perhaps the teenagers’ death was caused by some unknown disease. After all, it did take medical researchers a while to figure out what AIDS was. Before Ryuji’s spirit lends assistance Asakawa contemplates the curse. A girl with psychic powers is raped by a doctor who is also the last known person in Japan to have had smallpox. Could there be a connection?
Presumably there is as the curse is essentially a virus. The book doesn’t come right out and say that Sadako used her powers to mutate and manipulate the smallpox but the intimation is there. Suzuki has written a couple sequels to
Ring and so perhaps he explains the nature of this curse/virus. But, as far as the book at hand is concerned, I appreciate that he left its true nature unknown or at least ambiguous.
Another difference (at least as far as I can recall) is that the protagonists here are unlikable to varying degrees. Ryuji is cocky and, well, how much can one like a character that boasts of raping women? We eventually find out that the braggadocio is a front and the rapes are probably lies but this revelation comes very close to the end of the novel. Asakawa is less repellent but his failures aren’t masks. There is a scene where he, his wife, and his daughter visit his sister and brother-in-law ostensibly to console them for their loss of Tomoko. It is revealed that Asakawa is something of a hands-off kind of father and seems to rate his job higher than family. But after watching the tape, he transforms into a much more outwardly caring father and husband. He longs to spend more time with his family and thinks about whether his life insurance policy will be enough. As a character he changes and my view of him changed too. Contrast this with the movie where Asakawa is a single mom for whom it is difficult not to fee empathic towards.
Much of
Ring skews towards mystery but when Suzuki lays on the horror, things get really creepy. For instance, I read the scene where Asakawa watches the videotape at night with the family asleep. After finishing it, I set the book down, stood up, and looked around the dining room, Then I turned and looked at the TV half expecting some girl with filthy hair to crawl out of it. It was just spooky.
Whenever I watch or foreign film or read a book by a non-American author I ponder what elements are unique to the culture of the author. Here I am not sure what, if anything is reflective of something Japanese culture doesn’t share with ours. The role of technology? A stigma attached to rape? Hermaphroditism? More than once Sadako's beauty is mentioned and the doctor says that individuals with her condition are usually extremely good looking. Perhaps something from Japanese myth was referred to here and the reference went right over my head. The book doesn’t have any Japanese cultural references which will throw off American readers.
Having finished the book, I am keen on watching the movie again and reading the sequel.
