The Complete Ring Trilogy: Ring, Spiral, Loop. Koji Suzuki
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“It’s a grudge,” muttered Ryuji. “Imagine how Sadako must have felt when her mom threw herself into Mt Mihara.”
“She hated the media?”
“Not just the media. She resented the public at large for destroying her family, first treating them like darlings, and then when the wind changed scorning them. Sadako was with her mother and father between the ages of three and ten, right? She had first-hand knowledge of the vagaries of public opinion.”
“But that’s no reason to arrange an indiscriminate attack like this!” Asakawa’s objection was made in full consciousness of the fact that he himself belonged to the media. In his heart he was making excuses—he was pleading. Hey, I’m just as critical of the media’s tendencies as you are.
“What are you mumbling about?”
“Huh?” Asakawa realized that unknowingly he had been voicing his complaints, as if they were a Buddhist chant.
“Well, we’ve begun to illuminate the images on that video. Mt Mihara appears because it’s where her mother killed herself, and also because Sadako herself had predicted its eruption. It must have made a particularly strong psychic impression on her. The next scene shows the character for ‘mountain’, yama, floating into view. That’s probably the first psychic photograph Sadako succeeded in making, when she was very small.”
“Very small?” Asakawa didn’t see why it had to be from when she was very small.
“Yes, probably from when she was four or five. Next, there’s the scene with the dice. Sadako was present during her mother’s public demonstration; this scene means that she was watching, worried, as her mother tried to guess the numbers on the dice.”
“Hold on a minute, though. Sadako clearly saw the numbers on the dice in that lead bowl.”
Both Asakawa and Ryuji had watched that scene with their own eyes, so to speak. There was no mistaking.
“And?”
“Shizuko couldn’t see them.”
“Is it so strange that the daughter could do what the mother couldn’t? Look, Sadako was only seven then, but her power already far outstripped her mother’s. So much so that the combined unconscious will of a hundred people was nothing to her. Think about it: this is a girl who could project images onto a cathode-ray tube. Televisions produce images by an entirely different mechanism from photography—it’s not just a matter of exposing film to light. A picture on TV is composed of 525 lines, right? Sadako could manipulate those. This is power of a completely different order here.”
Asakawa still wasn’t convinced. “If she had so much power, what about the psychic photo she sent to Professor Miura? She should have been able to produce something much more impressive.”
“You’re even dumber than you look. Her mother had gained nothing but unhappiness by letting people know about her power. Her mother probably didn’t want her to make the same mistake. She probably told Sadako to hide her abilities and just lead a normal life. Sadako probably carefully restrained herself so as to produce only an average psychic photo.”
Sadako had stayed in the rehearsal hall alone after everyone else had left, so that she could test her powers on the television set, still a rarity in those days. She was trying to be careful not to let anyone know what she could do.
“Who’s the old woman who appears in the next scene?” asked Asakawa.
“I don’t know who that is. Perhaps she came to Sadako in a dream or something, whispered prophecies in her ear. She was using an old dialect. I’m sure you’ve noticed that everyone here now speaks fairly standard Japanese. That lady was pretty old. Maybe she lived in the twelfth century, or maybe she has some connection to En no Ozunu.”
… Next year you’re going to have a child.
“I wonder if that prediction really came true?”
“Oh, that? Well, there’s the scene with the baby boy right after that. So I originally thought it meant that Sadako had given birth to a boy, but according to this fax, that doesn’t appear to be the case.”
“There’s her brother who died at four months old …”
“Right. I think that’s it.”
“But what about the prediction? The old woman is definitely speaking to Sadako—she says you. Did Sadako have a baby?”
“I don’t know. If we believe the old lady, then I guess she did.”
“Whose child was it?”
“How should I know? Listen, don’t think I know everything. I’m just speculating here.”
If Sadako Yamamura did have a child, who was the father? And what was the child doing now?
Ryuji stood up suddenly, banging his knees on the table as a result.
“I thought I was getting hungry. Look—it’s way past noon. Say, Asakawa, I’m going to get something to eat.” So saying, Ryuji headed for the door, rubbing his kneecaps. Asakawa had no appetite, but something still bothered him, and he decided to tag along. He’d just remembered something Ryuji had told him to investigate, something he’d had no clue how to approach and so hadn’t done anything about. This was the question of the identity of the man in the video’s last scene. It might be Sadako’s father, Heihachiro Ikuma, but there was too much enmity in the way Sadako looked at him for that. When he’d seen the man’s face on the screen, Asakawa had felt a dull, heavy pain somewhere deep inside his body, accompanied by a strong feeling of antipathy. He was a rather handsome man, particularly around the eyes; he wondered why she hated him so. No matter what, that kind of gaze was not one Sadako would have turned on a relative. There was nothing in Yoshino’s report to suggest that she had squared off against her father. Rather, he got the impression that she was close to her parents. Asakawa suspected it would be impossible to discover the identity of this man. Nearly thirty years had undoubtedly changed his looks considerably. Still, just on the off-chance, maybe he should ask Yoshino to dig up a photo of Ikuma. He wondered what Ryuji would think about this. Wanting to take the matter up with him, Asakawa followed Ryuji outside.
The wind blew loudly. There was no point in using an umbrella. Asakawa and Ryuji hunched their shoulders and ran down the street to a bar in front of the harbor.
“How about a beer?” Without waiting for a reply, Ryuji turned to the waitress and called out, “Two beers.”
“Ryuji, to go back to our earlier conversation, what do you think the images on that video are, finally?”
“Don’t know.”
Ryuji was too busy eating his Korean barbecue lunch special to even look up, so he gave a curt answer. Asakawa stabbed a sausage with his fork and took a swallow of his beer. Out the window they could see the pier. There was nobody at the ticket window for the Tokai Kisen ferry line. Everything was silent. No doubt all the tourists trapped on the island were sitting at the windows of their hotels or B&Bs, looking worriedly at this same dark sea and sky.
Ryuji looked up. “I imagine you’ve probably heard what people say goes though a person’s mind at the moment of death, right?”
Asakawa returned his gaze to the scene in front of him. “The scenes from your life that have made the deepest impression on you are replayed, sort of like a flashback.” Asakawa had read a book in which the author described an experience along those lines. The author had been driving his car along a mountain road when he lost control of the steering wheel, plunging the car into a deep ravine. During the split second that the car hung in the air after leaving the road, the author realized that he was going to die. And at the instant he realized that, a sequence of different scenes from throughout his life came pitter-pattering up and flashed through his brain, so clearly that he could see every detail. In the end, miraculously, the writer had survived, but the memory of that instant remained vivid for