The Complete Ring Trilogy

by Kōji Suzuki

  In the middle of the island’s eastern shore there was a beach called the Ascetic’s Beach, with a small cave called the Ascetic’s Grotto. It contained a stone statue of En no Ozunu, the famed Buddhist ascetic, who had been banished here in the year 699. Ozunu had been born with great wisdom, and long years of discipline had given him command of occult and mystic arts. It was said that he could summon gods and demons at will. But Ozunu’s power to foretell the future had made him powerful enemies in the world of books and weapons, and he’d been judged a criminal, a menace to society, and exiled here to Izu Oshima. That had been almost thirteen hundred years ago. Ozunu holed himself up in a small cave on the beach and devoted himself to even more strenuous disciplines. He also taught farming and fishing to the people of the island, earning respect for his virtue. Finally he was pardoned and allowed to return to the mainland, where he founded the Shugendo monastic tradition. He was thought to have spent three years on the island, but stories of his time there abounded, including the legend that he had once shod himself with iron clogs and flown off to Mt Fuji. The islanders still retained a great deal of affection for En no Ozunu, and the Ascetic’s Grotto was considered the holiest place on the island. A festival, known as the Festival of the Ascetic, was held every year on June 15th.

  Right after the end of World War II, however, as part of their policy toward Shintoism and Buddhism, the Occupation forces had taken En no Ozunu’s statue from where it was enshrined in the cave and tossed it into the ocean. Shizuko, who had deep faith in Ozunu, had evidently been watching. She had hid herself in the shadow of the rocks at Worm’s Nose Point and watched carefully as the statue was cast from the American patrol boat. She memorized the exact spot.

  Genji couldn’t believe his ears when he heard that they were going fishing for the statue of the Ascetic. He was a good fisherman with strong arms, but he’d never tried to catch a stone statue. But there was no way he could just turn Shizuko down, given the secret feelings he nursed for her. He launched his boat into the night, thinking to take this opportunity to put her in his debt. And truth be told, being out on the sea under a beautiful moon like this, just the two of them, promised to be a wonderful thing.

  They’d built fires on Ascetic’s Beach and at Worm’s Nose as landmarks, and now they rowed farther and farther out to sea. Both of them were quite familiar with the ocean here—the lie of the seafloor, the depth, and the schools of fish that swam here. But now it was nighttime, and no matter how bright the moon was, it illuminated nothing beneath the surface. Genji didn’t know how Shizuko intended to find the statue. He asked her, while working the oars, but she didn’t answer. She just checked their position again by the bonfires on the beach. One might have been able to get a pretty good idea of where they were by gazing over the waves at the fires on the beach, and estimating the distance between them. After they’d rowed several hundred meters, Shizuko cried, “Stop here!”

  She went to the stern of the boat, leaned down close to the surface of the water, and peered into the dark sea. “Look the other way,” she commanded Genji. Genji guessed what Shizuko was about to do, and his heart leapt. Shizuko stood up and took off her splash-patterned kimono. His imagination aroused by the sound of the robe slipping across her skin, Genji found it hard to breathe. Behind him he heard the sound of her jumping into the sea. As the spray hit his shoulders he turned around and looked. Shizuko was treading water, her long black hair tied back with a rag and one end of a slender rope clenched between her teeth. She thrust her upper body out of the water, took two deep breaths, then dived to the bottom of the sea.

  How many times did her head pop up from the surface of the water to gasp for air? The last time, she no longer had the end of the rope in her mouth. “I’ve tied it fast to the Ascetic. Go ahead and pull him up,” she said in a trembling voice.

  Gen shifted his body to the bow of the boat and pulled on the rope. In no time Shizuko climbed aboard, draped her kimono around her body, and came up beside Genji in time to help him haul up the statue. They placed it in the center of the boat and headed back to the shore. The whole way back, neither Genji nor Shizuko said a word. There was something in the atmosphere that quashed all questions. He found it mysterious that she’d been able to locate the statue in the darkness at the bottom of the sea. It was only three days later that he was able to ask her. She said that the Ascetic’s eyes had called to her on the ocean floor. The green eyes of the statue, master of gods and demons, had glowed at the bottom of the deep dark sea … That’s what Shizuko had said.

  After that, Shizuko began to feel physical discomfort. She’d never even had a headache up until then, but now she often experienced searing pains in her head, accompanied by visions of things she’d never seen before flashing across her mind’s eye. And it happened that these scenes she had glimpsed very soon manifested themselves in reality. Genji had questioned her in some detail. It seemed that when these future scenes inserted themselves into her brain, they were always accompanied by the same citrus fragrance in her nostrils. Genji’s older sister had married and moved to Odawara, on the mainland; when she died, the scene had presented itself to Shizuko beforehand. But it didn’t sound like she could actually, consciously predict things that would happen in the future. It was just that these scenes would flash across her mind, with no warning, and with no inkling of why she’d witnessed those exact scenes. So Shizuko never allowed people to ask her to predict their futures.

  The following year she went up to Tokyo, despite Genji’s efforts to stop her. She came to know Heihachiro Ikuma, and conceived his child. Then, at the end of the year, she went back to her hometown and gave birth to a baby girl. Sadako.

  They didn’t know when Genji’s tale would end. Ten years later Shizuko jumped into the mouth of Mt Mihara, and to judge by the way Genji related the event, it seemed he had decided to blame it on her lover, Ikuma. It was perhaps a natural thought, as he had been Genji’s rival in love, but his obvious resentment made his account hard to sit through. All they’d gleaned from him was the knowledge that Sadako’s mother had been able to see the future, and the possibility that this power had been given her by a stone statue of En no Ozunu.

  Just then the fax machine began to hum. It printed out an enlargement of the head shot of Sadako Yamamura that Yoshino had got from Theater Group Soaring.

  Asakawa was strangely moved. This was the first actual look he’d had at this woman. Even though it had only been for the briefest moment, he’d shared the same sensations as her, seen the world from the same vantage point. It was like catching the first glimpse of a lover’s face in the dim morning light, finally seeing what she looks like, after a night of entwined limbs and shared orgasms in the dark.

  It was odd, but he couldn’t think of her as hideous. That was only natural; although the photo that came through the fax machine was somewhat blurred around the edges, still it fully communicated the allure of Sadako’s beautifully regular features.

  “She’s a fine woman, isn’t she?” Ryuji said. Asakawa suddenly recalled Mai Takano. If you compared them purely on the basis of looks, Sadako was far more beautiful than Mai. And yet the scent of a woman was much more powerful with Mai. And what about that “eerie” quality that was supposed to characterize Sadako? It didn’t come through in the photograph. Sadako had powers that ordinary people didn’t have; they must have influenced the people around her.

  The second page of the fax summarized information about Shizuko Yamamura. It picked up right where Genji’s story had left off just now.

  In 1947, having left behind her hometown of Sashikiji for the capital, Shizuko suddenly collapsed with head pains and was taken to a hospital. Through one of the doctors, she came to know Heihachiro Ikuma, an assistant professor in the psychiatry department of Taido University. Ikuma was involved in trying to find a scientific explanation for hypnotism and related phenomena, and he became very interested in Shizuko when he discovered that she had startling powers of clairvoyance. The finding went s
o far as to change the thrust of his research. Thereafter Ikuma would immerse himself in the study of paranormal powers, with Shizuko as the subject of his research. But the two soon progressed beyond a mere researcher-subject relationship. In spite of his having a family, Ikuma began to have romantic feelings toward Shizuko. By the end of the year she was pregnant with his child, and to escape the eyes of the world she went back home, where she had Sadako. Shizuko immediately returned to Tokyo, leaving Sadako in Sashikiji, but three years later she returned to reclaim her child. From then until the time of her suicide, evidently, she never let Sadako leave her side.

  When the 1950s dawned, the partnership of Heihachiro Ikuma and Shizuko Yamamura was a sensation in the pages of the news papers and the weekly news magazines. They provided a sudden insight into the scientific underpinnings of supernatural powers. At first, perhaps dazzled by Ikuma’s position as a professor at such a prestigious university, the public unanimously believed in Shizuko’s powers. Even the media wrote her up in a more-or-less favorable light. Still, there were persistent claims that she could only be a fake, and when an authoritative scholarly association weighed in with the one-word comment “questionable”, people began to shift their support away from the pair.

  The paranormal powers Shizuko exhibited were mainly ESP-related, such as clairvoyance or second sight, and the ability to produce psychic photographs. She didn’t display the power of telekinesis, the ability to move things without touching them. According to one magazine, simply by holding a piece of film in a tightly sealed envelope against her forehead, she could psychically imprint upon it a specified design; she could also identify the image on a similarly concealed piece of film a hundred times out of a hundred. However, another magazine maintained that she was nothing more than a con-woman, claiming that any magician, with some training, could easily do the same things. In this way the tide of public opinion began to rise against Shizuko and Ikuma.

  Then Shizuko was visited by misfortune. In 1954 she gave birth to her second baby, but it became ill and died at only four months of age. It had been a boy. Sadako, who was seven at the time, seemed to have showered a special affection on her newborn little brother.

  The following year, in 1955, Ikuma challenged the media to a public demonstration of Shizuko’s powers. At first Shizuko didn’t want to do it. She said that it was hard to concentrate her awareness the way she wanted to among a mass of spectators; she was afraid she’d fail. But Ikuma was unyielding. He couldn’t stand being labeled a charlatan by the media, and he couldn’t think of a better way to outwit them than by offering clear proof of her authenticity.

  On the appointed day, Shizuko reluctantly mounted the dais in the lab theater, under the watchful eyes of nearly a hundred scholars and representatives of the press. She was mentally exhausted, to boot, so these were hardly the best conditions for her to work under. The experiment was to proceed along quite simple lines. All she had to do was identify the numbers on a pair of dice inside a lead container. If she had just been able to exert her powers normally, it would have been no problem. But she knew that each one of the hundred people surrounding her was waiting and hoping for her to fail. She trembled, she crouched down on the floor, she cried out in anguish, “Enough of this!” Shizuko herself explained it this way: everybody had a certain degree of psychic power. She just had more of it than others did. But surrounded by a hundred people all willing her to fail, her power was disrupted—she couldn’t get it to work. Ikuma went even further: “It’s not just a hundred people. No, now the whole population of Japan is trying to stamp out the fruits of my research. When public opinion, fanned by the media, begins to turn, then the media says nothing the people don’t want to hear. They should be ashamed!” Thus the great public display of clairvoyance ended with Ikuma’s denunciation of the mass media.

  Of course, the media interpreted Ikuma’s diatribe as an attempt to shift the blame for the failed demonstration, and that’s how it was written up in the next day’s newspapers. A FAKE AFTER ALL … THEIR TRUE COLORS REVEALED … TAIDO UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR A FRAUD … FIVE YEARS OF DEBATE ENDED … VICTORY FOR MODERN SCIENCE. Not a single article defended them.

  Toward the end of the year, Ikuma divorced his wife and resigned from the university. Shizuko began to become increasingly paranoid. After that, Ikuma decided to acquire paranormal abilities himself, and he retreated deep into the mountains and stood under waterfalls, but all he got was pulmonary tuberculosis. He had to be committed to a sanatorium in Hakone. Meanwhile Shizuko’s psychological state was becoming more and more precarious. Eight-year-old Sadako convinced her mother to go back home to Sashikiji, to escape the eyes of the media and the ridicule of the public, but then Shizuko slipped her daughter’s gaze and jumped into the volcano. And so three people’s lives crumbled.

  Asakawa and Ryuji finished reading the two-page printout at the same time.

  “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 s
he 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.