by Kōji Suzuki
So, was Mai’s disappearance a result of her having watched that tape? The possibility worried him. She hadn’t been back to her room since then. She hadn’t been showing up at school, and she hadn’t even called her mother. On the other hand, he hadn’t heard anything about a young woman found dead from unexplained causes.
Ando let his mind wander for a while, considering all the things that could have befallen her. Maybe she’d died alone someplace unbeknownst to anybody. The thought pained him—she was only twenty-two. The fact that he could feel the first twinges of a crush on her only made it harder to bear.
The printer finally came to the end of another page, with a noise that snapped Ando out of his reverie. In any case, now was no time to be borrowing trouble. At the moment, he’d be better off finding out what was on that tape first.
10
The next few pages contained a thorough description of the contents of the videotape. As he read, Ando could see a TV screen in his mind, filled with shifting images.
Something red and viscous spurted across the screen. This was followed by a view of a mountain that he could tell at a glance was an active volcano. Lava flowed from its mouth; the earth rumbled. The eruption lit up the night sky. Then this scene was suddenly cut off, replaced by a white background, in front of which the character for “mountain”, written in black, faded in and out of view. Then a scene of two dice bouncing around on the bottom of a bowl.
Finally a human figure appeared onscreen. A wrinkled old woman sat on a tatami mat. She was facing the camera and saying something. She spoke in a nearly incomprehensible dialect, but he could tell, more or less from the sound of her words, that she was predicting somebody’s future, warning him or her.
Next, a newborn baby, wailing. There was no discernible link between scenes. One followed another with all the abruptness and randomness of someone flipping over cards.
The infant disappeared, replaced by hundreds of faces, filling the screen and multiplying as if by cellular division, all against the background of a multitude of voices intoning accusations: Liar! Fraud! Then an old television set, displaying the character sada.
Then a man’s face appeared. He was gasping for breath and dripping with sweat. Behind him could be seen a lush thicket of trees. His eyes were red and full of bloodlust; his mouth was contorted with screams and drool. His bare shoulder was deeply gouged, and blood flowed from the wound. Then came again, from nowhere in particular, the cry of a baby. In the center of the screen was a full moon, from which fell fist-sized stones, landing with dull thuds.
Finally, more words appeared on the screen.
Those who have viewed these images are fated to die at this exact hour one week from now. If you do not wish to die, you must follow these instructions exactly …
And then the scene changed entirely. Instead of the prescribed method for avoiding certain death, the screen now showed a common television commercial for mosquito coils. The ad ended and the previous eerieness returned, or rather, the memory of it.
At the end of this series of bizarre visions, Asakawa had managed to understand exactly two things. First, whoever watched this tape was doomed to die in exactly a week. And, second, there was a way to avoid this fate, but it had been deliberately recorded over. The four kids who’d watched the video first had erased it in a fit of malice or mischief. It was all Asakawa could do to slip the tape into his bag and flee cabin B-4.
Ando took a deep breath and lay the manuscript aside.
Holy shit.
In his report Asakawa had given a painstakingly elaborate account of the strange twenty minutes of images on the tape. He’d made every effort to recreate, using only words, what the video conveyed directly through sound and visuals, and he’d largely succeeded. The scenes still swirled around in Ando’s mind, as vividly as if he’d seen and heard them himself. He sighed again, suddenly exhausted. Or maybe it wasn’t fatigue. Perhaps it was that he now felt Asakawa’s fear as his own, and wanted somehow to push it away.
But even a moment’s pause only whetted his desire to know more. Taking a sip of tea, he picked up the next page of the report, and started reading ahead, even faster than before.
The first thing Asakawa did upon returning to Tokyo was to call Ryuji Takayama and tell him what had happened. Asakawa had neither the time nor the courage to solve this thing alone. He needed a reliable partner, and so naturally his thoughts turned to Ryuji, whom he’d known since high school. He also approached Yoshino, but Yoshino refused to watch the video. Regardless of whether or not he actually believed in it, if there was even a slim chance that calamity would befall him as a result of watching the video, he wanted to avoid doing so.
But not Ryuji. As soon as he heard about this video that’d kill in a week’s time anyone who watched it, the first words out of his mouth were, First let’s have a look at this video.
So Ryuji watched the video in Asakawa’s apartment, fascinated. And when it was over he asked Asakawa to make him a copy.
The word “copy” made Ando sit up and take notice. Now he thought he could figure out the route the tape had traveled. The original tape from Villa Log Cabin had most likely stayed in Asakawa’s possession. It had been in the VCR in Asakawa’s car at the time of the wreck, had passed to Asakawa’s brother Junichiro, and been thrown away. There was one more tape, the one in Mai’s apartment, the one with only the very beginning remaining. This was probably the copy Asakawa had made for Ryuji that first night. It had a title on the label, written in thick letters in a man’s hand. It was probably Asakawa’s handwriting. When Ryuji had asked Asakawa to make him a copy, instead of using a brand-new tape, Asakawa had recycled an old tape on which he’d originally recorded a music program. This had passed through Ryuji’s hands into Mai’s. That much made sense. But when had Mai received it? Mai had never mentioned having the tape to Ando. Which meant, Ando supposed, that she’d come across it by chance, several days after Ryuji’s death, and watched it not knowing it was dangerous.
In any case, the tape had been replicated in Asakawa’s apartment. Ando felt he needed to keep that in mind.
So Ryuji took the copy of the tape back to his apartment and started working on figuring out the erased message (he and Asakawa called this “the charm”). Both men wondered what this weird recording was doing in Villa Log Cabin B-4. At first they thought that it had been shot with a video camera and then left there, but that turned out not to be the case. Three days before the unfortunate youths, a family had stayed in B-4: they’d put a tape in the VCR and set it to RECORD. They’d then forgotten about it and left it there when they went home. So the images on the tape had not been shot elsewhere and the tape brought to the cabin: rather, some sort of unknown transmission had been captured on the tape when the machine was recording. The next people on the scene had been the four young victims. With time on their hands, they’d decided to watch a video; when they went to turn on the VCR, out popped a tape. They’d watched it. The threat at the end must have amused them. Like we’re really going to die in a week if we don’t do what it says? So they decided to play a trick by erasing the solution; that should scare the next guests. Of course, the kids never really believed in the tape’s curse. If they had, they never could have pulled such a stunt. In any case, the tape was found the next day by the manager, who put it on the shelf in the office, where it stayed unnoticed by anyone until Asakawa’s arrival.
So: how had those images gotten into the deck while it was recording? It occurred to Asakawa that some maniac might have hijacked the airwaves, so he tried to pinpoint the source of such a broadcast. Meanwhile, when Asakawa was out of the house his wife and daughter found the video still in the VCR and watched it. Now Asakawa was urged on by the desire to save not only his own life, but also those of his family.
Then Ryuji made a startling discovery. Watching the tape over and over at home, he had a flash of inspiration. He made a chart and found that the tape could be broken down into twelve scenes, which fell int
o two groups: abstract scenes that seemed to consist of what might be called mental imagery, and real scenes that seemed to have been seen through an actual pair of eyes. For example, the volcanic eruption and the man’s face were clearly things that had really been seen, while the firefly-like light in the darkness at the beginning of the tape looked like something conjured up by the mind—like something out of a dream. So Ryuji called the two groups “real” and “abstract”, for comparison’s sake. Upon further investigation, he noticed that in the “real” scenes, there were instants in which the screen was covered by what looked like a black veil, just for a split second. In the “real” scenes, these instants occurred at the rate of about fifteen per minute, while in the “abstract” scenes, they didn’t appear at all. What did this mean? Ryuji concluded that the black veil was in reality a blink. It appeared in the scenes that were seen with actual eyes, and not in the sequences that were only seen in the mind’s eye. Not only that, the frequency of the blackouts matched the average eye-blinking frequency of a female. It seemed safe, then, to consider them eyeblinks. Which led naturally to the conclusion that the images on the videotape had not been captured by exposure in a video camera, but rather taken from the vision and imagination of an individual and placed on the tape by thought-projection.
Ando had real trouble believing this part. The idea that a person could mentally imprint images onto a videotape was simply preposterous. He might be willing, just barely, to allow the possibility of mentally imprinting photographic film, but moving images? That was an entirely different set-up, first of all. In order to press on, Ando had to lay this point aside for the moment, even as he admired Ryuji’s perspicacity.
Assuming that someone had recorded the tape paranormally, the next question was: who? Asakawa and Ryuji concentrated on that point, heading to the Tetsuzo Miura Memorial Hall in Kamakura. A researcher into parapsychological phenomena, Miura had devoted his life to tracking down paranormals from all over Japan. The files containing his findings were now housed in his memorial. The two men got permission to examine those files, over a thousand in number, thinking that a psychic with powers strong enough to project moving images onto a videotape couldn’t have escaped Professor Miura’s notice. And, after several hours of searching, they’d found a likely candidate.
Her name was Sadako Yamamura. She’d been born in the town of Sashikiji, on Izu Oshima Island.
According to an entry in her file, at the age of ten she was already able to project the characters yama (mountain) and sada, elements from her name, onto a piece of film. These very characters had appeared on the video. Certain that this Sadako Yamamura was who they were looking for, Ryuji and Asakawa boarded a boat for Izu Oshima the next morning. They hoped that learning more about her upbringing and personality would illuminate some of the secrets of the videotape. Sadako was threatening whoever looked at her images with death in order to get the viewer to do something. The tape itself embodied her wish for that action to be undertaken. Which made it crucial that they find out what Sadako desired. At this point, Ryuji already had an inkling that Sadako Yamamura was no longer alive. It was his belief that on the brink of death she’d unleashed her final, unfulfilled desire in the form of a psychic projection, meaning to relay her wish to someone else. Her deepseated hatred had ended up on the videotape.
Between the assistance of the Oshima stringer for the Daily News and the help of Yoshino in Tokyo, with whom they stayed in frequent contact, Asakawa and Ryuji managed to piece together a profile of Sadako Yamamura.
She was born in 1947, the daughter of Shizuko Yamamura, a one-time paranormal who had made a big but temporary splash in the national media, and Heihachiro Ikuma, an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Taido University who had gotten into research on parapsychology with Shizuko as his subject. At first, the trio of Ikuma, Shizuko, and Sadako had been received by the public with simple curiosity, and in fact had become media darlings after a fashion. But once a certain prestigious academic society had pronounced Shizuko’s powers fake, the masses turned on them, and they became subject to violent attacks in the media. Heihachiro was hounded out of the university, and eventually came down with tuberculosis, while Shizuko suffered nervous attacks and finally threw herself into Mt Mihara, the volcano on Izu Oshima.
Sadako was taken in by some relatives on the island, where she lived until she graduated from high school. Once in fourth grade she gained some notoriety within the school by predicting an eruption of Mt Mihara, but aside from that she didn’t display any of the powers she’d inherited from her mother. On leaving high school she moved to Tokyo, where she joined a theater troupe in hopes of making it as an actress. It was Yoshino who picked up her trail from there.
Asakawa called Yoshino from the island and asked him to find the troupe’s rehearsal space in Yotsuya, Tokyo. He did, and once there, he found out more about Sadako’s true nature from a man named Arima, a leader of the troupe. It had been twenty-five years since Sadako had been a member of his company, but he recalled her very well. She seemed to have some sort of supernatural power; she could project images at will onto the screen of an unplugged television. If this was true, then Sadako’s powers far outstripped her mother’s. While at the rehearsal space, Yoshino succeeded in obtaining a photo of Sadako. They still had her resume on file, and it contained two black-and-white photos from when she joined. One was from the waist up, while the other was a full-length shot. Both revealed Sadako to have perfectly balanced features that went beyond even the word “beautiful”.
Yoshino was unable to determine what became of Sadako after she left the theater troupe, so he faxed the photos and the other information he’d gathered to Asakawa at the Daily News’s Izu Oshima bureau.
When he read the fax and found out that Sadako’s trail had gone cold, Asakawa was devastated. If they couldn’t find her, how could they hope to figure out the charm?
Once again it was Ryuji who had a flash of inspiration. He realized that it might not be necessary to follow Sadako’s every move. Instead, maybe they should turn their attention to the scene—Villa Log Cabin No. B-4—and try to figure out why the images had shown up there. She had to have some sort of connection with the place.
They realized that all of the buildings at South Hakone Pacific Land were new. It wasn’t impossible that something else had once stood there. Asakawa contacted Yoshino in Tokyo and asked him to try a new line of investigation: find out what had occupied that ground before the resort.
Yoshino faxed him the next morning. It turned out that there had once been a tuberculosis sanatorium on the site. He even managed to send them a plan of the facility’s layout. He also attached a file with the name, address, and resume of one Jotaro Nagao, age 57, a GP and pediatrician with a practice in Atami. For a period of five years, from 1962 to 1967, he had worked at the South Hakone Sanatorium. The suggestion seemed to be that any further information about the sanatorium would best be gleaned from Nagao.
So, armed only with what they’d learned from Yoshino, Asakawa and Ryuji took a high-speed ferry for Atami. It was one week to the day since Asakawa had watched the video. If they didn’t figure out the “charm” by ten that evening, Asakawa would die. Ryuji’s deadline was ten o’clock the next night. And Asakawa’s wife and daughter’s time would be up at eleven on the morning after.
The two men climbed back into their rented car and headed off to find Dr Nagao’s office. Their hopes to gain even a tidbit of information from him were granted, in spades. When they finally came face to face with the doctor, both Asakawa and Ryuji recognized him. Near the end of the tape there was a part in which a man was seen from the waist up, panting and sweating, blood streaming from a gouge in his shoulder. Although he’d aged and lost some hair, Nagao was unmistakably that man. Sadako had seen his face up close. Not only that, in her “eyes” he was something wicked.
With typical brashness, Ryuji pressured Nagao until he confessed everything. He told them all about that hot summer afternoon twe
nty-five years ago …
Nagao had contracted smallpox from a patient while on a call to the sanatorium’s isolation ward in the mountains, and that afternoon, the early symptoms of the illness were starting to show. But in spite of his headache and fever, he didn’t recognize at first that he had smallpox, and went on treating tuberculosis patients as usual. He thought it was simply a cold. Then he met Sadako Yamamura in the courtyard. She often came to the sanatorium to visit her father, who was a patient there. Having just left the theater troupe, Sadako had nowhere else to go, and she was often up to see her father.
One glance at Sadako and Nagao was overwhelmed by her beauty. He approached her and they began to talk, and then, as if guided by something beyond himself, he took her to an abandoned house deep in the woods. There, in front of an old well, he raped her. It was then that Sadako, in her desperate attempts to resist him, bit his shoulder. Between the bleeding and his feverish delirium, it took him some time to notice Sadako’s uniqueness. She had testicular feminization syndrome, an extremely rare condition in which one had both male and female genitalia. A person with this syndrome usually has breasts and a vagina but lacks a uterus and fallopian tubes. Externally, the person would appear quite female, but chromosomally would be XY—a male—and unable to bear children.
Nagao strangled Sadako and threw her body in the well. He then threw rocks into the well after her.
After hearing out Nagao’s confession, Asakawa showed him the plan of the resort and asked the doctor to show him on the map the location of the well. Nagao was able to indicate the general area—namely, where Villa Log Cabin was located now. Asakawa and Ryuji immediately sped off to Pacific Land.
Once there, they began to search for the well in the vicinity of the cabins. They found it beneath cabin B-4. The cabin stood on a gentle slope, and when they investigated the space beneath the porch they saw the rim of an old well, covered with a concrete lid. If Sadako’s hatred had radiated straight up out of the well, it would have run smack into the TV and VCR in the cabin above. The videotape was in the perfect position to pick up her psychic projections.
