by Kōji Suzuki
Miyashita slapped his knee and stood up. “Let’s go, then.”
“Where are we going?”
“It’s obvious, isn’t it? Your place.”
“I told you already. Sadako’s there.”
“That’s why we’re going. We’re going to confront her.”
“Now, just hold on a minute,” Ando recoiled. He’d come here to get away from Sadako. It was going to take a lot to get him to go back.
“We don’t have time to fart around like this. Don’t you understand how deep we’re into this?”
Ando did understand. It was obvious that something had to happen to him because he’d read Ring. But he didn’t care anymore. He wasn’t afraid of death, not particularly. He’d been quite afraid of death while his son was alive and his wife had loved him, but not now.
Miyashita hooked a hand under Ando’s arm and tried to wrestle him to his feet. “Get a move on. This might be our last chance.”
“Chance?”
“Listen, Sadako came to you and entered your apartment of her own free will.”
“Well, yes.”
“She must have had a reason.”
“What reason?”
“How the hell should I know? Maybe she wants you to do something for her.”
Now Ando remembered. She’d said something along those lines the second time he met her.
I’ll call on you soon with a request.
As Miyashita dragged him out of the study, Ando was thinking that he had no idea what kind of request she might have for him, and that he didn’t really care to find out.
8
They parked the car on a street that went by Yoyogi Park. As they climbed out onto the sidewalk, Ando and Miyashita looked up at the apartment building. Ando’s windows were dark. It had been well over three hours since he’d burst out of there, chest heaving. It was now nearly one in the morning.
Miyashita lowered his voice and asked, “Hey, are you sure the bitch is in there?” His use of the word “bitch” sounded forced. Ando figured Miyashita was trying to steel himself against the upcoming encounter.
“Maybe she’s asleep.”
The room seemed quiet, but there was no way to tell from the outside if she was still in there.
“Hey, do the living dead need to sleep?” Miyashita was sarcastically driving at the strangeness of Sadako awakening from a long slumber just to doze off in a place like this.
The two men stood on the empty sidewalk staring up at the fourth-floor windows for a while. Then Miyashita, with a show of fighting spirit, said, “Let’s go,” and barged on ahead. Ando followed meekly behind. The silence and cold of the night pierced him to the marrow, and he didn’t think he could bear standing on the sidewalk much longer. Perhaps, if it had been warmer, he would have been even less willing to go back into his apartment.
Urged on by Miyashita, Ando braced himself and turned the doorknob. It hadn’t been locked from the inside. The door opened easily. The place seemed to be empty. The pumps were gone from the concrete floor of the vestibule, as was Sadako’s only possession, a small Boston bag. Ando remembered seeing it sitting unceremoniously in the vestibule when he fled.
Ando led the way into the apartment and flipped on the lights. The place was indeed empty.
The thread of his tension severed, Ando collapsed limply onto his bed. Miyashita, though, kept his senses sharp, peering into the bathroom and out at the balcony.
Finally, having searched the place meticulously, he was convinced. “I think she’s gone.”
“I wonder where she went,” Ando mumbled. But in reality, he couldn’t care less where she’d gone. He never wanted to have anything to do with her again.
“Any ideas?” asked Miyashita.
Ando immediately shook his head. “Nope,” he said. It was then that he noticed it. On the desk by the window, a notebook had been left open. Ando couldn’t remember using a notebook there for some time.
He got to his feet and picked it up. Several pages had been filled with sloppy writing. The first line said, Dear Mr Ando, and at the end it was signed Sadako Yamamura. She’d left him a note.
Ando read the opening sentence silently to himself, and then handed the notebook to Miyashita.
“What’s this?”
“A message from Sadako.”
Miyashita let out a gasp as he took the notebook from Ando. Though he hadn’t been asked to, he read it aloud.
Dear Mr Ando,
As I do not wish to startle you any further, I have decided to leave you a letter. It’s rather an old-fashioned thing to do, I know. Please try to remain calm as you read it.
Surely you’ve figured out by now where I came from. I borrowed the womb of a woman named Mai Takano in order to effect my rebirth into this world. I am perplexed myself as to the exact mechanism by which I was able to come back to life.
My father was an assistant professor of medicine at a university, and he often used to speak to me about heredity when I visited him at the South Hakone Sanatorium where he was a patient. As a result, I know a little about genetics. It may be just a hunch, but I wonder if perhaps, using my psychic powers, I was able to imprint my genetic information onto something. Thinking about it now, I am quite sure that on the verge of death I willed my genetic information to remain intact in some form or other. What I felt was not so much a desire to be reborn as an unbearable revulsion at the thought that Sadako Yamamura and everything she represented would rot away at the bottom of that well, unbeknownst to anyone. What happened to me as a result is something that no doubt you, as a specialist, are better qualified to explain than I.
My psyche, that which had died in that well, gradually took shape again within that woman. When I regained self-awareness, what I saw in the mirror was not my own face. At first, I did not understand what had happened. My face and my body were not my own; they belonged to another woman. But the “me” that was thinking that was indeed the true me. The city, too, looked unfamiliar. The cars lining the streets were so modern. The apartment (that tiny concrete box), the appliances, the electronics. When I looked at the calendar I found that twenty-five years had passed in the blink of an eye. I realized that somehow my spirit must have escaped my corpse and then taken up a new body twenty-five years later. The poor girl whose body I stole was Mai Takano.
My consciousness was not born when Mai gave birth to me. A seed named Sadako was already putting forth buds in the depths of Mai’s womb. As I grew, it grew, taking up residence within Mai, the master of that body. By the time I was ready to be born I ruled Mai completely from my place in her womb.
I was able to see things from two perspectives, mother and fetus, and touch and feel accordingly. With my little hands I was able to touch the soft folds of my own oviducts, feel them undulating like waves.
As my birth approached, one thing began to bother me. After I was born, what would become of the Mai-body? Would Mai’s soul return, would that body go back to wholeness as Mai Takano? Somehow I thought not. I had come to think of that borrowed body as my chrysalis. Just as the chrysalis cannot live by itself after the butterfly has grown, the body had to be discarded, having outlived its usefulness. It might have been a self-serving conclusion, but I felt that Mai had already died when her body had been usurped.
The question then became, where should I be born? If she bore me in her room, I would be faced with the need to dispose of her decomposing corpse. Judging from how rapidly my fetus had developed, I thought it would not be long before I reached maturity, and I would need a place to live. Mai’s apartment seemed the most sensible choice.
This meant that I had no other choice but to be born somewhere out of sight of the neighbors, someplace where I could leave behind the husk and return to the apartment alone. That rooftop was made to order. If I left the husk in the exhaust shaft, it would be some time before it was discovered, and in the meantime I could use Mai’s apartment freely.
As our time approached, I made preparations and went up
to the roof in the middle of the night. I tied a cord to the metal grate and descended into the shaft. In the process I slipped and wrenched an ankle, but this did not bother the mother-body. I was able to be reborn into this world on schedule. I crawled out of the womb, severed the umbilical cord with my hands and mouth, and cleaned myself off with a wet towel I had readied for the purpose. I was born in the early morning, before sunrise. It was only then when I looked up that I first realized, with a shock, that the exhaust shaft looked quite like the well where I had died.
It was like a rite of passage prepared for me by the gods. I thought of it as a divinely appointed trial; I would not be able to adapt to this world, into which I’d been newly reborn, unless I crawled out ofthat hole on my own. But it wasn’t hard to do. A cord hung down from the rim. I climbed it and was able to emerge from the hole with no difficulty. The eastern sky was growing light and the city was awakening with it. Let me tell you, I drank the air greedily. I felt, quite literally, revived.
A week later I had grown to the age I had been at my death. Mysteriously, I retained all my memories from my previous life. My birth in Sashikiji on Izu Oshima Island, my transient life with my mother as she was subjected to parapsychological experiments, my aged father’s time in the sanatorium … I remembered it all. Why is that, I wonder. Perhaps memories are not engraved upon the folds of the brain, but stored in the genes.
Deep within my body, however, there was one way in which I could tell I differed from my previous self. Intuition is all I have to go by regarding the changes in my body, but I know beyond a doubt that I am different from what I was before. I seem to have both a womb and testicles. Previously, I had no womb. Reborn, I have both. I am now a complete hermaphrodite. What is more, the man in me can ejaculate. I learned that as a result of what we did together.
At that point, Miyashita raised his eyes from the notebook and glanced at Ando. Thinking Miyashita meant to tease him about sleeping with Sadako, Ando snapped, “Shut up and keep reading.”
But Miyashita was thinking about something else. “‘A complete hermaphrodite.’ Suppose she—it, maybe?—can have a child without procreative sex? Imagine the consequences.”
There are many lower organisms that can reproduce without male-female union. Worms, for example, have male and female parts in one body, and can lay fertilized eggs. Reproduction among single-celled organisms by cellular division also falls under the heading of asexual reproduction. A child born without input from a male and a female would have the same genes as its single parent. In other words, Sadako would give birth to another Sadako. If such a thing were possible.
“If that’s true, then …” Ando’s gaze wandered uneasily off into space. “Then Sadako isn’t human anymore. She’s a new species. New species arise due to mutation. This is evolution happening before our eyes!”
Ando tried to pursue the train of logic. The question was how Sadako meant to establish herself as a new species. When a new species arises as a result of mutation, it can find only unmutated individuals to mate with.
For example, suppose a single black sheep is born into a flock of thousands of white sheep. That black sheep must mate with a white sheep. Assuming the result of this mating to be a white or gray sheep, it’s easy to see how the trait of blackness must become weaker and weaker until it gradually disappears. Unless there are at least two black sheep, one of each sex, the trait will not be passed on down the generations.
But in Sadako’s case, the problem was already solved. If she could reproduce asexually, there was no need for her to choose a breeding partner. If she could reproduce herself, all alone, then all the traits that made her Sadako would be transmitted to the next generation.
However, with one Sadako giving birth to another Sadako, one at a time, the species’ rate of increase would be extremely slow, no faster than the videotape’s propagation, one copy at a time. And while the species dallied, the human race might corner it and annihilate it. Just as the killer videotape itself had been made extinct. In order to thrive, the new species needed to reproduce itself rapidly and en masse. Sadako needed to secure room to survive, perhaps by usurping human habitats, perhaps by flooding in through the cracks. Perhaps she already had a plan …
Ando’s thoughts were interrupted when Miyashita resumed reading from the notebook.
This has become rather a long letter, but I assure you that every word of it is true. I have simply told you honestly what happened to me. Why have I? So that you may understand. And now that you do understand, I would like to ask you to do something for me. Why you? Because I believe you, as an expert, have the expert knowledge that will be required.
Ando braced himself reflexively. Oh God, here it comes. What if it was something he didn’t know how to do? The thought filled him with anxiety.
First things first: I want you not to interfere with the publication of Ring.
Well, that was certainly within the scope of his abilities. All he had to do was do nothing.
I want you not to interfere with anything else I may try to do, either. I want you to cooperate with me.
Please listen to me. It is not my intention to threaten you, but I must tell you that something very bad will happen to you if you interfere. After all, you have already read the manuscript called Ring. Consider it too late, please, to do anything. If you cross me, you will find a change coming over your body. But I realize that you are courageous and may be willing to resist me even at the risk of death. So I think I must offer you a reward for granting my request. Nothing is free, is it? What would you say if I told you that I could offer you the thing you want most, namely …
Miyashita stopped reading and handed the notebook to Ando, evidently wanting him to see for himself what came next.
No sooner did Ando read what was written there than he dropped the notebook. In an instant he’d been robbed of the power to think; all strength had been sapped from his body. He’d never dreamed she would offer such a thing. Miyashita must have guessed how he was feeling, and he made no comment.
Ando’s eyes were shut. Sadako, he felt, was whispering sweetly to him that he should destroy the human race. That he should take the side of the new species, become its ally, and work on its behalf. Sadako understood that without collaborators among humans, her species could never survive. Junichiro Asakawa, through his efforts to publish Ring, was already acting on Sadako’s behalf. He probably didn’t yet realize it himself, but there was no question Sadako was manipulating him.
But the compensation Ando was being offered in exchange for his soul was more than enticing. How many times had he prayed for that dream to come true? Never thinking that it actually could.
Is such a thing possible? he asked himself. He opened his eyes and looked at the bookshelf. There it was, in an envelope sandwiched between two books. Medically, it wasn’t impossible. And with Sadako’s help, it might actually happen. Still …
He raised his voice in a cry of anguish. If Sadako wasn’t stopped now, there was no telling what suffering she’d bring to the human race. As a member of that race, Ando couldn’t betray it. In the end the only way to stop Sadako was to destroy her. But if her body was obliterated, his dream would be, too. The only way to make his dream come true was to keep Sadako safe and healthy.
Ando was openly groaning now from the depths of his torment. As he lay on the bed, belly heaving, he saw a figure behind his closed eyelids, a figure that he could not chase away.
“What should I do?” Ando wept. He was incapable of coming to a decision on his own.
“That’s your problem,” Miyashita said—not cruelly, but with calm self-possession.
“But I don’t know what I should do.”
“Think about it. If we get in Sadako’s way, you and I, we’ll be killed on the spot. She’ll just find someone else to assist her, that’s all.”
Miyashita was probably right. Everything was clear when he thought about it coolly. Ando’s meeting up with Sadako had not been pure chance. Sh
e’d been watching him. None of it was accident, not his brush with her in Mai’s apartment, not his rooftop encounter with her, not their meeting at Sangubashi Station. She’d foreseen that Ando would ferret out the truth, and she’d made her moves. Suddenly, Ando felt it was simply impossible to outmaneuver Sadako. All he had to do was make one false move and the ring virus in his body would start to wreak havoc on him.
Miyashita had seen this immediately and drawn the obvious conclusion, but Ando still couldn’t quite make up his mind.
“Are you saying I should cooperate with her?”
“What else can you do?”
“What about humanity?”
“Come on, stop acting like you’re a delegate for the whole species. Besides, you’ve already decided, haven’t you? Consider the reward, for God’s sake. Are you telling me you mean to pass it up?”
“But it’s not fair. What do you get out of it?”
“I’ll consider it a sort of insurance policy. One day I might be glad I had it, you know. We’ve no idea what life has in store for us.”
Ando realized he was cornered, snared. Decades from now, he would be in the history books, and not as a hero. He’d be remembered as the traitor thanks to whom the human race was driven to the brink of extinction. That was, of course, if there was still a human race to remember him. If the species ended, so did its history.
Why did I ever get involved in the first place?
Remorsefully, Ando thought back to how it had all begun for him. How could he forget it? There had been Ryuji’s autopsy, and then the code, RING. It was meant to inform Ando of the existence of a report, Ring. He’d read that report. If he hadn’t read it, he wouldn’t be in this mess now. If only he hadn’t read it …
Something interrupted Ando’s reflections. A thought. There was something else going on here.
“Ryuji,” he muttered. Miyashita gave him a worried look. Ando paid no attention, though, as he pursued this new line of reasoning. He was beginning to think he saw a will at work behind all the events he’d accepted as random. Had Ryuji really sent him the words “ring” and “mutation” in code out of pure goodwill? Just to tell Ando to pay attention? Ando began to doubt that. He began to see those hints as course corrections, delivered at moments when Ando seemed about to get off track. Why had Ryuji done such a thing?
