by Kōji Suzuki
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 into 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 hi
m 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 twenty-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.
Asakawa and Ryuji broke a few boards, crawled under the cabin, pried the lid off the well, and set about the task of finding Sadako's remains. That's what both Asakawa and Ryuji now interpreted the missing "charm" to be: Sadako wanted whoever watched the videotape to release her from that cramped, dark space. The two men took turns descending into the well and scooping water out of the bottom of it with buckets. And when they finally, thankfully, fished from the mud a skull that they took to be Sadako's, it was already after ten o'clock. Asakawa's deadline had come and gone, and he wasn't dead. They were satisfied that they'd figured out the secret of the videotape.
After that, Asakawa took Sadako's remains back to Izu Oshima, while Ryuji returned to his apartment in Tokyo to work on an article. The case had been put to rest. The bones of Sadako Yamamura, possessor of fearsome psychic powers, had been rescued from the depths of the earth. She had been appeased. Neither Asakawa nor Ryuji had any doubt about that.
11
Having read that far, Ando now stood up, still holding the report, and opened the window. Imagining climbing down a rope into a well had given him the feeling that he was suffocating. It was a doubly restricted space; under the cabin it would be dark even in the daytime, and then there was the well, not even a yard across. It gave him a flash of claustrophobia; he had to breathe outside air. Directly beneath his window he could see the dark woods of Meiji Shrine swaying in the breeze. The pages in his hand fluttered too, stirred by the same current of air. The last page of the manuscript was in the printer now. One more page and Asakawa's account would be finished. Ando heard the sound of the printer finishing its task. He glanced back at the word processor only to find a mostly blank piece of paper staring back at him.
He picked up the final page. It said:
Sunday, October 21
The nature of a virus is to reproduce itself.
The charm: make a copy of the video.
And that was all. But it had to be of the utmost importance.
October 21 st was the day of Asakawa's accident. The previous morning, Ando had dissected Ryuji's body and met Mai at the medical examiner's office. Although the manuscript ended abruptly, Ando could more or less fill in the rest himself.
On October 19th, Sadako Yamamura's remains had been delivered into the custody of her relatives back home. But that hadn't been the end of things after all. Even as Asakawa sat in a hotel on Oshima composing his detailed report, Ryuji was dying in his apartment in East Nakano. Upon returning to Tokyo and learning of Ryuji's death, Asakawa had rushed to Ryuji's apartment. There he'd encountered Mai Takano and peppered her with what seemed to her strangely inappropriate questions.
Ryuji really didn 't tell you anything at the end? Nothing, s
ay, about a videotape?
It was easy to see why Asakawa had been in a panic. He'd been convinced that he'd escaped death by figuring out the riddle of the videotape, and now he'd found out he was wrong. The curse still lived. And Asakawa was left without a clue. Why was Ryuji dead and Asakawa alive? Not only that, Asakawa's wife and child had a deadline of their own coming, at eleven the next morning. So Asakawa had to figure out the charm all over again, alone this time and with only a few hours to do it in. Logically, he realized that whatever it was the videotape had wanted him to do, he must have done it at some point in the past week without realizing it. Something that he could be sure Ryuji hadn't done. What could it be? Perhaps he spent the whole night wondering. And then finally, on the morning of the twenty-first, he'd had a spark of intuition, maybe, and hit upon what he was sure was the solution. He'd made a quick note of it on his word processor.
Sunday, October 21
The nature of a virus is to reproduce itself.
The charm: make a copy of the video.
What Asakawa meant here had to be none other than the smallpox virus. Just before her death, Sadako Yamamura had had physical relations with the last smallpox victim in Japan, Jotaro Nagao. It was natural to assume that the virus had invaded her body. Driven to the brink of extinction, the smallpox virus had borrowed Sadako's extraordinary power to accomplish the purpose of its existence, which was to reproduce itself. But once it took the form of a videotape, the virus couldn't" reproduce on its own. It had to work through human beings, forcing them to make copies of it. If one were to fill in the missing part at the end of the tape, it would run like this:
