by Kōji Suzuki
The road grew narrower and steeper as it wound between farmers' fields. The surface of the road was in such poor condition that it was difficult to believe it led to a resort. Unpruned branches and desiccated weeds brushed against the car on both sides, and the sound was unpleasant. The higher they climbed, the stronger Ando's sense of deja vu became. He'd never been this way before, and yet he could swear that wasn't so.
"Does all this seem familiar to you?" Ando asked in a low voice.
"I was just about to ask you the same question."
So Miyashita felt the same way. Of course, Ando had felt deja vu any number of times, but the sensation had never gone on this long before. And it was only growing stronger as they drove on. Ando could clearly picture the information center that awaited them at the end of the road, an elegant three-story building with a facade of black glass.
They pulled into a circular driveway leading to the parking lot, and a building came into view. It was the information center, just as Ando had imagined it. He could even picture the restaurant beyond the lobby. There was no need for further confirmation. Reading Ring had delivered this scenery to Ando and Miyashita with perfect fidelity. What other explanation was there?
2
A good while later, Miyashita drove down from the mountains past Atami and took the Manazuru Road along the coast toward Odawara. Conversation kept lapsing as each man contemplated the things they'd just seen, the people they'd just met. Ando was too busy worrying about what the day's drive had proved to even glance at the sublime winter sea out the window. The resort, and the cabin with the well under the floorboards, overlay the waves like a mirage; Ando could still smell the dirt. He kept thinking of the man whose face he had recognized.
The various facilities that made up Pacific Land were scattered along both sides of the road between the information center and the hotel. The tennis courts, the pool, the gym, the cottages, everything was built on an incline, whether on the mountainside or in the valley. The slope on which the log cabins stood was actually a comparatively gentle one. Standing on the bank of the road and looking down over the valley where the cabins stood interspersed, they could see far below them a seemingly endless series of greenhouses, in the area between Kannami and Nirayama. Their white roofs flashed in the winter afternoon light. Each and every one of them looked familiar to the two men.
They went down to cabin B-4. They tried the doorknob, but the door was locked, so they went around the back, under the balcony. When they crouched down they could see at a glance the gaping hole where wall boards had come off between two pillars. The hole seemed to have been made deliberately, and they knew by whom. Ryuji had removed the boards so he could pass through. On October 18th, he and Asakawa had crawled through that hole to the space under the cabin, and then climbed down a rope into a well to fish out Sadako Yamamura's bones. A hair-raising feat.
Miyashita retrieved the flashlight he kept in his car and shone it into the space beneath the floorboards. Immediately they found a black protrusion, in more or less the center. The top of the well. A concrete lid lay next to it. Exactly as Ring said.
Ando had no desire to crawl in there and peer into the well, just as he'd had no desire to look into the exhaust shaft where Mai's corpse had been discovered. He had come close but in the end hadn't found the courage to look in. A young woman called Sadako had been thrown into the well, to end her life staring at a small circle of sky. Mai had breathed her last at the bottom of a rectangular prism made of concrete. One died in an old well at the edge of a mountainside sanatorium, and the other on the roof of a waterfront office building. One died deep in hushed woods, where branches hemming in from all sides nearly obstructed the view of the sky, and the other by a harbor road where the sea smelled strong, with nothing at all between her and the sky. One died in a barrel-shaped coffin sunk deep in the earth, and the other in a box-shaped coffin that floated high. The peculiar contrasts between the places Sadako and Mai had died only served to highlight their essential similarity.
Suddenly Ando's heart was racing. He detested the damp air beneath the floorboards, the feel of the ground beneath his hands and knees. The smell of soil filled his nostrils until, without his realizing, he was holding his breath. He felt like he was going to suffocate.
Whereas Ando was ready to bolt from the hole, Miyashita was trying to force his fat body into the space under the floorboards. Ando feared that he meant to go all the way to the well, and said, sternly: "Hey, that's far enough."
Miyashita hesitated for a moment in his awkward position. "I guess you have a point," he ceded. Obeying Ando, he started to back out of the hole. They had indeed gone far enough. What else was there to prove?
The two men crawled out from under the balcony and gulped lungfuls of the outside air. There was no need to speak. It was abundantly clear that every detail in Ring hewed to fact. They'd proved the hypothesis that the mental images created by the report were identical to the way things looked in reality. Everything was just where the text said it would be. By virtue of having read Ring, Ando and Miyashita had already "seen" the place. From the smell of the air to the feel of the dirt beneath their feet, they had experienced everything as Asakawa had.
Yet Miyashita didn't seem quite satisfied. "As long as we've come this far, why don't we have a look at Jotaro Nagao?"
Jotaro Nagao. The name had almost slipped Ando's mind, but he could remember the man's face clearly without ever having met him outside the pages of Ring. He was bald, and his handsome face was of a healthy hue that belied his fifty-seven years. Overall he made a first impression of smoothness, and that was true also of his speech. For some reason Ando even knew how Nagao sounded when he talked.
Twenty years ago, there had been a tuberculosis sanatorium on the ground where Pacific Land now stood. Although Nagao had a private practice in Atami now, he had once worked at the sanatorium. When Sadako Yamamura had come to visit her father, Nagao had raped her and thrown her into the well. Nagao had also been Japan's last smallpox patient.
In Ring it was written, "In a lane in front of Kinomiya Station was a small, one-story house with a shingle by the door that read Nagao Clinic-Internal Medicine and Pediatrics." Upon reaching the place, Ryuji, always true to form, had throttled the doctor until he confessed what he'd done a quarter century ago. Miyashita was proposing they visit the clinic and see Nagao's face for themselves.
But when they got there, the curtain was pulled across the clinic's entrance. The place didn't seem to be closed just for the weekend; rather, the door looked like it hadn't been opened for quite some time. There was dust beneath it, and cobwebs on the eaves. The whole building hinted at extended, perhaps permanent, closure.
Ando and Miyashita gave up on the idea of meeting Nagao, and walked back to the curb where they'd left the car. Just then, they noticed a wheelchair coming down the steep road that descended from Atami National Hospital. A bald old man sat hunched over in the wheelchair, steered by a refined-looking woman of around thirty. From the way the old man's eyes lolled around looking at nothing in particular, it was clear that he had a psychiatric disorder.
When Ando and Miyashita saw his face they cried out as one and exchanged glances. Although he had aged terribly-twenty years, it seemed, in just three months-the man was instantly recognizable to them as Jotaro Nagao. Ando and Miyashita were able to remember what he had looked like and to compare that image with what they were seeing now.
Miyashita approached the man and spoke to him. "Dr Nagao."
The old man didn't respond, but the young woman attendant, who looked like she might have been his daughter, turned toward the voice. Her eyes met Miyashita's. He bowed slightly, and she bowed back.
"How's his health?" Miyashita promptly inquired with the air of an old acquaintance.
"Fine, thank you," she said, and hurried away with a put-upon expression. But the encounter hadn't been fruitless. Evidently, the interview with Asakawa and Ryuji that had forced the doctor to own up to quar
ter-century-old crimes had seriously unbalanced him. It was clear that Nagao had almost no consciousness of the outside world.
Father and daughter passed the clinic and entered a narrow road beyond it. Both Ando and Miyashita, as they watched him go, thought the same thing and it didn't exactly concern Nagao. They were ruminating over the way they'd both instantly recognized the old man in the wheelchair as the one-time clinician. Ring, it seemed, had "recorded" not only scenery but people's faces with absolute fidelity.
Ando looked at the sign for the Odawara-Atsugi Highway, and then at the face of his friend sitting next to him. Miyashita was showing signs of fatigue, and no wonder. He'd been gripping the steering wheel since morning.
"You can just drop me off at Odawara," said Ando.
Miyashita frowned and turned his head slightly toward Ando, as if to ask why. "Cut it out, buddy. You know I'd gladly drive you back to your apartment."
"It's such a detour. Look, if I get out at Odawara I can take the Odakyu Line straight home."
Ando was concerned about Miyashita. If he drove all the way in to Yoyogi to drop Ando off, and then back to Tsurumi where he lived, it would add miles to the drive. Miyashita was clearly exhausted, both physically and mentally, and Ando wanted him to just go home and rest.
"Well, since you insist, you shall be dropped off at Odawara!" Miyashita said it like he was indulging the odd whim of a friend, but no doubt he didn't mind not having to drive into Tokyo and out. He was always that way, hardly ever coming right out with a "Thankyou." He had trouble expressing gratitude in a straightforward manner.
They'd almost finished threading their way through downtown Odawara to the station when Miyashita muttered, "First thing next week, we'll get our blood tested.
Ando didn't need to ask why, since he'd been thinking the same thing. He had the nasty realization that he'd been transformed from an observer into a participant. All copies of the evil video had vanished, and he hadn't watched it. He was supposed to be safe, but now that he knew the Ring report had described absolutely everything with preternatural accuracy… He felt like a physician treating an AIDS patient who suddenly found himself infected via a previously unknown route of transmission. Of course, nothing at all had been proven; it was still only a possibility. Yet Ando cowered, for he felt now that his body had indeed been invaded by something. He'd been paralyzed for a good part of the day by the fantasy that something just like the ring virus he'd seen under the electron microscope was spreading through his body beneath the skin, coursing through his veins, violating his cells. No doubt Miyashita was tasting the same fear.
Aside from its author, Asakawa, Ando had been the first person to read Ring. The report described the images on the video minutely. It also described Jotaro Nagao so faithfully that Ando had been able to recognize him at a glance. Naturally, he had to wonder if reading Ring might not have the same effect as watching the videotape.
But he'd read it on November 19th of the past year. Two months had elapsed since then, and nothing had happened to him, at least as far as he could tell. He hadn't developed a blockage in the coronary artery and died in a week. Had the virus mutated so that the incubation period was longer? Or was he to be merely a carrier of the virus, one who did not display any symptoms himself?
Miyashita was right. They had to get their blood checked first thing next week back at the university. If the ring virus swarmed in them, too, they had to do something quick. Not that Ando had the slightest idea what.
"What do you plan on doing if you're ring-positive?" he asked dejectedly.
"Well, I won't just sit on my hands. I'll think of something to do." Miyashita spoke in clipped phrases. Ando thought he heard in his friend's voice overtones of fear even greater than his own. That was as it should be in that Miyashita had family to think of.
They entered the traffic circle in front of Odawara Station, went once around in the passenger-car lane, and then came to a stop. Ando got out of the car and saw Miyashita off with a wave.
We're in up to our necks now.
For the first time, Ando felt he truly understood what Asakawa had been through. In Ando's mind he and Miyashita started to blur into Asakawa and Ryuji. Ando corresponded to Asakawa, and Miyashita to Ryuji. Of course, from the physical point of view, and even in terms of personality, Ryuji and Miyashita weren't overly similar. It almost struck Ando as funny. But he was brought up short when he remembered that Asakawa and Ryuji were both dead. He'd cut open Ryuji himself.
He went through the ticket gate and into the station and sat down on a bench on the platform. The cold back of the bench against his spine, Ando wondered if that was what lying on the autopsy table felt like. If that was what it felt like to be dead. Sometimes it was worse to be in the dark, imagining terrors. He figured that in some ways, it was much more grueling to suspect you had cancer than to be told straight out that you did. The uncertainty was what made it so hard. Directly faced with a trial it was possible to endure it with some measure of equanimity. Something in man made being left hanging the worst. So was he infected, or wasn't he? For Ando, there was only one way to overcome the misery of the moment, and it was to persuade himself that his life was spent anyway. Regret at having let his son die could help him overcome his own attachment to life…
But as he sat there in the cold on the platform waiting for the Romance Car Express, Ando couldn't stem his shivering no matter what.
3
He settled himself in a seat on the Romance Car. Now he had nothing to do but stare out the window at the scenery. Usually, he'd turn his attention to a book right about now, but he'd neglected to bring one. That morning as he'd climbed into Miyashita's car, he hadn't expected to return by train. Staring at the suburban landscape gradually made him drowsy, and he didn't fight it. He shut his eyes.
When he opened them again he didn't know where he was. His pulse quickened with the unease of having been carried off a great distance in his sleep. He thought he could hear his heart beat. He tried to stretch his legs and bumped them into the back of the seat ahead of him; his upper body jerked. He was jostled from beneath by the distinctive vibrations of a train, and he heard the clanging of a railway crossing in the distance.
I'm on a train.
With a sense of relief, Ando recalled that some two hours ago he'd said goodbye to Miyashita in Odawara, where he'd luckily managed to catch an express for Tokyo. That felt like days ago; it seemed like ages since he visited South Hakone Pacific Land with Miyashita. Hakone felt like some far-off land. Only the highland scenery and Jotaro Nagao's face remained vivid when he shut his eyes.
Ando rubbed his eyes with the backs of his hands and then looked out the window again. Nighttime street scenes flowed slowly past. The train was slowing down now as it approached its final destination, Shinjuku Station. Red lights flashed and bells clanged as they crossed streets. He strained his eyes to read the signs as they passed through a station without stopping.
Yoyogi Hachiman. The next station would be Sangubashi, his station. He wished he could just get off there, but the Romance Car Express was skipping all stops before the terminal. He'd have to get off there and get on another train coming back this way, to return two stops. What a pain.
At Yoyogi Hachiman the Odakyu Line tracks made a nearly ninety-degree swerve to run parallel to the dark woods of Yoyogi Park. The scenery was quite familiar to him. He couldn't see it from where he sat, but his apartment was just over to the right. As they rushed through the station he used every day, Ando pressed his face up against the window to his left and gazed at the platform.
With a start, he turned to press his face harder to the glass. He saw a woman he recognized standing on the platform. Wearing only a blazer, hardly dressed for a winter night, she stood at the edge of the platform, very close to the train as it rushed by, staring at the Romance Car with a nonchalant expression. Although the train was slowing down, figures on the platform flashed in and out of view in an instant. In that mere instant Ando's e
yes and the woman's had met. He wasn't imagining it; he could still feel the impact from that moment when their gazes locked.
This was the third time he'd encountered her. The first time, she'd emerged from Mai's apartment and shared the elevator with him. The second time had been on the top floor of the building where Mai's body had been discovered. The elevator door had opened and he'd found himself face to face with her. Though he'd only seen her twice, he remembered her face very clearly.
Ten minutes later, at Sangubashi, he got off an outbound train from Shinjuku. At Sangubashi Station, the inbound and outbound tracks were situated in the middle between the two platforms. When the outbound train stopped and he got off, another train was stationed on the inbound tracks. As a result, Ando's view of the other platform was totally blocked. He struggled against the current of passengers heading for the gates to stay where he was on the platform, waiting for the trains to depart so he could see if the woman was still there on the opposite platform. Though it had been ten minutes and perhaps his desire to see her again was confounding him, Ando was curiously sure she was still there.
