Ring

Koji Suzuki died recently. For those not aware, he’s the author of the Ring trilogy and Dark Water, and therefore has a strong claim to be the father of the “J-horror” boom that took over cinema in the 2000s, given that a movie adaptation of Ring was a huge hit in Japan and a remake of that movie was a huge hit internationally.

The Ring—the American remake—was a formative horror experience for me, and to this day it’s one of my all-time favourites. I freely confess that I still prefer it to the original; part of that may just be because it’s the first version I saw, but I also think the remake’s gloomy, oppressive atmosphere and use of surreal visuals gives it an extra layer of creepiness that the more grounded original lacks. Also, I think the decision to show the ghost girl’s face was the correct choice, an opinion I feel is justified by the Japanese sequels and their increasingly ridiculous insistence on having even pre-ghost Sadako covered by her long hair 24/7. The Japanese original is still a classic, but vibes + hair = better movie in my opinion.

Anyway, despite this decades-long fandom, I have never gone and read the novel that started it all, due to… well, some things I had heard about it from people who did read it, which I will go into later. With Suzuki’s recent death, it seemed like it was time to finally change that.

The basic plot of Ring, the novel, is similar in its broad strokes to Ring, the movie: after a journalist’s niece and her three friends drop dead of heart attacks at the same time, the journalist embarks on an investigation that leads them to a cursed VHS tape, which will kill anyone who watches it after seven days. Having fallen under the power of the curse, the journalist finds themselves in a desperate race against time to track down the origin of the tape.

In both movies, the protagonist is a woman; here in the source material, he’s a man named Asakawa. That’s not the only change that the movie made to the protagonist’s character: in addition to being a man, Asakawa is also kind of an asshole, a workaholic who doesn’t help his wife with their infant daughter and who thinks of his relationship with both of them in transactional and possessive terms. He also absolutely loses his shit over the curse in a far less dignified way than either the Japanese or American movie protagonists did, and develops a nasty temper at the same time to boot.

This is all part of the novel’s version of the story having a much seedier, sleazier edge to it that the adaptations sanded off. Another example is Asakawa’s partner in investigation, Ryuji: in the movie he’s the main character’s estranged husband, here he’s Asakawa’s high school friend.

Ryuji is a bit of a weirdo. Kind of quirky, you know? Kind of a weird little guy.

Also, he’s a rapist.

“Ryuji looked vaguely relieved. He put his arm around Asakawa’s shoulders and pulled Asakawa’s face close. He put his mouth to Asakawa’s ear and said, “You seem like you can keep a secret, like I can trust you. So I’ll tell you. As a matter of fact, at five o’clock this morning, I raped a woman.””

This isn’t one of the things I had heard about the book that made me stay away from it, so this plot point took me completely by surprise.

Now, okay, let’s unpack this. Ryuji raping women (he’s done it at least three times as of when the story takes place) isn’t just there for shock value. Like I said, Asakawa is kind of an asshole, and the fact that he’s still friends with Ryuji is very much intended to illustrate the fact that he’s an asshole. More importantly, a major element of the book that the movie only glances at is Asakawa grappling with how far he’s willing to go to save himself from the curse, and a big reason why he invites Ryuji into the investigation instead of anyone else is that he doesn’t think it would be a particularly bad thing if Ryuji died. So, this does have narrative and thematic utility. And the book suggests towards the end that his claims might be bullshit anyway, although there’s a lot of ambiguity.

At the same time, “one of the main characters is a serial rapist” is a pretty big speedbump to drop into the middle of your story, especially since I’m not at all convinced it was necessary. The book could have illustrated Ryuji’s amorality and twisted worldview any number of other ways, and in fact I think alluding to him having committed terrible deeds, but keeping their exact nature from the reader, probably would have been more effective. As it stands, this element of the story is just needlessly gross and feels like juvenile edglordiness (not that Suzuki had the “juvenile” excuse, he was 34 when this book came out).

Moving on from that delightful little plot nugget, there are some other big departures from the movie that surprised me (and I realise I’m writing this like the book was adapted from the movie instead of the other way around, but the movie versions are so ingrained in my mind that I can’t really help it), such as the centrality of the cursed tape in the plot.

In both versions of the movie, the cursed tape is the lynchpin of the story. Ask anyone what either one is about, and they’ll say it’s about a VHS tape that kills you if you watch it. Both movies open with the tape’s first on-screen victim discussing the urban legend surrounding it, and the tape is the initial thread in the investigation that the protagonist follows. It would not surprise me if a substantial number of people today know about Ring solely as “the movie about the tape that kills you” and aren’t aware of Sadako as a character. (This is the position I was in when I watched it, which is probably why it blew my adolescent mind so hard).

That’s not the case with the book. There is no urban legend around the tape, because Asakawa’s niece and her friends are the first people who have ever seen it, which means that Asakawa has no idea the tape is a thing initially, stumbling onto it completely by accident when he gets to the cabin that the teens stayed at prior to their deaths.

Also, the spooky imagery on it is kind of shit, but I’ll address that more later.

This all sounds fairly minor, and it is, but it gets to a major weakness of Ring the book compared to Ring the movie, which is that its plot is a lot sloppier than any of the adaptations it was made into. I suspect that the movie made the cursed tape such a central part of the story for more than just marketing value: it provides an elegant throughline for the plot, allowing the protagonist to move smoothly from the initial urban legend to the tape itself and then on to Sadako via the tape’s contents. When the protagonist of the movie watches the tape, her “oh shit I shouldn’t have done that, this is serious” reaction immediately makes sense, because she’s been investigating The Tape That Makes You Dead from the beginning; by contrast, Asakawa’s immediate, iron-clad conviction that the tape is the curse vector and he’s just doomed himself comes across as kind of ridiculous, especially since the book doesn’t feature any of the related supernatural phenomena that the movie’s victims suffer.

Ring is at its core a detective story, and seen in that light, the book is not a satisfying one. Asakawa actually finds very little of the clues involved in the investigation, mostly because he’s too busy panicking to think very clearly about anything. Instead, Ryuji comes up with most of the important deductions, and the legwork of looking into Sadako’s history falls to one of Asakawa’s colleagues (who the book clumsily transitions into the POV of for a chapter). Asakawa, our ostensible main character, is thus reduced to a sweaty, permanently-hysterical Watson who Sherlock Rapist can bounce ideas off of.

This might have worked okay if Asakawa had any sort of character arc or interiority, but he really doesn’t, beyond not wanting to die and frequently panicking about the idea of dying. Even when he learns that his wife and daughter have watched the tape, he doesn’t think about it nearly as much as I’d expect, as though the book can’t be bothered to incorporate the event into his psychology. I can see why the movie turned Ryuji into the protagonist’s ex-husband, as it gives the two characters some interpersonal conflict and drama to liven up the story.

Ring’s prose is… well, ‘basic’ is probably the kindest way to describe it. ‘Dry’ or ‘flavourless’ would be less kind, but more accurate, descriptions. Scenery and setting descriptions are extremely sparse, to the point that characters sometimes seem to inhabit blank voids. The book frequently jumps POV between paragraphs—most of the time it’s in Asakawa’s point of view, but often it will switch to someone else briefly or even adopt an omnipotent narrator perspective—which is maybe acceptable to some people, but which I’ve always seen as an egregious writing flaw. I guess I should add the caveat that I am reading an English translation of the book, but since I can’t read Japanese, that’s all I can judge.

Not a lot of positives for Ring so far. Before I start to wrap up, I will say that once Asakawa watches the tape, the pacing is relentlessly fast and quite propulsive, despite all the flaws I’ve described so far. Even knowing how the story was going to play out, I found myself eager to finish the book. I can see why it was popular when it came out.

Now, here’s an important question: is it scary?

This gets back to what I said before, about how I had avoided the book for years because I had heard things about it that turned me off. Specifically, what I always heard was that although the Ring movie is very firmly a supernatural horror story, the source material is much more of a mystery, one that ends up leaning more towards science fiction (albeit SF that heavily involves psychic powers) once the full truth of the tape is unveiled. Having read the book, I can confirm that this is the case. Apart from a handful of individual scenes, it’s really not trying to be particularly frightening or tense.

That actually makes me admire the movie adaptation even more. Not only did the filmmakers sand off the book’s flaws—and as I’ve explained in this review, there are a lot of flaws—they also realised that the basic material of the novel could be transformed into a terrifying horror experience.

Where does that leave the original novel? Unfortunately, I have to conclude that it’s been left in the shadow of its adaptations for a reason. Full credit for coming up with that killer premise, but this book just isn’t very good.