Ring

1

October 19-Friday

A phone call from the manager’s office woke Asakawa from his slumber. The manager was reminding them that checkout was at 11 a.m., and asking if they’d prefer to stay another night. Asakawa reached out with his free hand and picked up his watch beside his pillow. His arms were tired, just lifting them was an effort. They didn’t hurt yet, but they’d probably ache like hell tomorrow. He wasn’t wearing his glasses, so he couldn’t read the time until he brought the watch right up to his eyes. A few minutes past eleven. Asakawa couldn’t think of how to reply right away. He didn’t even know where he was.

“Will you be staying another night?” asked the manager, trying to suppress his annoyance. Ryuji groaned right beside him. This wasn’t his own room, that was for sure. It was as if the whole world had been repainted without his knowing it. The thick line connecting past to present and present to future had been cut into two: before his sleep and after it.

“Hello?”

Now the manager was worried that there was nobody on the other end of the line. Without even knowing why, Asakawa felt joy flood his breast. Ryuji rolled over and opened his eyes slightly. He was drooling. Asakawa’s memories were hazy; all he found when he searched his recollections was darkness. He could more or less remember visiting Dr Nagao and then heading for Villa Log Cabin, but everything after that was vague. Dark scenes came to him, one after another, and his breath caught in his throat. He felt like he did after waking up from a powerful dream, one that left a strong impression even though he’d forgotten what it was about. But for some reason, his spirits were high.

“Hello? Can you hear me?”

“Uh, yeah.” Asakawa finally managed to reply, adjusting his grip on the receiver.

“Check-out time is eleven o’clock.”

“Got it. We’ll get our things together and leave right away.” Asakawa adopted an officious tone to match the manager’s. He could hear a faint trickle of water from the kitchen. It seemed someone hadn’t turned the faucet tight last night before going to sleep. Asakawa hung up the phone.

Ryuji had closed his eyes again. Asakawa shook him. “Hey, Ryuji. Get up.”

He had no idea how long they’d slept. Ordinarily, Asakawa slept no more than five or six hours a night, but now he felt like he’d been asleep for much longer than that. It had been a long time since he’d been able to sleep soundly, untroubled.

“Hey, Ryuji! If we don’t get out of here they’re going to charge us for another night.” Asakawa shook Ryuji harder, but he didn’t wake up. Asakawa raised his eyes and saw the milky-white plastic bag on the dining room table. Suddenly, as if some chance happening had brought back a fragment of a dream, he remembered what was inside it. Calling Sadako’s name. Fulling her out of the cold earth under the floor, stuffing her into a plastic bag. The sound of running water… It had been Ryuji, last night, who had gone to the sink and washed the mud from Sadako. The water was still running. By then, the appointed time had already passed. And even now, Asakawa was still alive. He was overjoyed. Death had been breathing down his neck, and now that it had been cleared away, life seemed more concentrated; it began to glow. Sadako’s skull was beautiful, like a marble sculpture.

“Hey, Ryuji! Wake up!”

Suddenly, he got a bad feeling. Something caught in a corner of his mind. He put his ear to Ryuji’s chest. He wanted to hear Ryuji’s heart beating through his thick sweatshirt, to know he was still alive. But just as his ear was about to touch Ryuji’s chest, Asakawa suddenly found himself in a headlock, held by two powerful hands. Asakawa panicked and started to struggle.

“Gotcha! Thought I was dead, didn’t you?” Ryuji released his grip on Asakawa’s head and laughed an odd, childlike laugh. How could he joke around after what they’d just been through? Anything was liable to happen. If at that instant he’d seen Sadako Yamamura alive and standing by the table, and Ryuji tearing at his hair dying, Asakawa would have believed his eyes. He suppressed his anger. He owed Ryuji a great deal.

“Stop fooling around.”

“It’s payback time. You scared the bejeezus out of me last night.” Still on his side, Ryuji began to chuckle.

“What did I do?”

“You collapsed down there at the bottom of the well. I really thought you’d gone and died. I was worried. Time was up. I thought you were out of the game.”

Asakawa said nothing, just blinked several times.

“Hah. You probably don’t even remember. Ungrateful bastard.”

Now that he thought about it, Asakawa couldn’t remember crawling out of the well on his own. Finally he recalled dangling from the rope, his strength totally spent. Hauling his sixty kilogram frame four or five meters straight up couldn’t have been easy, even for someone of Ryuji’s strength. The image of himself hanging suspended reminded him somehow of the stone statue of En no Ozunu being pulled up from the bottom of the sea. Shizuko had gained mysterious powers for fishing out the statue, but all Ryuji had to show for his troubles were aches and pains.

“Ryuji?” asked Asakawa in a strangely altered voice.

“What?”

“Thanks for everything you’ve done. I really owe you.”

“Don’t start getting mushy on me.”

“If it hadn’t been for you, I’d be… well, you know. Anyway, thanks.”

“Cut the crap. You’re going to make me puke. Gratitude isn’t worth a single yen.”

“Well then, how about some lunch? I’m buying.”

“Oh, well in that case.” Ryuji pulled himself to his feet, staggering a little. All of his muscles were stiff. Even Ryuji was having trouble making his body do what he wanted it to.

From the South Hakone Pacific Land rest house, Asakawa called his wife in Ashikaga and told her he’d pick her up in a rental car Sunday morning, as promised. So, everything’s all taken care op she asked. All Asakawa could say was, “Probably”. From the fact that he was still here, alive, he could only guess that things were resolved. But as he hung up the phone, something still bothered him deeply. He couldn’t quite get over it. Just from the mere fact that he was alive, he wanted to believe that everything was wrapped up neatly, but… Thinking that Ryuji might have the same doubts, Asakawa walked back to the table and asked, “This is really the end, right?”

Ryuji had wolfed down his lunch while Asakawa was on the phone.

“Your family doing alright?” Ryuji wasn’t going to answer Asakawa’s question right away.

“Yeah. Hey, Ryuji, are you feeling like it’s not all over yet?”

“You worried?”

“Aren’t you?”

“Maybe.”

“About what? What bothers you?”

“What the old woman said. Next year you’re going to have a child. That prediction of hers.”

The moment he realized Ryuji had exactly the same doubts, Asakawa turned to trying to dispel those doubts.

“Maybe the ‘you’, just that once, was referring to Shizuko instead of Sadako.”

Ryuji rejected this straightaway. “Not possible.

The images on that video come from Sadako’s own eyes and mind. The old woman was talking to her. ‘You’ can only refer to Sadako.”

“Maybe her prediction was false.”

“Sadako’s ability to foresee the future should have been infallible, one hundred percent.”

“But Sadako was physically incapable of bearing children.”

“That’s why it’s so strange. Biologically, Sadako was a man, not a woman, so there was no way she could have a kid. Plus, she was a virgin until right before she died. And…”

“And?”

“Her first sexual experience was Nagao. The last smallpox victim in Japan. Quite a coincidence.”

It was said that in the distant past God and the Devil, cells and viruses, male and female, even light and darkness had been identical, with no internal contradiction. Asakawa began to feel uneasy. Once the discussion moved into the realm of genetic structures, or the cosmos before the creation of the Earth, the answers were beyond the pale of individual questioning. All he could do at this point was to persuade himself to dispel the niggling uncertainties in his heart and tell himself that it was all over.

“But I’m alive. The riddle of the erased charm is solved. This case is closed.”

Then Asakawa realized something. Hadn’t the statue of En no Ozunu willed itself to be pulled up from the bottom of the ocean? That will had worked on Shizuko, guiding her actions, and as a result she was given her new power. Suddenly that pattern looked awfully familiar. Bringing Sadako’s bones up from the bottom of the well, fishing En no Ozunu’s statue up from the ocean floor… But what bothered him was the irony: the power Shizuko was given brought her only misery. But that was looking at things the wrong way. Maybe in Asakawa’s case, simply being released from the curse was the equivalent of Shizuko’s receiving power. Asakawa decided to make himself think so.

Ryuji glanced at Asakawa’s face, reassuring himself that the man before him was, indeed, alive, then nodded twice. “I suppose you do have a point.” Exhaling slowly, he sank back into his chair. “And yet…”

“What?”

Ryuji sat up straight and asked, as if to himself, “What did Sadako give birth to?”

2

Asakawa and Ryuji parted company at Atami Station. Asakawa intended to take Sadako’s remains back to her relatives in Sashikiji and have them hold a memorial service for her. They probably wouldn’t even know what to do with her, a distant relative they hadn’t heard a peep out of in nearly thirty years. But, things being what they were, he couldn’t just abandon her. If he hadn’t known who she was, he could have had her buried as a Jane Doe. But he knew, and so all he could do was hand her over to the people in Sashikiji. The statute of limitations was long past, and it would be nothing but trouble to bring up a murder now, so he decided to say she’d probably been a suicide. He wanted to hand her off and then return immediately to Tokyo, but the boat didn’t depart that often. Leaving now, he’d end up having to spend the night on Oshima. Since he’d have to leave the rental car in Atami, flying back to Tokyo would just make things more complicated.

“You can deliver her bones all by yourself. You don’t need me for that.” As he’d said this, getting out of the car in front of Atami Station, Ryuji seemed to be laughing at Asakawa. Sadako’s bones were no longer in the plastic bag. They were wrapped neatly in a black cloth in the back seat of the car. To be sure, it was such a small bundle that even a child could have delivered it to the Yamamura house in Sashikiji. The point was to get them to accept her. If they refused, then Asakawa wouldn’t have anywhere to take her. That would be troublesome. He had the feeling that the charm would only be completely fulfilled when someone close to her held services for her. But still: why should they believe him when he showed up on their doorstep with a bag of bones, saying this is your relative whom you haven’t heard from in twenty-five years? What proof did he have? Asakawa was still a little worried.

“Well, happy trails. See you in Tokyo.” Ryuji waved and went through the ticket gate. “If I didn’t have so much work, I wouldn’t mind tagging along, but you know how it is.” Ryuji had a mountain of work, scholarly articles and the like, that needed immediate attention.

“Let me thank you again.”

“Forget about it. It was fun for me, too.”

Asakawa watched until Ryuji disappeared into the shadow of the stairs leading to the platform. Just before disappearing from view, Ryuji stumbled on the steps. Although he quickly regained his balance, for a brief moment as he swayed Ryuji’s muscular form seemed to go double in Asakawa’s vision. Asakawa realized he was tired, and rubbed his eyes. When he took his hands away, Ryuji had disappeared up the stairs. A curious sensation pierced his breast, and somewhere he detected the faint scent of citrus…

That afternoon, he delivered Sadako’s remains to Takashi Yamamura without incident. He’d just returned from a fishing voyage, and as soon as he saw the black wrapped bundle he seemed to know what it was. Asakawa held it out in both hands and said, “These are Sadako’s remains.”

Takashi gazed at the bundle for a while, then narrowed his eyes tenderly. He shuffled over to Asakawa, bowed deeply, and accepted the bones, saying, “thank you for coming all this way”. Asakawa was a bit taken aback. He hadn’t thought the old man would accept it that easily. Takashi seemed to guess what he was thinking, and he said, in a voice full of conviction, “It’s definitely Sadako.”

Up until the age of three, and then from age nine to age eighteen, Sadako had lived here, at the Yamamura estate. Takashi was sixty-one now. What exactly did she mean to him? Guessing from his expression as he received her remains, Asakawa imagined that he must have loved her dearly. He didn’t even ask for assurance that this was Sadako. Perhaps he didn’t need to. Perhaps he knew intuitively that it was her inside the black cloth. The way his eyes had flashed when he’d first seen the bundle attested to that. There must be some sort of power at work here, too.

Having completed his errand, Asakawa wanted to get away from Sadako as quickly as possible. So he beat a hasty retreat, lying that “I’ll miss my flight if I don’t leave now.” If the family changed their minds and suddenly decided they wouldn’t accept the remains as Sadako’s without proof, all would be lost. If they started asking him for details, he didn’t know what he’d say. It would be a long time before he’d be able to tell anyone the whole story. He particularly didn’t feel up to telling her relatives.

Asakawa stopped by Hayatsu’s “bureau” to say thanks for all his help the other day, and then he headed for the Oshima Hot Springs Hotel. He wanted to soak away all his fatigue in a hot bath and then write up the whole sequence of events.

3

Just about the time Asakawa was settling into bed at the Oshima Hot Springs Hotel, Ryuji was dozing at his desk in his apartment. His lips rested on a half-written essay, his spittle smudging the dark blue ink. He was so tired that his hand still clutched his beloved Montblanc fountain pen. He hadn’t switched over to a word processor yet.

Suddenly his shoulders jerked and his face contorted unnaturally. Ryuji leapt up. His back went ramrod-straight, and his eyes opened far wider than they usually did when he woke up. His eyes were normally slightly slanted, and when they were wide open like this he looked different, somehow cuter than usual. His eyes were bloodshot. He’d been dreaming. Ryuji, normally not afraid of anything, was shaking through and through. He couldn’t remember the dream. But the tautness of his body, and his trembling, bore witness to the terror of the dream. He couldn’t breathe. He looked at the clock. 9:40. He couldn’t immediately figure out the significance of the time. The lights were on-the overhead fluorescent bulb and the desk lamp in front of him- and there was plenty of light, but things still felt too dark. He felt an instinctual fear of the dark. His dream had been ruled by a darkness like no other.

Ryuji swiveled in his chair and looked at the video deck. The fateful tape was still in it. For some reason, he couldn’t look away again. He kept staring at it. His breathing became rough. Misgiving showed on his face. Images raced through his mind, leaving no room for logical thought.

“Shit. You’ve come…”

He placed both hands on the edge of the desk and tried to figure out what was behind him. His apartment was in a quiet place just off a main street, and all sorts of indistinct sounds came in from the street. Occasionally the revving of an engine or the squeal of tires would stand out, but other than that the sounds from outside were just a dull, solid mass stretching out behind him to the left and right. Pricking up his ears, he could figure out what was making some of the noises. Among them were the voices of insects. This mixed-up herd of sounds now started to float and flutter like a ghost. Reality seemed to recede- that was Ryuji’s impression. And as reality receded it left an empty space around him, in which some sort of spirit matter hovered. The chilly night air and the moisture clinging to his skin turned into shadows and closed in on him. The beating of his heart grew faster, outstripping the ticking of the clock. The signs were pressing down on his chest. Ryuji looked again at the clock. 9:44. Every time he looked, he gulped.

A week ago, when I watched that video at Asakawa’s, what time was that? He said his brat always goes to sleep at around nine … Assuming we hit ‘play’ after that, we would have finished at…

He couldn’t figure out exactly when they’d finished watching the video. But he could tell that the time was fast approaching. He was well aware that these indications that were now closing in on him were no counterfeit. This was different from when one’s imagination magnified one’s fears. This was no imaginary pregnancy. It was definitely coming steadily closer. What he didn’t know was…

Why’s it only coming for me? Why is it coming for me, when it didn’t come for Asakawa? It’s not fair.

His mind overflowed with confusion.

What the hell’s going on? Didn’t we figure out the charm? So why? Why? WHY?

His chest was beating an alarm. It felt like something had reached inside his breast and was squeezing his heart. Pain shot through his spine. He felt a cool touch on his neck, and, startled, he tried to get up from his chair, but instead he was overcome by severe pain in his waist and back. He collapsed on the floor.

Think! What should you do now?

Somehow his remaining consciousness managed to give orders to his body. Stand! Stand and think! Ryuji crawled over the floor mats to the video deck. He pushed eject and took out the tape. Why am I doing this? There was nothing else he could do but take a good long look at this tape that was behind everything. He looked at it back and front, and then went to put it back in the video deck, but stopped. There was a title written on the label on the spine of the tape. Asakawa’s handwriting. Liza Minnelli, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr/1989. It must have had some music program recorded on it, before Asakawa had used it to dub that video. An electric jolt ran down his spine. A single thought swiftly took shape in his otherwise blank mind. Nonsense, he told himself, putting the thought from his mind, but when he turned the tape over, that momentary jolt changed to a certainty. Suddenly Ryuji understood many things. The riddle of the charm, the old woman’s prophecy, and another power hidden in the images on that tape… Why had those four kids in Villa Log Cabin run off without trying to carry out the charm? Why was Ryuji facing death when Asakawa’s life had been spared? What had Sadako given birth to? The hint was right here, so close at hand. He hadn’t realized that Sadako’s power had become fused with another power. She’d wanted to have a child, but her body couldn’t bear one. So she’d made a bargain with the devil- for lots of children. What effect is this going to have? Ryuji wondered. He laughed through his pain, an ironic laugh.

You’ve got to be kidding. I wanted to watch the end of mankind. And here I am, in the vanguard…

He crawled to the telephone and started to dial Asakawa’s home number, but then he remembered: he was on Oshima.

Sonofabitch’ll sure be surprised when he hears I’m dead. The terrific pressure in his chest made his ribs creak.

He dialled Mai Takano’s number. Ryuji wasn’t sure whether it was a fierce attachment to life or just a desire to hear her voice one last time which had given rise to this impulse to summon Mai; he couldn’t tell the difference anymore. But a voice came to him.

Give it up. It wouldn’t be right to get her messed up in this.

But on the other hand, he still had a smidgen of hope-he might still be in time.

The clock on the desk caught his eye. 9:48. He put the receiver to his ear and waited for Mai to come to the phone. His head suddenly felt unbearably itchy. He put his hand to his head and scratched furiously, and felt several strands of hair come out. On the second ring, Ryuji lifted his face. There was a horizontal mirror on the chest of drawers in front of him, and he could see his face reflected in it. Forgetting that he had the phone wedged between his shoulder and his head, he brought his face in close to the mirror. The receiver fell, but he didn’t care; he just stared at his face in the mirror. Somebody else was reflected there. The cheeks were yellowish, dried and cracked, and hair was falling out in clumps to reveal brown scabs. A hallucination, it’s got to be a hallucination, he told himself. Even so, he couldn’t control his emotions. A woman’s voice came from the receiver where it lay on the floor: “Hello? Hello?” Ryuji couldn’t stand it. He screamed. His screams overlapped with Mai’s words, and in the end he wasn’t able to hear his beloved’s voice. The face in the mirror was none other than his own, a hundred years in the future. Even Ryuji hadn’t known it would be so terrifying to meet himself transformed into someone else.

Mai Takano picked up the phone on the fourth ring and said “Hello”. The only answer was a ghastly scream. A shudder came over the line. Fear itself came through the line from Ryuji’s apartment to Mai’s. Surprised, Mai held the receiver away from her ear. The moans continued. The first scream had been one of shock, and the subsequent moans held incredulity. She’d received harassing phone calls several times before, but she immediately realized that this was different, and brought the phone back to her ear. The voice ceased. It was followed by dead silence.

9:49 p.m. His wish to hear the voice of the woman he loved one last time had been cruelly shattered. Instead, all he’d done was drown her in his death cries. Now he breathed his last. Nothingness enveloped his consciousness. Mai’s voice came again from the receiver near his hand. His legs were splayed out on the floor, his back was up against the bed, his left arm was thrown back across the mattress, his right hand was stretched out toward the receiver which still whispered “Hello?” and his head was bent backwards, eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. Just before he slipped into the void, Ryuji realized he wouldn’t be saved, and he remembered to wish with all his might that he could teach that asshole Asakawa the secret of the videotape.

Mai called “Hello, hello,” over and over again. No reply. She put the receiver back in the cradle. Those groans had sounded familiar. A premonition crept into her breast, and she picked up the receiver again to dial her esteemed professor’s number. She got a busy signal. She pressed down the hook with her finger and dialed again. Still busy. And she knew that it had been Ryuji calling, and that something horrible had happened to him.

4

October 20-Saturday

He was happy to be home again at last, but with his wife and child gone, the place seemed lonely. How long had it been since he was home? He tried to count on his fingers. He’d spent one night in Kamakura, got stuck on Oshima for two nights, spent the following night in Villa Log Cabin, and then another night on Oshima. He’d only been away for five nights. But it felt as if he’d been gone from home for much longer. He often went away for four or five nights to research articles, but when he came home it always felt like the time had flown by.

Asakawa sat down at the desk in his study and turned on his word processor. His body still ached here and there, and his back hurt when he stood up or sat down. Even the ten hours he’d slept last night couldn’t make up for all the sleepless nights of the last week. But he couldn’t stop and rest now. If he didn’t take care of the work that had piled up, he wouldn’t be able to keep his promise to take them on a drive to Nikko tomorrow-Sunday.

He sat right down in front of the word processor. He’d already saved the first half of the report on a floppy disk. Now he needed to add the rest, everything that had happened since Monday, when they had learned the name of Sadako Yamamura. He wanted to finish this document as quickly as possible. By dinnertime he’d written five pages. It was a pretty good pace. The speed of Asakawa’s writing usually picked up as the night wore on. At this rate, he’d be able to relax and enjoy seeing his wife and daughter tomorrow. Then, on Monday, he’d go back to his normal life. He couldn’t predict how his editor would react to what he was writing now, but he’d never know until he’d finished writing it. Knowing it was probably fruitless effort, Asakawa went through and put the events of the second half of the week in order. Only when the manuscript was finished would he feel that the episode was really and truly over.

Sometimes his fingers stopped over the keyboard. The printout containing Sadako’s photo was sitting by the desk. He felt as if that terrify-ingly beautiful girl were watching him, and it ruined his concentration. He’d seen the same things she’d seen, through those beautiful eyes.

He still had the feeling that part of her had entered into his body. Asakawa put the photo out of sight. He couldn’t work with Sadako staring at him.

He ate dinner at a local diner, and then he suddenly wondered what Ryuji was doing right now. He wasn’t really worried-somehow he just remembered Ryuji’s face. And as he went back to his room and continued working, that face floated at the edge of his consciousness, gradually becoming clearer.

I wonder what he’s up to right now?

His mental image of Ryuji’s face drifted in and out of focus. He felt strangely agitated, and reached out for the phone. After seven rings, he heard the receiver being picked up, and he felt relieved. But it was a woman’s voice he heard.

“… Hello?” The voice was faint and thin. Asakawa had heard it before.

“Hello. This is Asakawa.”

“Yes?” came the faint reply.

“Ah, you must be Mai Takano, right? I should thank you for the lunch you made the last time we met.”

“Don’t mention it,” she whispered, and waited.

“Is Ryuji there?” Asakawa wondered why she didn’t just turn the phone over to Ryuji right away.

“Is Ryuji—”

“The Professor is dead.”

“… What?” How long was he speechless? All he could say, stupidly, was, “What?” His eyes stared blankly at a point on the ceiling. Finally, when the phone felt ready to slip out of his hands, he managed to ask, “When?”

“Last night, at around ten o’clock.”

Ryuji had finished watching the video at Asakawa’s condominium last Friday night at 9:49. He’d died right on schedule.

“What was the cause of death?” He didn’t need to ask.

“Sudden heart failure… but they haven’t determined an exact cause of death.”

Asakawa barely managed to stay on his feet. This wasn’t over. They’d just entered the second round.

“Mai, are you going to be there for a while?”

“Yes. I need to put the Professor’s papers in order.”

“I’ll be over right away. Wait for me.”

Asakawa hung up the phone and sank to the floor. His wife and daughter’s deadline was tomorrow morning at eleven. Another race against time. And this time, he was alone in the fight. Ryuji was gone. He couldn’t stay on the floor like this. He had to take action. Quickly. Right now.

He stepped out onto the street and gauged the traffic situation. It looked like driving would be faster than taking the train. He crossed at the crossing and climbed into the rental car, parked at the curb. He was glad he’d extended the rental another day so he could pick up his family.

What did this mean? Hands gripping the wheel, he tried to get his thoughts together. Scene after scene flashed back to him, but none of them made any sense. The more he thought, the less his mind could absorb, and the thread connecting events got more and more tangled until it seemed ready to snap. Calm down! Calm down and think! He lectured himself. Finally, he realized what he had to focus on.

First of all, we didn’t really figure out the charm- the way to escape death. Sadako didn’t want her bones to be found and laid to rest with an appropriate memorial service. She wanted something entirely different. What? What is it? And why am I still alive like this if we didn’t figure out the charm? What does that mean? Tell me that! Why did only I survive?

At eleven o’clock next morning, Shizu and Yoko would face their deadline. It was already nine at night. If he didn’t do something, he’d lose them.

He’d been thinking of this from the perspective of a curse pronounced by Sadako, a woman who’d met an unexpected death, but he began to doubt that approach now. He had a premonition of a bottomless evil, sneering at human suffering.

Mai was kneeling formally in the Japanese-style room with an unpublished manuscript of Ryuji’s on her lap. She was turning the pages, casting her eyes over each one, but it was a difficult subject at the best of times, and now nothing was sinking in. The room felt cavernous. Ryuji’s parents had picked up his body early this morning and taken it back home to Kawasaki. He was gone.

“Tell me everything about last night.”

His friend was dead. Ryuji was like a brother-in-arms to him. He grieved. But he hadn’t time now to wallow in sentiment. Asakawa sat next to Mai and bowed.

“It was after nine-thirty at night. I got a call from the Professor…” She told him the details. The scream that had come from the phone, the silence that had followed. Then when she’d rushed to Ryuji’s apartment she’d found him leaning against the bed, legs spread wide. She fixed her gaze on the spot where Ryuji’s corpse had been, and as she described the scene tears came to her eyes.

“I called and called, but the Professor didn’t respond.”

Asakawa didn’t give her time to cry. “Was there anything different about the room?”

“No,” she said shaking her head. “Only that the telephone was off the hook and making an ear-splitting sound.”

At the moment of death, Ryuji had called Mai.

Why? Asakawa pressed further. “He didn’t tell you anything there at the end? No last words? Nothing, say, about a videotape?”

“A videotape?” Mai’s expression showed that she couldn’t see any possible connection between her professor’s death and a videotape. There was no way for Asakawa to know whether or not Ryuji had figured out the true nature of the charm just before he’d died.

But why did he call Mai? He must have done it knowing his death was at hand … Was it just that he wanted to hear a loved one’s voice? Isn’t it possible that he’d figured out the charm and needed her help in carrying it out? And that’s why he called her? In which case, it takes another person to make the charm work.

Asakawa started to leave. Mai walked him to the door.

“Mai, will you be staying here tonight?”

“Yes. I need to take care of his manuscript.”

“Well, I’m sorry to have bothered you when you’re so busy.” He went to leave.

“Urn…”

“Yes?”

“Mr Asakawa, I’m afraid you have the wrong idea about the Professor and me.”

“What do you mean?”

“You think we were having a relationship… as a man and a woman.”

“No, well, I mean…”

Mai could spot a man who thought they were lovers-the way he looked at them. Asakawa looked at them that way. It bothered Mai.

“The first time I met you, the Professor introduced you as his best friend. That surprised me. I had never heard the Professor talk like that about anyone before. I think you were very special to him. So…” She hesitated before continuing. “So, I wish you could understand him a little better, as his best friend. The Professor… as far as I know he never knew a woman.” She lowered her eyes.

You mean he died a virgin?

Asakawa had nothing to say to that. He remained quiet. The Ryuji that Mai remembered sounded like a completely different person from the one he knew. Were they talking about the same man?

“But…”

But you don’t know what he did as a junior in high school, was what he wanted to say, but he stopped himself. He had no desire to dredge up a dead man’s crimes, and he didn’t feel like destroying Mai’s cherished image of Ryuji.

Not only that, he found himself with new doubts. Asakawa believed in a woman’s intuition. Mai seemed to have been pretty close to Ryuji, and if she said he was a virgin, he had to consider that a credible theory. In other words, maybe the whole thing about raping a college girl in his neighbourhood had been nothing more than fiction.

“The Professor was like a child when he was with me. He told me everything. He didn’t hide anything. I know almost everything there is to know about his youth. His pain.”

“Is that so?” was all Asakawa could say in response.

“When he was with me he was as innocent as a ten-year-old boy. When there was a third person around he was the gentleman, and with you I imagine he probably played the scoundrel. Am I right? If he hadn’t…” Mai softly reached out for her white handbag, took out a handkerchief, and dabbed at her eyes. “If he hadn’t put on an act like that, he would never have been able to get along in the world. Do you see what I’m saying? Can you understand that?”

Asakawa was shocked, more than anything. But then something struck him. For a guy who’d been good at his studies and excelled at sports, Ryuji had been quite a loner. He hadn’t had one close friend.

“He was so pure… Not superficial, like those jerks I go to school with. They couldn’t compare to him.”

Mai’s handkerchief was soaked with tears by now.

Standing in the doorway, Asakawa found that he had too much to think about to be able to come up with any suitable words to leave with Mai. The image of the Ryuji he’d known diverged completely from the one Mai had; his view of the man had become so unfocused now as to be unrecognizable. There was a darkness concealed within Ryuji. No matter how he struggled, Asakawa couldn’t completely grasp his personality. Had he really raped that girl in high school? Asakawa had no way of knowing that, nor whether he’d continued doing things like that, as he’d said he had. And right now, with his family’s deadline coming up tomorrow, Asakawa really didn’t want to worry himself with anything else.

So all he said was, “Ryuji was my best friend, too.”

The words must have pleased Mai. Her adorable face broke into an expression that could have been a smile or could have been more weeping, and she bowed ever so slightly. Asakawa shut the door and hurried down the stairs. As he emerged onto the street and put distance between himself and Ryuji’s apartment, he was suddenly overwhelmed by the thought of this friend who’d thrown everything into this dangerous game, even sacrificing his life. Asakawa didn’t bother to wipe away the tears.

5

October 21-Sunday

Midnight passed, and Sunday finally arrived. Asakawa was making notes on a sheet of paper, trying to get his thoughts in order.

Just before his death, Ryuji had figured out the charm. He telephoned Mai, possibly to summon her. Which means that he needed Mai’s help to work the charm. Okay, the important question here is, why am I still alive? There’s only one possible answer. At some point during the week, without even knowing it, I must have carried out the charm! What other explanation is there? The charm must be something anybody can easily do, with the help of another person.

But that brought up another problem. Why did those four kids run out without performing the charm? If it was so easy, why couldn’t at least one of them have played tough when they were together and then gone and done it in secret later? Think. What did I do this week? What did I do that Ryuji clearly didn’t do?

Asakawa let out a yell. “How the hell am I supposed to know? There must have been a thousand things I did this week that he didn’t do! This isn’t funny!”

He punched Sadako’s photo. “Damn you! How long are you going to keep torturing me?” He hit her in the face over and over. But Sadako’s expression never changed; her beauty never diminished.

He went into the kitchen and splashed some whiskey into a glass. All the blood had rushed to a single point in his head and he needed to disperse it. He went to knock it back at one gulp, but then stopped. He just might come up with the answer tonight and have to drive to Ashikaga in the middle of the night, so maybe he’d better not drink. He was mad at the way he always tried to rely on something outside himself. When he’d had to dig Sadako’s bones out from under the cabin, he had given in to fear and nearly lost himself. It was only because he had Ryuji with him that he’d been able to do what he needed to do.

“Ryuji! Hey, Ryuji! I’m begging you, help me out here!”

He knew he’d never be able to go on without his wife and daughter. Never.

“Ryuji! Lend me your strength! Why am I alive? Is it because I was the one to find Sadako’s remains first? If so, then there’s no saving my family. That can’t be right, can it, Ryuji?”

He was devastated. He knew it was no time to be wailing, but he’d lost his cool. After moaning to Ryuji for a while, his calm returned. He started making notes again on the paper. The old woman’s prophecy. Did Sadako really have a baby? Just before her death she had sex with the last smallpox victim in Japan. Does that relate somehow? All of his notes ended with question marks. Nothing was certain. Was this going to lead him to the charm? He couldn’t afford to fail.

Several more hours elapsed. It was beginning to get light outside. Lying on the floor, Asakawa could hear the sound of a man’s breathing. Birds chirped. He didn’t know if he was awake or dreaming. Somehow he’d wound up on the floor, asleep. He squinted against the bright morning light. The figure of a man was slowly fading in the soft light. He wasn’t scared. Asakawa came to himself with a start and stared hard in the direction of the figure.

“Ryuji? Is that you?”

The figure didn’t reply, but suddenly the title of a book came to Asakawa, so vividly that it might have been branded into the wrinkles of his brain.

Epidemics and Man.

The title appeared in white on the back of his eyelids when he closed his eyes, then disappeared; but it still echoed in his head. That book should be in Asakawa’s study. When he’d first started to investigate the case, Asakawa had wondered if it could have been a virus that had caused four people to die simultaneously. He’d bought the book then. He hadn’t read it, but he remembered putting it away on a bookshelf.

Sun was streaming in through the eastern windows, falling on him. He tried to stand up. His head throbbed.

Was it a dream?

He opened the door to his study. He took down the book that whoever-it-was had suggested to him: Epidemics and Man. Of course, Asakawa had a pretty good idea who it was that had made that suggestion. Ryuji. He’d returned just for a brief moment, to teach him the secret of the charm.

So where in this three-hundred-page tome did the answer lie? Asakawa had another flash of intuition. Page 191! The number was insinuated into his brain, though not quite as searingly as the last time. He opened to that page. A single word jumped out at him, and pulsed bigger and bigger.

Reproduction. Reproduction. Reproduction. Reproduction.

A virus’s instinct is to reproduce. A virus usurps living structures in order to reproduce itself

“Ooooooohhhhh!” Asakawa groaned. He’d finally grasped the nature of the charm.

It’s obvious what I did this week and Ryuji didn’t. I brought the tape home, made a copy, and showed it to Ryuji. The charm is simple. Anybody can do it. Make a copy and show it to somebody. Help it reproduce by showing it to somebody who hasn’t seen it. Those four kids were happy with their prank and stupidly left the tape in the cabin. Nobody went to the effort of going all the way back for it so they could actually perform the charm.

No matter how he thought about it, that was the only possible interpretation. He picked up the phone and dialled Ashikaga. Shizu answered.

“Listen to me. Listen carefully to what I’m going to tell you. There’s something I need your mother and father to see. Right away. I’m on my way now, so don’t let them go anywhere before I get there. Do you understand? This is incredibly important.”

Ah, am I selling my soul to the devil? In order to save my wife and daughter, I’m willing to put my wife’s parents in danger, even if it’s only temporary. But if it’ll save their daughter and granddaughter, I’m sure they’ll gladly cooperate. All they have to do is make copies and show them to somebody else, and they’ll be out of danger. But after that.… what then?

“What’s this all about? I don’t understand.”

“Just do as I say. I’m leaving right now. Oh, right-they have a video deck, don’t they?”

“Yes.”

“Beta or VHS?”

“VHS.”

“Great, I’m on my way. Don’t, I repeat, don’t go anywhere.”

“Hold on a minute. What you want to show my mom and dad is that video, isn’t it?”

He didn’t know what to say, so he shut up.

“Right?”

“… Right.”

“It’s not dangerous?”

Dangerous? You and your daughter are going to be dead in five hours. Give me a break, damnit! Stop asking so many questions. I don’t have time to explain it all to you from the beginning anymore. Asakawa wanted to shout at her, but he managed to restrain himself.

“Just do as I say!”

It was just before seven. If he raced there on the freeway, provided there were no traffic delays, he should get to his in-laws’ house in Ashikaga by nine-thirty. Factoring in the time it would take to make a copy for his wife and another for his daughter, they should just make the eleven o’clock deadline. He hung up, opened the doors to the entertainment centre, and unplugged the video deck. They needed two decks to make copies, so he had to take one of his.

As he left, he took one more look at the photo of Sadako.

You sure gave birth to something nasty.

He took the Oi ramp onto the freeway, deciding to skirt Tokyo Bay and get on the Tohoku Highway heading out of town. There wouldn’t be much traffic on the Tohoku Highway. The problem was how to avoid congestion before that. As he paid the toll on the Oi on-ramp and peered at the traffic-information board, he realized for the first time that it was Sunday morning. As a result, there were hardly any cars in the tunnel under the bay, where they were usually lined up like beads on a rosary. There weren’t even any jams in the big merging areas. At this rate he’d get to Ashikaga right on schedule, with plenty of time to start making copies of the video. Asakawa eased up on the accelerator. Now he was more afraid of going too fast and getting into an accident.

He sped north along the Sumida River. Glancing down, he could see neighbourhoods just waking up on a Sunday morning. People were walking around with a different air than on weekday mornings. A peaceful Sunday morning.

He couldn’t help but wonder. What effect is this going to have? With my wife’s copy and my daughter’s copy, this virus is going to be set free in two directions-how’s it going to spread from there? He could imagine people making copies and passing them on to people who’d already seen it before, trying to keep the thing contained within a limited circle so it wouldn’t spread. But that would be going against the virus’s will to reproduce. There was no way of knowing yet how that function was incorporated into the video. That would take some experimenting. And it would probably be impossible to find anybody willing to risk their life to find the truth of it until it had spread pretty far and things had become quite serious. It really wasn’t very difficult to make a copy and show it to someone-so that’s what people would do. As the secret travelled by word of mouth, it would be added to: “You have to show it to someone who hasn’t seen it before.” And as the tape propagated, the week’s lag time would probably be shortened. People who were shown the tape wouldn’t wait a week to make a copy and show it to someone else. How far would this ring expand? People would be driven by an instinctual fear of disease, and this pestilential videotape would no doubt spread throughout society in the blink of an eye. And, driven by fear, people would start to spread crazy rumours. Such as: Once you’ve seen it you have to make at least two copies, and show them to at least two different people. It’d turn into a pyramid scheme, spreading incomparably faster than it would just one tape at a time. In the space of half a year, everybody in Japan would have become a carrier, and the infection would spread overseas. In the process, of course, several people would die, and people would realize that the tape’s warning wasn’t a lie, and they’d start making copies even more desperately. There would be panic. Where would it all end? How many victims would this claim? Two years ago, during the boom in interest in the occult, the newsroom had received ten million submissions. Something had gone haywire. And it would happen again, allowing the new virus to run rampant.

A woman’s resentment toward the masses who had hounded her father and mother to their deaths and the smallpox virus’s resentment toward the human ingenuity that had driven it to the brink of extinction had fused together in the body of a singular person named Sadako Yamamura, and had reappeared in the world in an unexpected, unimagined form.

Asakawa, his family, everybody who had seen the video, had been subconsciously infected with this virus. They were carriers. And viruses burrowed directly into the genes, the core of life. There was no telling yet what would result from this, how it would change human history- human evolution.

In order to protect my family, I am about to let loose on the world a plague which could destroy all mankind.

Asakawa was frightened by the essence of what he was trying to do. A voice was whispering to him.

If I let my wife and daughter die, it’ll end right here. If a virus loses its host, it’ll die. I can save mankind.

But the voice was too quiet.

He entered the Tohoku Highway. No congestion. If he kept going, he’d be there in plenty of time. Asakawa drove with his arms taut and both hands clutching the wheel. “I won’t regret it. My family has no obligation to sacrifice themselves. There are some things you just have to protect when they’re threatened.”

He spoke loud enough to be heard over the engine, to renew his determination. If he were Ryuji, what would he do? He felt sure he knew. Ryuji’s spirit had taught him the secret of the video. It was practically telling him to save his family. This gave him courage. He knew what Ryuji would probably say. Be true to what you’re feeling this instant! All we have in front of us is an uncertain future! The future’ll take care of itself. When humanity gets around to applying its ingenuity, who knows if it won’t find a solution? It’s just another trial for the human species. In every age, the Devil reappears in a different guise. You can stamp it out, and stamp it out, and he’ll keep coming back, over and over.

Asakawa kept his foot steady on the accelerator and the car pointed toward Ashikaga. In his rear-view mirror he could see the skies over

Tokyo, receding into the distance. Black clouds moved eerily across the skies. They slithered like serpents, hinting at the unleashing of some apocalyptic evil.