One night in Tokyo, four healthy teenagers die one after another of heart failure. A journalist, the uncle of one of the victims and intrigued by the coincidence, investigates and learns of a videotape that the four watched together a week before dying. Amid a series of bizarre and frightening images is a warning that the viewer will die in exactly one week unless a certain act is performed. The description of the act, of course, has been erased from the videotape, and the journalist's work to solve the mystery assumes a deadly urgency.
Ring is not only a chillingly told horror story but also a shrewdly intelligent and subversive commentary on the power of imagery and contagious consumerism. Ring spawned one of Japan's highest-grossing films ever as well as the blockbuster DreamWorks remake starring Naomi Watts. The Japanese version of the novel has sold almost 3 million copies.
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[A row of condominium buildings, each fourteen stories high, ran along the northern edge of the housing development next to Sankeien Gardens]***
(Harper, 5 June 2009, first published 1991, 400 pages, ebook, bought from @AmazonKindle)
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I'm a big fan of the American Ring horror movies especially the first ones starring Naomi Watts. There's something so creepy and sinister about them. I knew they were remakes of Japanese movies but only found out recently they were based on books. So of course I had to read them. Ring has some similarities to the movie but is different enough to make it a worth a read. Japanese horror is very different from British over even American. If Ring is anything to go by I like it a lot more. The book's a fascinating blend of horror and an amateur sleuth story. The book is quite slow to develop but really starts to get intense from the halfway point. Sadako is much more sinister than Samara is in the movies and even more twisted. I wouldn't describe the book as out and out horror; it's much more subtle and menacing and all the more enjoyable. What I found interesting and odd is how unlikable both Asakawa and Ryuji are. Asakawa treats his family like crap. Ryuji is a rapist who tells Asakawa each times he does it and Asakawa never reports him to the police. That's a bit messed up. Still, it's a refreshing change to have unlikable characters as protagonists. Ring was a blast to read. I loved it.
