Suzuki Kōji, the acclaimed novelist who created the terrifying Yamamura Sadako, died on 8th May in a Tokyo hospital. He was 68 years old.
The English translations of Ring and Spiral are still on my desk where they’ve been since I last re-read them for my Japanese Lit course at the UEA. I picked them up this morning, along with the digital Japanese version I have on my iPad, along with the battered bunkobon copies that I got for £1 at a Japanese bookstore in Colindale.
Ring,『リング』, is not a horror story, not really. It’s a mystery in which Asakawa, a male journalist, has to team up with his former friend, the psychopathic Takeyama Ryūji. The pair must figure out who, or what, killed Asakawa’s niece and her friends before the men become the next victims of what appears to be a seven-day curse.
Honestly, as a journalist, I love it when we get to look at Japanese publishing and newspapers so, while I prefer Film Asakawa, Book Asakawa taught me a lot more about journalism in Japan…
This was the book in which Yamamura Sadako, the iconic onryō, was born. I’ve spoken about her before, but she remains one of the few supernatural beings who truly terrified me.
Sadakophobia is a thing, I know, because I coined the phrase back in the early 2000s.
You see my first meeting with Sadako was not the novel—which was released in English in 2003. I met her in 2001 on a VHS tape (old school but apt in this case…) borrowed from Blockbuster. (RIP Tartan Films…) I was still in the first flushes of my passion for Japan.
I slept with the light on for two weeks. And my VCR and TV unplugged…
I had no idea where any of the places, outside of Tokyo, were. I had no understanding of death and the ritual of Buddhist funerals. I didn’t know why Sadako was so scary, much less the history around ghosts in Japanese folklore. But here was a perfect introduction to an alien kind of scary story, one with its own beats, its own tropes, unfiltered, unsanitised.
Around this time, there was an influx of Japanese movies, most of which were acquired through eBay as badly subbed video discs and, later, DVDs. Sadako introduced me to Battle Royale, to Saeki Kayako and Toshio of Juon: The Grudge, to Kairo (that scene…) and Marebito, to Shikoku (『死国』; a bad movie but a fantastic linguistic pun where ‘fourth country’ becomes ‘land of the dead’…)
Even today I associate summer with horror, because that’s when it works best (and has done in Japan for centuries at this point…). Terrifying stories, scary white-garbed female ghosts. But of the books, Ring and Spiral are my favourite, Ring because it’s a supernatural murder mystery and Spiral because it has puzzles. DNA-coded puzzles.
But the film, it remains my go-to for horror.
For atmosphere, for the simple story and the terrifying undertone which only becomes obvious in that classic scene, and, of course, the ending where the horror of what Asakawa is about to do to her parents, in order to save Yōichi.
I’ve read Suzuki’s other works, of course, and not just his Sadako stoties like like Loop (which I actually dislike, a lot…), S and Lemon Heart (the Sadako-focused short story collection which gave us Ring 0)… But my favourite is the Dark Water short story collection, because it’s genuinely creepy. Even the manga adaptation, well it’s just Chef’s Kiss… The manga is harder to find, but I honestly love it.
So we have lost a luminary of fiction, the man who single-handedly made Japanese literature cool long before the current cosy era of magic and coffee shops. Of murdereresses and magarine… (Please, go and read Yuzuki Asako’s Butter…) Suzuki Koji was there at the beginning, terrifying his audiences. And he will remain long after cosy is dead, because horror is eternal.