PART FIVE - FORESHADOWING

January 15th, Coming of Age Day, was a holiday, which made it a three-day weekend. On the first day of the long weekend, Ando got a call from Miyashita asking if he wanted to go for a drive. The invitation was like a port in a storm for Ando, who'd been wondering how he was going to get through three workless days all alone. He wasn't sure if he liked the way Miyashita asked him- like he was hiding something-but Ando had no reason not to go along. He said yes, then asked, "Where are we going?"

"There's something I want to show you," was all Miyashita would say. Ando figured his colleague had his reasons, and so refrained from pressing the matter. He'd get the answer out of Miyashita when he saw him.

Miyashita picked Ando up at home. As soon as he climbed in the car, Ando asked again where they were going.

"I can't tell you. Now stop asking questions." And so even as they departed, their destination was unknown to Ando.

The car left the No. 3 Tokyo-Yokohama Freeway for the Yokohama New Road. They seemed to be heading for Fujisawa. They couldn't go too far and still expect to keep it a day trip. Maybe as far as Odawara or Hakone, possibly the Izu peninsula, but no farther than Atami or Ito. After several guesses at the destination of the mystery tour, Ando decided to just sit back and enjoy the ride.

Just before they were to merge with traffic, they came to a halt. The entrance to the Yokohama New Road was always jammed, and was especially so today, at the start of the long weekend. In an effort to keep Miyashita from getting too bored at the wheel, Ando decided to tell him the hypothesis he'd come up with a few days ago as to why Mai alone had displayed no abnormalities in her coronary artery. It was Ando's theory that Mai had been ovulating the day she watched the video, and that the ring virus had shifted the focus of its attack to her egg. Then, just before falling into the rooftop exhaust shaft, Mai had given birth to some unknown life form. Something that had only gestated for a week. If she'd just given birth, that explained why Mai hadn't been wearing any panties.

Miyashita heard him out and then was silent for a time. His striking round eyes seemed to be staring straight ahead, but then he changed lanes with an agility that belied his lax expression, poking his way into the passing lane.

"I thought more or less the same thing when we looked at Mai's virus under the electron microscope," said Miyashita, paying no attention to the blaring horns behind him.

"What do you mean?"

"The broken viruses looked familiar. After a while it hit me that they looked like spermatozoa."

"You too?"

"Nemoto said the same thing."

"So all three of us got the same impression."

"Yes. Sometimes you have to pay attention to intuition." Miyashita flashed Ando a grin, turning his attention from the road ahead.

"Watch where you're going!" As the brake lights of the car ahead drew closer, Ando clenched his leg muscles.

"Don't worry, we're not going to end up like Asakawa," Miyashita said, trying to look unconcerned as he stepped on the brake. But his front bumper was almost touching the car in front of them. Wiping away a cold sweat, Ando wondered if there was something wrong with Miyashita's depth perception. Driving like that they were sure to get in an accident sooner or later.

"Speaking of Asakawa, it's still a mystery as to why he didn't die of a heart attack."

"Right. Men don't ovulate."

"But maybe there was something physically different about him, just as with Mai."

"The virus probably found another exit."

"Exit?"

"A better way to spread and flourish."

Once they passed the exit for the Hodogaya bypass, the traffic snarl eased somewhat, and they made better time. No doubt the road signs had inspired Miyashita to use the word "exit" as he had. He continued.

"You know, it's up to us to figure this out." All trace of his customary nonchalance was gone from his voice.

"Believe me, I'm trying."

Miyashita changed the subject. "What did you do over New Year's break?"

"Nothing. Just lay around the apartment."

"Hmph. I took my family down to a fishing village at the southern tip of the Izu peninsula. We stayed at a little B&B that wasn't even listed on the travel brochures. Guess why I picked such a remote place? Well, one of my favorite novels is set in the village, and I'd always wanted to visit it. In the book it said that if you gaze out over the ocean at the horizon from that village, you see a mirage. I believed it."

Ando couldn't figure out where Miyashita was headed. He just nodded and listened.

"I know it's insensitive to say this to you, but family's a really wonderful thing. We could hear the surf from that inn, see, and it woke me up in the middle of the night. And as I gazed at the faces of my wife and daughter, it sank in just how dear they are to me."

Ando knew all too well the dearness of family. He tried to imagine a New Year's holiday with family in a southern Izu fishing village, where one could see mirages… Alone, the loneliness would be overwhelming, but the presence of loved ones would make the experience heartwarming. Ando began to wallow in thoughts of his own broken home, but Miyashita wouldn't give him time.

"My wife's a real looker, isn't she?"

When Ando replied, though, he wasn't recalling Miyashita's wife, but his own. "Absolutely," he nodded, thinking of how guileless and fresh she'd looked when they'd first met.

"Me, I'm short, fat, and ugly. And her! She's beautiful, and she's got a great personality. I'm a lucky man, and I know it."

Miyashita's wife was taller than him, and she looked just like a very popular actress. Next to her, Miyashita definitely seemed some inferior breed. But he was talented, and if he just kept it up, there was no way he wouldn't get tenure at their med school. Ando laughed ruefully. There was nothing inferior about that.

"So I don't want to die. I think I've been too optimistic. See, all along I've been at this case as a disinterested observer. In fact, I've enjoyed wondering where it might all lead."

Ando had been taking things a bit more seriously. Still, his, too, was the standpoint of the disinterested observer. Even if he failed to solve the case, he wasn't afraid of coming to any particular harm as a result. In that, his situation was fundamentally different from Asakawa and Ryuji's.

"Me, too."

"But I realized that maybe I've been underestimating the danger."

"Realized when?"

"After the holiday, when we got back from Izu."

"Did something happen there?"

"There was no mirage."

Ando frowned. Miyashita wasn't making sense.

"Just because of that?"

"Have you ever visited the setting of a novel?"

"Yeah, I guess." Ando figured that most people felt, at least once, the urge to visit the setting of a favorite book.

"How did it go?"

"Like, 'Well, I suppose this is it.'"

"Was it different from what you'd expected?"

"Most of the time you're bound to feel let down."

"The setting as you'd imagined it from reading the novel was different from the way the place looked in reality."

"I don't imagine it could ever really be the same."

"It was the same for me in Izu. That's the thing. I recognized the place from the descriptions in the book. But it didn't feel right and finally wasn't what I'd imagined. I didn't get to see the mirage."

He didn't say so aloud, but Ando thought that Miyashita's grievance was incredibly juvenile. A novelist inevitably sees things through his own filter and describes them accordingly. That filter is unique to that author, and when readers imagine a landscape for themselves based on it, the result can't help but be at odds with reality. There's no way to accurately convey a scene to another person without a camera or a video camera. Language has its limits.

Suddenly bringing his face close to Ando's, Miyashita said, "On the other hand, what if…"

"You can talk and watch the road at the same time, can't you?" Ando pointed straight ahead, and Miyashita slowed down and moved over into the other lane.

"Do you remember when you read Ring?"

Ando could recall the exact date. It was the day after he'd borrowed the disk from Asakawa's brother, Junichiro. Ando had snatched each page up out of the printer and read it eagerly.

"I can even tell you the day. November 19th."

"I only read it through once."

The same was true for Ando. He'd read it once through and hadn't looked at it again. "So what?"

"In spite of that, I remember the scenes, vividly. I still think about them sometimes."

Ando found himself agreeing with this, too. The events and places described in Ring were extremely vivid; it was as if they'd burrowed into the folds of his brain. If he tried, he could recall each scene with great clarity. It was a highly graphic report. But then again, what of it?

Clueless as to what Miyashita was getting at, Ando didn't respond.

"I suddenly wondered how accurately the report was communicating the scenes it describes."

Miyashita's expression was still strangely peaceful, given the gravity of what he'd just uttered.

Now Ando grasped the nature of Miyashita's concern. What if the settings they had imagined while reading Ring differed not in the slightest from reality? Was that even possible?

"What if it was…" Ando's throat was dry as he uttered the words. The heater kept the car at a comfortable temperature, but it also dried out the air.

"Well, I thought we'd better check and see."

"I get it. So that's why you've dragged me along."

Ando finally knew their destination. They were headed for the South Hakone-Atami area, where many of the events narrated in Ring had taken place. They were going to see if the appearance of the various locations matched what they'd seen in their minds' eyes. And of course, two people were better than one for this. Ando and Miyashita could both have a look, discuss the sight, and hopefully come to a precise assessment.

"At first, I wasn't going to tell you until we got there. I didn't want you to be prejudiced."

"I'll be alright."

"I forgot to ask. You don't happen to have been to South Hakone Pacific Land before, right?"

"Of course not. I mean, have you?"

"I'd never even heard of the place until I read that thing."

So neither of them had been there. But when he closed his eyes, Ando could see in his mind the cabins that comprised Villa Log Cabin, scattered across a gentle slope. It was in cabin B-4 that this astonishing chain of events had begun. Beneath the porch was a hole that led to an old well that sank five or six yards into the ground. Twenty-five years ago a woman named Sadako Yamamura had been raped and thrown into the well-the dungeon in which Sadako's vengeful will mingled with the smallpox virus's will to propagate.

That was where Miyashita proposed they go.

Keeping Mt Hakone, shrouded in clouds, on their right, Miyashita drove through Manazuru toward Atami. According to Ring, they were to see signs for South Hakone Pacific Land as soon as they left Atami on the Atami-Kannami Highway. That was the route Miyashita and Ando were taking.

It was the first time either of them had been on the highway. Yet Ando had the illusion that he'd come this way before. Kazuyuki Asakawa had taken this route on October 11th. He'd gone on up a mountain road not knowing what awaited him in cabin B-4, though not without a sense of foreboding, either. It was almost noon, and the sky was clear and bright. On October 1lth it had been raining off and on, and Asakawa's windshield wipers had been on. Ando remembered reading that in Ring. Asakawa had stared uneasily through the windshield as the wipers scraped back and forth. Both the time of day and the weather were different, but Ando felt like he was suffering flashbacks. He saw the sign on the mountainside for Pacific Land. It looked familiar, the unusual script, in black on a white background. Miyashita unhesitatingly turned left and got on the steep mountain road as though he knew the way well.

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?

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 quarter-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.

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 eyes 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.

Bells rang and both trains pulled away at the same time, like sliding doors opening, revealing a clear view of the opposite platform. In the sudden stillness his eyes met hers again. His hunch had been right. She stood in exactly the same place as before, fixing him with the same steady gaze. Ando returned her gaze and nodded. He was signaling an intention to comply with her instructions.

Ando slowly began to walk toward the gate. Matching his movements, she went down the stairs on her side. They met at the ticket gate.

"We meet again," she said, as if this were coincidence. Ando didn't think so. He felt that she'd somehow known he'd pass through Sangubashi Station on that train. She'd been lying in wait for him. But it was no use resisting her charms now that she stood before him. Together they went through the ticket gate and turned into the little store-lined street beyond.

When he awoke the next morning, the woman lying next to him immediately asked him to take her to a movie that had just opened. It was the weekend, but as they went to the first showing, the theater wasn't too crowded.

The woman sat down leaving an open seat between her and Ando. Until they'd entered the theater, she'd been practically hanging from his arm, but now she suddenly wanted to keep her distance. The seats themselves were luxuriously large, so it wasn't a question of feeling cramped. Ando couldn't figure it out. But if he started listing everything she'd done that struck him as strange, it'd take him all day. All he knew was that she was Mai's sister and that her name was Masako.

He stared at the screen, but he couldn't follow the story. It was partly because he was still sleepy, but more than that, Masako's presence was distracting him. He remembered meeting her at Sangubashi Station the night before, but he couldn't quite reconstruct how he'd ended up taking her back to his apartment. He'd invited her to a bar in front of the station, where, over beers, he'd asked her name.

Masako Takano. I'm Mai's older sister.

Just as he'd guessed. She said she was two years older than Mai; she worked at a securities firm which she'd joined after graduating from a women's college. Everything after that point was hazy for Ando. He hadn't drunk that much, but he could only recall fragments. He couldn't recall who had suggested it, but one way or another, they'd ended up in Ando's apartment.

In the next scene he could recall, there was running water. In this fragment the context was clear. Masako was in the shower, and Ando was sitting on the bed waiting for her to come out.

The water stopped, and then Masako emerged from the hallway. She turned out the lights without even asking him; that moment, when everything went dark, left a strong impression. A second later, Masako pressed her naked upper body against him. Her wet hair was wrapped in a towel, which she held together with her left hand, and with her right, she grabbed Ando's head and pressed his face against her flesh. He felt sucked into her fine skin; his nose and mouth were covered, and he was starting to smother. It was all he could do to push her away enough for him to breathe. Then he filled his lungs with her fresh scent and put his arms around her…

The movie was unremarkable, so Ando spent the time dredging up bits and pieces of the previous night's weirdness. He hadn't been flesh to flesh with a woman for a year and a half. He'd ejaculated three times that he could remember. Not that it gave him any particular pride about his virility. He was about to turn thirty-five, and his managing to do it three times, at least, in one night said more about her beauty than his stamina. Only, now that he thought about it, he realized that everything that had happened in bed last night took place in complete darkness. It didn't matter how pretty Masako was, or how provocative she may have looked; Ando hadn't feasted on her with his eyes. Not only had she turned off the lights, but she'd covered the clock on the bedside table with a towel. She'd made the room truly dark, unwilling even to tolerate the faint trace of light coming from behind the face of the clock. Every one of her movements had betrayed an intense attachment to darkness.

Ando was pretending to watch the movie screen, but all the while he was secretly watching Masako. The darkness of the theater set off her beauty even more. Darkness became this woman.

She closed her eyes several times while watching the movie. She wasn't dozing off; her lips were moving. She appeared to be saying something, but Ando couldn't make out what. He leaned forward and to the left, resting his elbow on his knee.

Finally, by looking back and forth between her lips and the screen, Ando figured out what she was doing. Masako was repeating the characters' lines under her breath.

On screen, a bad street girl who had been transformed into a killing machine by a government agency was being sent out on her first mission. In this scene she wore a black dress and carried a huge pistol hidden in her handbag. She was entering a classy restaurant. It was a very tense moment in the film, with lots of rapid-fire dialogue.

Utterly indifferent to the movie, Ando watched Masako as she repeated the heroine's lines. Then, for a moment, Masako's voice and the heroine's overlapped. The movie was in French, with Japanese subtitles, but Masako's Japanese was perfectly in sync with the heroine's French. It was like a well-done choral recitation. Ando was shocked to see that sometimes Masako's mouth opened even before the subtitles appeared. She couldn't pull off such a feat unless she'd seen the movie enough times to memorize the dialogue.

For a while Masako lost herself in the heroine with a look of happiness on her face that Ando found amusing. But she seemed to feel his eyes upon her and abruptly shut her mouth. She didn't open it again, just staring at the screen thereafter.

As they left the theater, Masako squinted, stifled a yawn, and took Ando's arm. The winter sun shone softly, and Ando decided he'd rather touch Masako's skin directly than link arms with her. He separated his arm from hers and then held her hand. For a moment he felt a chill, but then their skin temperatures evened out, and Masako's hand relaxed in Ando's long fingers.

It was Coming of Age Day, and everywhere they looked there were young women dressed up in kimonos. Ando and Masako followed the crowd from Yurakucho toward Ginza. He intended to take her out to lunch, but had no particular place in mind. He planned to choose some likely-looking restaurant as they strolled along.

Masako kept looking around with evident curiosity at the Ginza streetcorners, and now and then she'd let slip a sigh. She didn't offer much in the way of conversation, but Ando didn't feel ill-at-ease with her. In fact, he felt a surge of satisfaction at being able to quietly stroll around Ginza on a sunny holiday.

Masako stopped in front of a hamburger joint on a corner and stared at its sign on the sidewalk. There was something of the innocence of a teenager in her earnest gaze.

"You want to eat here?" Ando asked.

"Uh-huh," she said, nodding vigorously. Ando went inside, glad he was getting off so cheaply.

Masako's appetite was simply astounding. In the blink of an eye she'd consumed two hamburgers and an order of fries, and was eyeing the counter again greedily.

It turned out to be ice cream she wanted now, so he ordered one and gave it to her. This time she ate slowly, as if she dreaded coming to the last bite. She carried each spoonful to her mouth with great care, but even so, she ended up dripping melted ice cream on her lap. Her stockings were flecked with drops of milky white mixed with bits of strawberry. She scooped up a drop with her index finger and licked it, then grew impatient. She clutched her shin with both hands, brought her mouth to her knee, and ran the tip of her tongue over it. Still in her curled-up position, she rolled her eyes and shot Ando a suggestive glance. There was provocation in her eyes, and Ando couldn't look away. She finished licking up the ice cream and lowered her leg again. There was a run in her new stockings. She must have snagged them with a canine tooth.

Ando had bought her those stockings that morning at a convenience store by the station. She didn't seem to own any; after all, she'd been walking around with bare legs in the middle of winter. Ando felt cold just looking at her, so he bought a pair of stockings without even checking with her. When he handed them to her she ran straight into a restroom to put them on, and she was still wearing them.

The run seemed to bother Masako, because she kept rubbing her knee.

Ando felt he'd never get tired of watching her every move. She came out of nowhere, and now I'm falling for her.

He wondered if he really was. Maybe he was just becoming desperate, dissolute. If he'd become a carrier of the ring virus as a result of having read that strange report, if his body was being eaten away by the hour, then his nascent pleasure was something he couldn't afford to lose.

Back in college, he'd read a novel set in a little mountain village that featured a female character who was rather like the woman he was confronted with now. The fictional woman is possessed of above-average looks, but because she doesn't speak and act like others, the villagers have branded her as crazy. She ends up providing comfort to men who have no fixed companions. The image of a woman without a home wandering the woods in a disheveled state, accepting the local men one and all without discrimination, embodied a certain high Eros, aided by the exotic setting. The mountain village gave the story a perfect harmony of character and setting, and at the time Ando had felt that if the author had placed such a woman in the city, the novel wouldn't have acquired the right atmosphere.

Well, he was in Ginza now, smack in the middle of Tokyo, not some alpine hamlet. But Masako had the same aura as the heroine of that book, and her modern beauty didn't seem at all out of place on a stool in a fast-food joint.

Ando suddenly remembered how the novel ended. Alone in the mountains, the woman gives birth to a child, having no idea who the father is. The story closes with that baby's first cries piercing the forest and echoing across the mountainside.

I can't let that happen.

Ando admonished himself. He had to take precautions to protect Masako's body. He recalled that the night before he'd been so overjoyed at the prospect of coupling that he'd forgotten himself and neglected to use birth control.

Masako was running her fingers in a circle over her kneecap, gradually making the hole bigger. The skin of her leg showed white where it peeked through the rent, so white as to make it a shame to cover it up with stockings.

The hole got bigger. Ando stopped her by laying his hand on top of hers.

He asked her, "What were you saying back there in the theater?" He meant to ask why she was repeating the characters' lines.

Masako's reply was: "Take me to a bookstore."

She liked to deflect his questions that way. She asked Ando to do things far more often than she answered his queries. But of course, Ando was incapable of saying no to her.

He took her to the biggest bookstore in Ginza. Masako flitted from shelf to shelf, in the end spending over an hour in the bookstore reading on her feet. Ando, who didn't share that habit, ended up wandering around aimlessly until he discovered, next to the registers, a stack of pamphlets from Shotoku, the publisher. Since he'd visited their offices only the other day, and the pamphlets were free, he picked one up.

The pamphlet included a short essay but consisted mainly of ads for future Shotoku releases.

I wonder if Ryuji's in here? Ando flipped through the pamphlet expectantly. The other day, Ryuji's editor Kimura had told Ando that Ryuji's collection of philosophical essays was just about to be published. Ando was hoping to see a friend's name in print.

But before he could find it, he was dragged out of the bookstore by Masako. "How about another movie?"

Her plea was a mild one, but the way she gripped his arm and pulled him along suggested she wouldn't take no for an answer. Maybe, while reading in the bookstore, she'd found out about another movie and decided she had to see it. Ando slipped the pamphlet into his coat pocket and asked, "What do you want to see?"

She didn't answer, but simply squeezed his hand and tugged him forward.

He hung back a bit, saying, "Pushy, aren't you?" Then he noticed that she was still clutching an event-guide magazine and came to a full stop. Masako hadn't spent a single yen since the night before. She hadn't made a move to pay for anything, always leaving it to Ando to pick up the tab. He didn't imagine for a moment that she'd purchased the magazine with her own money. Indeed, it wasn't in a bag, and she held it bare rolled up in her hand.

She lifted it.

Ando looked back toward the bookstore. Nobody was coming after them. She'd managed to elude the sharp eyes of the clerks. It was only a three-hundred yen magazine; even if she'd been caught, it wouldn't have been a big deal. As he let Masako pull him along, Ando was beginning to feel bolder than ever before.

When he put the key in the lock he could hear the phone in his apartment ringing. Figuring he wouldn't make it in time anyway, Ando decided not to hurry. He turned the knob. When friends called, they usually only let the phone ring five or six times, because they knew how small his apartment was. Hence he could usually guess the caller by how long it took him or her to give up. As he'd expected, by the time he got the door open the ringing had stopped, a sure sign of someone who knew him and how he lived. There weren't too many people who had visited him. It was probably Miyashita, Ando figured, looking at his watch. It was just past eight o'clock in the evening.

He opened the door wider and beckoned Masako inside, then turned on the lights and the heat. Clothing was scattered about exactly as they'd left it that morning. Masako had left her belongings there, seemingly having decided to spend another night with Ando.

Ando's shoulders and back were stiff from watching movies in the morning and afternoon. He wanted a soak in the tub.

Starting to take off his coat, he found the publisher's pamphlet in his pocket. He took it out and placed it on the bedside table, thinking to examine it at leisure after a bath. He'd decided to buy Ryuji's book, and he needed to look up the title and publication date.

He stripped down to his shirt and rolled up his cuffs. He gave the tub a quick rinse and then adjusted the water temperature and started to fill it. It wasn't a large tub, so it wasn't long before it was ready. The bathroom was full of steam, and turning on the fan didn't do much good. He thought he'd have Masako bathe first, so he stuck his head into the other room. She was sitting on the edge of the bed taking off her stockings.

"Would you like to take a bath?"

She stood up. At the same time, the phone rang.

As Ando walked to the telephone, Masako took his place in the bathroom, disappearing behind the accordion-style shower curtain.

It was Miyashita, as he'd expected. As soon as Ando had the receiver to his ear, his friend yelled, "Where the hell have you been all day?"

"At the movies."

Miyashita obviously hadn't expected that answer. "At the movies?" he blurted.

"Two of them, in fact."

"Must be nice not to have a care in the world," Miyashita sneered in heartfelt disgust. Then he continued with his harangue. "I don't know how many times I tried to call you."

"I do go out, you know."

"Well, whatever. Do you know where I am now?"

Where was Miyashita calling from? It didn't sound like he was at home. Ando could hear cars. He must have been in a roadside phone booth somewhere.

"Please don't tell me you're in the neighborhood and you want to come up?"

Now was a bad time. Masako was in the bath. Ando was prepared to refuse if that was Miyashita's plan.

"Don't be an idiot. Think theater, man, the stage."

"What are you talking about?"

Now it was Ando's turn to be annoyed. What right did Miyashita have to criticize him for watching movies when he was going to plays? But that wasn't what Miyashita was up to.

"I'm at the offices of Theater Group Soaring."

The name rang a bell. Where had he seen it before? He remembered-in Ring. It was the name of the troupe Sadako Yamamura had belonged to prior to her death.

"What the hell are you doing there?"

"Yesterday I realized that the descriptions in Ring were so precise and objective that it was like they'd been observed through the viewfinder of a video camera."

"Me, too."

Why were they going through all that again? Ando spotted the Shotoku pamphlet on the table and pulled it over next him so he could take notes on it. It was a habit of his to take notes while he was on the phone; it calmed him down. His customary phone-conversation posture was receiver wedged between his ear and left shoulder, ballpoint pen in right hand.

"Well, I realized today that there was one more thing to check on. I mean, if we wanted to look at faces, we didn't need to go all the way to Atami, did we?"

Ando was getting impatient. He couldn't see where Miyashita was going. "Just tell me already."

Miyashita finally came out with it. "I'm talking about Sadako Yamamura."

"Come on, she died in 1966." But wait… Ando suddenly realized why Miyashita had visited the theater group. "The photograph."

He remembered reading in Ring that Asakawa's colleague Yoshino had visited the troupe's rehearsal space and seen Sadako's portfolio. This was something she'd submitted when she'd joined the troupe, and included two photos, a full-length one and one from the chest up. Yoshino had made copies of them.

"Finally got it, huh? All along, it was easy as pie to feast our eyes on Sadako."

Ando summoned up his mental image of Sadako. Thanks to Ring, he had quite a strong impression stored away in his brain. Tall and slender, with only a modest bustline but perfectly balanced in her proportions. Her facial features were somewhat androgynous, but she had perfect eyes and a perfect nose, with nothing about them he would change if he could. He imagined her as an unapproachable beauty.

Ando whipped up some courage and asked, "And how about it? Have you gotten them to show you the photos?"

Miyashita had probably seen them, and the face in the photos and the one in his mind had probably been identical. That was the reply Ando expected.

But what he heard from the other end of the line was a sigh.

"It's different."

"You mean…"

"The face is different."

Ando didn't know what to say.

"I don't know how to put it. The Sadako Yamamura in the photos is not the one I pictured. She's beautiful, no question, but… How can I put it?"

"What do you mean?"

"What do I mean? Hell, I'm just confused. But I did remember something. I had a friend who was good at drawing people's portraits, and I asked him once what type of face was the hardest to draw for him. And he told me there wasn't any particular type of face he couldn't draw. He said all faces had peculiarities that made them easy to capture in convincing portraits. But if he had to pick one, he said, the hardest type to draw, for him, was his own face. Especially when the self-portraitist is a very self-conscious sort, it's next to impossible to make the picture match the reality. It always comes out looking like someone else."

"So?" What did that have to do with the question at hand?

"Nothing, I guess. I was just reminded of him, that's all. But take the videotape. It wasn't shot with a camera, right? Those images came from Sadako's eyes and mind. And in spite of that…"

"What?"

"It captured places and people accurately."

"We didn't actually see the video, you know."

"But we read Ring."

Ando was getting annoyed. Miyashita seemed to be dancing around the subject. He was like a child who wanted to go somewhere but was afraid to take the first step.

"Look, Miyashita, why don't you just tell me what's on your mind?"

Ando could hear Miyashita take a deep breath.

"Did Kazuyuki Asakawa really write Ring?"

Who else could have? Ando started to say, but heard a beep signaling that Miyashita's phone card was about to run out.

"Crap, my card's almost used up. Can your fax machine handle photos?" Miyashita spoke fast.

"That's what the guy said when he sold it to me."

"Great, I'll fax them to you. I want you to check right away to see if she's different from what you imagined, or if I'm just-"

And with that they were cut off.

Ando sat there for a minute with the receiver still on his shoulder, in a daze. The noise of the shower stopped, and the apartment was wrapped in stillness. Feeling a chill breeze, he looked over to see that the window was open a crack, admitting the wintry night air. In the distance, a car horn sounded. The dry, harsh noise testified to how desiccated the outside air was. In contrast, the air inside his apartment was almost wringing with moisture as steam seeped out from the bathroom. Masako was taking a long time.

Ando thought over what Miyashita had said. He could understand his friend's state of mind. Probably he'd spent the whole day on pins and needles, and rather than just sit around and wonder whether the ring virus had entered his body because he'd read Ring, he'd decided to act.

When he'd remembered that the acting troupe had kept photos of Sadako, he'd gone over to check. Surprisingly, the photos hadn't matched his mental image. Unable to judge whether this was simply due to some blockage on his part, he'd copied the photos, so he could get Ando's opinion. And now he was going to fax them over.

Ando glanced at the fax machine. No movement yet.

He looked away from it. His eyes came to rest on the publisher's pamphlet. He picked it up and started to flip through it while he waited. Upcoming publications were listed in the back. Under the heading "New in February" fifteen or so titles were listed, each one followed by the name of the author and a dozen or so words describing the contents. About halfway down Ando saw Ryuji's name. The title was still The Structure of Knowledge, and the summary said it represented "the cutting edge of contemporary thought". On the list it was sandwiched between a romance novel and a collection of behind-the-scenes essays about the television industry, making it seem even more eggheaded. But this was his friend's last work being published posthumously. Ando would give it a read no matter how difficult it was. He circled the entry.

He felt something click in his mind. He couldn't figure out what. Still holding the pen, he thought hard. It seemed to him that he'd seen a familiar word on that page of the pamphlet. He looked again. The bottom half of the page was taken up with a list, in smaller type, of books coming out in March. He looked at the third title from the end.

And then his eyes grew wide with shock. At first he wondered if it was just a coincidence, but then he saw the name of the author.

New in March:

. . .

. . .

RING by Junichiro Asakawa. Bloodcurdling cult horror.

Ando let the pamphlet slip out of his hand. He was going to publish that?

Now he understood why Junichiro had been so standoff-ish that day when Ando had run into him in the Shotoku lounge. He'd decided to tweak his brother's reportage and publish it as a novel. And since Ando was the one person who knew Junichiro was using his brother's work without consent, it was no wonder he'd been so cold that day, fleeing after hardly the most perfunctory of greetings. Had they talked for long, the subject of the report would have come up, and his editors might have found out. Junichiro obviously wanted to claim the book as being entirely his own.

"It mustn't go to press!" Ando cried out loud. At the very least, he had to get Junichiro to delay publication until it could be established that Ring was physically harmless. It was his duty as a medical professional. Tomorrow, he and Miyashita would have their blood tested. It would take several days for the results to come back. If they were positive, if he and Miyashita turned out to be carriers of the ring virus, then publication of that book could have catastrophic consequences. The original videotape could only spread at the rate of one copy at a time. Publication involved numbers of an entirely different scale, ten thousand copies at least. In a worst-case scenario, hundreds of thousands, even millions, of copies would be disseminated throughout the country.

Ando's teeth chattered as he imagined a huge tsunami. A vast, dark wall of ocean bearing down silently, driving before it a wind that he thought he could feel on him even now. He went to the window and shut it tightly. Standing by the window, he looked back toward the hall. Masako stood there, wrapped in a towel; he saw her face in profile. She was rummaging through her bag, probably for underwear.

The phone rang. Ando picked up the receiver, and when he confirmed that it was an incoming fax, he pushed the start button on the fax machine. Miyashita was sending him the photos.

A few seconds later, the fax machine whirred to life and began printing. Ando stood motionless over the black machine, staring at the sheet slowly emerging from it. He felt someone sneak up behind him and turned to look. It was Masako, wearing only panties. She'd draped the towel over her shoulders and was standing directly behind him. Her face was flushed, and her eyes had a new gleam, so lustrous as to make him want to hold her and kiss her eyelids then and there. She wore a strangely resolute expression.

The fax machine beeped to say it was done printing. Ando tore off the fax, sat down on the bed, and had a look. The transmission consisted of two photos, side by side. The printout wasn't quite photo quality, but it was clear enough for him to make out Sadako Yamamura's face and body.

He screamed. The woman in the photos was indeed different from what he'd imagined. But that wasn't why he'd screamed. The photos on the fax were of the woman standing in front of him now.

She took the fax out of his hands and looked at the photos. Ando stared up at her weakly, like a boy getting a scolding from his mother. Finally he managed to wring words from his throat.

"You're… Sadako Yamamura." Not Masako, not Mai's sister-those were lies.

Her expression relaxed. Perhaps she found Ando's consternation funny, for she seemed to be smiling.

Ando's mind went blank. It was the first time he ever fainted in his almost thirty-five years.

Ando was unconscious for less than a minute, but that was enough. With no way to process the facts thrust into his face, he'd had no other option but to stop thinking altogether. Perhaps his consciousness would have been able to deal with it if he'd had a little more time, or more composure to begin with. If he'd even remotely entertained the possibility beforehand, maybe he wouldn't have had to faint.

But as it was, it came all too suddenly. To find out that a woman who had died twenty-five years ago was standing right in front of him, and remembering making love to her several times the night before… In that instant he'd gone to the brink of insanity, and his brain circuitry had been forced to shut down momentarily. Most people would faint if they got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and turned around to find a dead person standing there. That's how people escape from horrors presented to them; once you faint, you no longer have to endure the unendurable. Only with that cushion of unconsciousness are we able to prepare ourselves to accept reality.

When consciousness returned to him, Ando thought he could smell burning flesh somewhere. He should have been lying face down on the bed, but somehow he was on his back looking up instead. Had he rolled over himself, or had someone turned him over? Only his upper body was actually on the bed; his legs, though neatly arranged, were hanging out onto the floor. Without otherwise moving a muscle, Ando sniffed the air and listened for sounds. He opened his eyes a slit. He had no intention of reawakening all his senses at once. He meant to ease himself into acceptance. Otherwise he'd probably suffer the same reaction all over again.

He could hear water spurting from a faucet. The sound probably came from the bathroom, but it sounded like the distant burbling of a brook. The noise of the water hid the night sounds of the city. Normally he should have been able to hear the cars rushing by on the Metropolitan Expressway. He eased his eyes open. In the middle of the ceiling two twenty-watt fluorescent bulbs glowed, casting a bright light over the whole room.

Moving only his eyes, Ando looked around the room. Then, gingerly, he sat up. He couldn't see anybody around. Just as he was starting to wonder if his imagination was playing tricks on him, the water stopped. He held his breath without meaning to.

The woman emerged from behind a corner in the hallway. Just as before, she wore nothing but panties and held a wrung-out towel.

Ando tried to scream, but no sound came out. He brushed away the hand offering him a wet towel and got unsteadily to his feet. Then he backed up until he was flat against the wall. He tried to scream her name, but he still couldn't find his voice.

Sadako Yamamura!

He tried to recall everything he knew about her. Twenty-five years ago she'd been murdered, thrown into an old well. She had created that awful videotape by means of thought projection. She possessed paranormal powers. She had testic-ular feminization syndrome; she was a hermaphrodite. Ando turned his stare on her lower body. There was no visible bulge under the white panties that covered her crotch. Of course, her testicles were not supposed to be readily visible. But Ando had touched her down there last night, caressed her over and over. Nothing had struck him as odd; she was in every way perfectly female as far as he could tell. But he hadn't been able to see. Everything they'd done the night before had been done in darkness. Ando suddenly wondered what her obsession with darkness was meant to prevent him from seeing.

The otherworldliness he'd felt on first meeting her hadn't been off the mark after all. That time in the elevator in Mai's building, he'd been desperate to distance himself from her-just like now. The way she'd just appeared like that from Mai's apartment, he'd had no idea where she'd come from and still didn't.

He had so many questions, but he could hardly breathe much less ask he

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 654