“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 11th i
t 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 déjà 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 déjà 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?
2
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.<
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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 “Thank you.” He had trouble expressing gratitude in a straightforward manner.