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PREVIOUS c0tuMNs Engineof Disquiet LouisianaBreakdown PatternRec0qnition TheBraided world By dshn Gj,\,$** Summerland The HauntedAir S t is titring cycledtoo far, fatallywatered down (though NebulaAwards it rainsa lot in Seattle,where this versionis set), which may help explain Showcase2002 why the storyline,so adulteratedin its descentfrom the originalsource, has lne biftnoavor rne becomepretty confusing. But today we have the originalnovel at last, Rlng, Worldand Other very competentlytranslated by RobertB, Rohmerand GlynneWalley, a tale Stories gives off a very clear (we will now stop making ringjokes) ring. The Years of Rice and Salt The first thing to note,given the hi-techfeel of the Ring Hauntinq A Winter tale's dependencyon what have become low-tech Ey KoiiSuzuki Vitals technologies,like VHS and floppydisks, is that Verlical,lnc. Rohmerand Walleyhave made absolutely no Redshift:Extreme Hardcover Suzuki'soriginal text, which V;sion$of attemptto modernize 288pages Specu'ativeFiction is set specificallyin 1990.Ring takesus resolutely MSRF:$24.95 back,therefore, to Japanthe MiracleState, Japan ISEN:1832234004 CountinqCouD beforethe Fall. Propertyvalues are rising BlackHouse everywhere.Super'fast trains traverse great Nekropolis distanceswithout disaster. The protagonistsof the book-Kazayuki practice give StranqerThinqs Asakawa(l follow Western and the surnamesecond), who is Happen an industriousreporter for a prosperouspaper, and RyujiTakayama, who is a philosophyprofessor longing to thrusthimself through the wall of the ImmodestProposals worldinto some kindof ultimateexperience-have no anxietiesabout the The Conan fate of Japan.To say this is to say somethingpretty significant about a text Chronicles,Vols. 1 & generatedfrom within a culturewhose most famous productsinclude ?" Godzilla,the novelsof the great Kobo Abe (urbanfantasies read as though ChasmCitv they were set in quicksand),and Sakyo Komatsu'sJapan Slnks (trans Hammerfall 1978),whose title itselfis an extremeexpression of deep culturalanxiety of http ://www. scifi .com/sfw/cunent/excess.html PageI of4 Excessive Candour 4/23/033:28 PM

The PickupArtist this rivenfolk. But the perilsAsakawa and Takayamaface are centripetal; theydo not shakethe island. Ship of Fools Returnt0 the Whorl So we are in a land of prosperousoverachievement, where horrors-the Lookto Windward pleasuresof the text-can reverberateto their own drummer.Asakawa's young niece has just died mysteriously,with an expressionof terrible In the StoneHouse anguishon her face, apparentlyof a heartattack. Sensitized by this, he Declare hearsalarm bells in the tale his taxi drivertells him: of waitingout a red light ThirteenPhantasms besidea youngmotorcyclist, who suddenly keels gvp_-r"..dea.d,.of a.heart The Tellinq attack,at exactlythe sametime his niecedie{r-$lou/y,-venCSlewly-l{Ak- I worksas a slowcrescendo; by novel'send, thift'gs-are happening very fast In Green'slunqles indeed,as thoughthe text had been tracinga slow reverb back upstream, ProbabilityMoon to a fasterand faster beat, until it reachesat last the originaltone that set Ash the future ringsto), very very slowly,Asakawa discovers that two more teenagershave died of heart attacks,that they knew one another,that all PerdidoStreet (to Station four had surreptitiouslyrented a cottagein a seasideresort have sex in, he assumes)just a week beforetheir simultaneous exits. Galveston RevelationSpace A taLe of the tape PerpetuityBlues and Other Stories ScienceFiction of Asakawagoes to the resort,rents the cabin,finds an unmarkedVHS tape the 20th Century;An they had apparentlywatched; and watchesit. lt is partlyabstract, partly a IllustratedHistorv sequenceof images:a volcano,an old woman predictingthe birth of a boy, The Book of a venomousmob, a ragingman with a wound.Words then appearon the Confluence screen,to the effectthat, unlessa certainaction is performed,anyone who views the video will die in seven days. But Asakawacannot discover these Thereand Back Aqain vital instructions,as the remainderof the sequencehas been taped over. Thiscould all havebeen a joke; butAsakawa jumps immediately to the Blue'sWaters On conclusionthat what the video says is somehowfrue (thisabrupt, almost Ail Tomorrow's decorouslurch into obedient belief in a commandof thissort might,a little Pafties vulgarlyperhaps, be thoughtof as purelyJapanese-an aliennessto Half Life Westernmodalities that the translators.conveywithout flinching). Ender'sShadow We now meet Ryuji,who is always addressedby his given name, and who The Rift insistson viewingthe tape himself.(ln the U.S. remakeof 2002,the female When We Were Real protagonisthas her ex-boyfriendview the sequence,which is a bit as Darwin'$REdio thoughshe'd found out she had AIDS and immediatelyslept with the guy; originaltext, and the Japanesefilm, avoidthis surrealobscenity.) To I ne urct!onarvor the ScienceFiction Places Westerneyes, Ryuji sounds a bit likeYukio Mishima,the Japanesenovelist who disemboweledhimself in public,compressing, as it were, Rimbaud's A Deepnessin the longlong death into an existentiallycharged, sublime instant. Whatever the Sky reason,we feel oddly comfortablewith his plungeinto viewingthe fatal I ne uraqonsor tape,almost as thoughto do so were,in thisstrange universe of 1990 Sprinqplace Japan,the donething. The Good New St{rff TheTwinklinq of an Eventscontinue to accelerate.With the aid of colleagues,the two beginto work out that somethingparanormal is affectingthem. On analysis,the tape The Good Oid Stuff provesnot in fact to containa recordingin any usual sense-what is imprintedhere turns out to be a patternof intensevisual memories, The GoldenGlobe memoriesof the sort that peopleare reputedto experienceat the moment The DreamsOur of death.The terrifyingflickers of blacknessin the sequence,which evoke a Stuff Is Made0f sense of abyssalnothingness in Asakawa,are caused by the blinkingof BlackGlass the eyelidsof the personwhose inner vision has imprintedthe tape (this Six Mosn Dance terrifyingflicker sounds uncannilylike the demonicabyss that flickersin betweeneach film ftame, 24 times a second,in TheodoreRoszak's Darwinia Flicker-but there must have been some fibrillationin the zeitgeist,as both Weird Women, novelswere both published,more or lesssimultaneously, in 1991).The Wired Women volcano,and the old woman,are tracedto Oshima,a realisland in the Girl in Landscape Pacific,directly south of the real peninsulawhere the resortis sited. Parallel The Smithsonian chainsof investigationlead to SadakoYamamura, the illegitimatechild of a Institution dead motherwho went to the mainlandto becomean actressbut who years earlier.Further search connectsher to Moonfall disappeared30 university experimentsin the paranormal.lt becomesclear that she may somehow The Sparrow; havebeen capable of layinga geas or wanweirdon the VHS, whichwould Childrenof God then operateas a curse. Even furtherresearch places her in the httD://www. scifi .com/sfw/cunent/excess.html Page 2 of 4 Excessive Candour 4123/033:28 PM

Cosm tuberculosissanatorium which, years later, was turnedinto a resort.... To $ay Nothinqof the Doq Timeis runningout, all the same.Asakawa finally locates Sadako's grave The Calclitta (unsurprisingly,it is in a well directlyunder the cabinwhere the VHS had Chromosome beenimprinted with her dyingmemories of vengeanceand famishment), the novel seems to come to a not unexpectedclimax: by disinterring Expendable and Sadako'sskull and returningit to her family on Oshima,Asakawa survives The Riseof beyondthe seven days. The revenantSadako has been liberatedfrom Endymian bondageand waterand the dark;she has beenappeased; she can rest. Jack Faust,A Sort of thing. Geoqraphyof UnknownLands Destinv's Road Ring without end, amen Eternitv Road is climax.One day later(seven he Lives of the Monster Butthis onlya seeming daysafter Doqs viewedthe VHS), Ryuji dies in agony,of an apparentheart attack.The curse has nof been lifted.We now realizethat we do not know how Fire God's Asakawahas survived,nor do we know what instructionwas wiped from the originaltape; and we now rememberthat, so far, we have not begunto understandthe meaningof the title.And what is the the significanceof the lastcase of smallpoxin Japan,which the authorhas broughtup a coupleof times so far? And there is a furtherproblem for the plot to solve:Asakawa's wife and child(who is transmogrifiedin the 2002 remakeinto a demonic nuisance)have inadvertentlyseen the VHS: how to save them? €SfuWY I don't normallypay much attentionto Spoiler'sCode in reviews,as it has weffiilffi alwaysseemed a contradictionin terms to write a responseto a work of art withoutsaying what it does; but in the case of Ring, it seemsto me that WffiEW much of the pleasureof the text lies in its successfulretardation of genuine revelation,a revelationwhich changesthe meaningof, but does not turn ##ffiwM,qs into mere sound and fury, everythingthat happensup to this point. In the last page or so of Ring, Asakawafigures it all out. To save his wife and sww child,he mustget to them in time.Fortunately it is Sunday,he will haveno difficultydriving back to where they are staying.But saving his familywill {wsrfslw necessarilyentail puttingothers-putting eventuallythe entire world-at risk.What shouldhe do? As in real life,there is no real debate here.The sww€ novel ends in a foreordainedslingshot: Asakawa will save his wife and child.What the noveldoes not tell us, as the last page closes,is the cost.

So the lastpage hurls us out. lt has beena ride.Suzuki depends on nothing-as far as the translationcan depose,he is a writer of reportorial speed and directness,but little rhetoricalrange-on the crescendoof story 11, ,+'#ffi he is riding.Each event in Ring is slowerand quieterthan its successor. l{{ Everythingis subordinateto Next. Suzuki himself,who does not advertise his craft,seems more like a jockey than a writer.But that is only seeming.Rrng is as.writtenas a sonngt.llis a.Leng_jneof d,isouiet. er"{s^+.

Johlillufe is a witer, editor, citic and scholar of science fiction. His first novel for 25 years, Appfeseed. was a New York Times Notable Book for 2002. He is the author of Science Fiction: The lllustrated Encyclopedia and co-editor of both The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, all Hugo Award winners. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times. The Washington Post, Omni, F&SF and elsewhere. Much of this material has been collected rn Sfrokes: Reviews and Essays 1966-1986,Look at the Evidence: Reviews and Essays, and the forthcoming Scores.' Reviews 1993-2003, which will include the first 76 "ExcessiveCandour" columns and other pieces.A/so forthcoming is An Historical Dictionary of Horror Literature.

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