The Ring :

The Japanese Comic Versions

Nothing is simple.  I wanted to review the Japanese horror novel, The Ring.  After the success of the American remake of the film version of this Japanese horror blockbuster, the manga publisher, Viz Communications, announced it would publish an English translation of the original book.  Viz later announced that negotiations with Kadokawa fell through and that the publisher, Vertical, picked it up for publication late this year.  So, with no translation to look at, reading the novel by Koji Suzuki proved too difficult for me (in a reasonable amount of time).   Fortunately, there are two comic book versions of the story. One follows the novel, and the other, the Japanese movie.  I chose the former because it is based on a better story, though the latter better parallels the American film (and therefore tells the story most of you are familiar with).

Like I said, nothing is simple: The history of the novel and its subsequent sequels, both filmed and in print, is convoluted.  In the novel, Kazuyuki Asekawa, a male journalist, who investigates the mysterious death of his niece, is the protagonist.  In the first film, a movie made for television, the hero is still a man, but in the theatrical release of The Ring, the main character becomes Reiko Asekawa (a.k.a. Rachel Keller in the American film) , a woman who works for a television studio; and Kazuyuki's burly cohort, Ryuji, becomes Reiko's slim, cool ex-husband.

The comic version of the novel keeps the novel's male protagonist.  It starts with the tragic events of the night of September 5th. Asekawa's niece, Tomoko, is studying alone at home and finds she is not alone.  Without showing her death, the story switches to Asekawa, who rapidly pieces together the simultaneous deaths of Tomoko and her three friends.  His investigation leads him to the now famous cabin B-4 in the Pacific Land resort, where the foursome saw the cursed videotape.  In the same cabin they rented, Asekawa watches the dreadful video. It is a sequence of mysterious images: a volcano, a baby, an angry audience, a man with a wounded shoulder and view of a well from its bottom.  It fills Asekawa with horror, and when it ends the strange sounds and an eerie phone call convince him that he only has a week to live.

He enlists the help of his friend Ryuji, who also watches the video, and goes on a quest for answers.  This kind of discovery plot is common in horror. Adding a time limit makes it more dreadful.  Another common theme In horror lore is that the unclean, or infected, must purge themselves or die.  The implication of the novel and the comic is that watching the video makes the viewer unclean.  To this end, Asekawa begins to wonder if the curse of the video tape is a kind of virus that needs a week to incubate. Japanese horror often favors combining biological horror with the supernatural, a kind of a double whammy. Asekawa and his friend are not doctors or scientists, so finding a medical solution is doubtful.  In the end, they find out that a psychic girl, Sadako Yamamura, is seeking revenge from her watery grave.

In the comic version of the Japanese movie, Misao Inagaki does a fine job of translating Sadako's vengeance to comic book form.  His stark, uncluttered graphics and striking layouts are superior example of modern Japanese horror comics. The dialog is easily readable and includes Japanese furigana, small characters that give the sounds of the complex Chinese characters or Kanji.

The premise of this version of the story is that a cursed videotape is circulating in Japan.  After watching it, the viewer has one week to live. The action opens with the unexplained death of Tomoko Oishi, a 17 year-old high school student.  She appeared to have died of fright at home. Her aunt, Ms. Asekawa, is an investigative reporter for a television station.  After talking to her sister, Tomoko's mother, and some of Tomoko's classmates, she decides to investigate her niece's death.  The first unnerving fact she uncovers is that three of her niece's friends died at exactly the same time as her niece. She finds out that the four of them all stayed together in a cabin a week before their deaths, and all watched the videotape.  Asekawa drives out to the rental cabins and spots the an unlabeled videotape behind the front desk.  She borrows it and watches in the same cabin where the four of them stayed.

Again, the video is an odd montage of strange images. It features an erupting volcano, rolling dice, a crying baby, a well, a sea of faces, and a strange old woman who talks about the undead.  The film ends with a warning, "You will die in seven days time unless..." and then cuts off.  So now, Asegawa is cursed, and the story follows her efforts at decrypting the mysterious imagery of the video. She enlists the aid of her ex-husband, Ryuji, a cold, detached college professor who finds the video intriguing. Though a failure as a husband and father, he proves himself to be invaluable in getting to the bottom of the mystery.

The story is very effective because of the deadline, the heightening sense of dread, and the terrible ways in which the four friends die.  From the tape, Asekawa knows she has seven days to live and a mountain of data to sift through to understand the arcane images on the tape.  As the story develops, she finds more and more convincing evidence that the tape is really cursed and that she is going to die.  She fears that her son will be left alone in the world. Ryuji does not believe that Asekawa is cursed by the videotape until she gives him a bit of concrete evidence.  A picture of the four friends taken outside the fated cabin in the woods shows their faces hideously distorted. Asekawa makes Ryuji take her photo with a Polaroid camera.  Her face also appears disfigured.

With Ryuji convinced, the story moves into high gear.  With only a few days left, they do massive research to unravel the meaning of the videotape. As the story reaches its climax, they identify the volcano, the girl in the photo and finally the well. The girl is Sadako, the cause of all the horror.  So they go to the island where Sadako lived.  Finding her house, they see more details from the picture, including a doctor who was the young man in the video.

(A spoiler follows, so skip the next paragraph if you plan to see the Japanese movie.)

When the doctor was a young intern, he treated Sadako's father.  He was deathly afraid of his daughter, and the intern could not figure out why. One day when Sadako visited her father in the hospital, the intern follows her.  Curiosity turns to lust, and he throws her to the ground, apparently trying to rape her. She resists by savagely biting his shoulder.  She telepathically warns him that she'll kill him. Frightened, he throws her in the well and drops stones on top of her.  The ending finally reveals the secret of the tape.  It is as gripping a scene in the comic book as it is the film, and it challenges the traditional idea of appeasing an angry spirit.

The events make Asekawa and her son, Goichi closer.  He becomes a higher priority in her life than ever.  This is one of the themes of the comic and the book: evil forces are everywhere and are always ready to snatch away loved ones.  Stories need to be told. People must become closer.

Despite how enjoyable both of these texts are, they suffer from the typical weakness of comics--a lack of character development.  The protagonists have simple motivations and possess little depth.  The comic artists seem to rely on facial expressions and cultural cues to reveal what the characters are thinking or feeling, and much of this is lost on a non-Japanese reader.  The plot develops without giving much hint about the background of the characters, what made them the way they are, and how the events of the story change their thoughts and actions.