The Complete Ring Trilogy: Ring, Spiral, Loop. Koji Suzuki

out what to say, he started out like this. Now listen, you.

      “I know what you’re thinking, sir.”

      “Now, I’m not saying it’s not interesting. We don’t know what’ll jump out at us. But, look. If what jumps out at us looks anything like it did that other time, I won’t like it very much.”

      Last time. Oguri still believed that the occult boom two years ago had been engineered. He hated the occult for all he’d gone through on account of it, and his bias was alive and kicking after two years.

      “I’m not trying to suggest anything mystical here. All I’m saying is that it couldn’t have been a coincidence.”

      “A coincidence. Hmm …” Oguri cupped a hand to his ear and once again tried to sort out the story.

      Asakawa’s wife’s niece, Tomoko Oishi, had died at her home in Honmoku at around 11 p.m. on the fifth of September. The cause of death was “sudden heart failure”. She was a high school senior, only seventeen. On the same day at the same time, a nineteen-year-old prep school student on a motorcycle had died, also of a cardiac infarction, while waiting for a light in front of Shinagawa Station.

      “It sounds to me like nothing but coincidence. You hear about the accident from your cab driver, and you remember your wife’s niece. Nothing more than that, right?”

      “On the contrary,” Asakawa stated, and paused for effect. Then he said, “The kid on the motorcycle, at the moment he died, was struggling to pull off his helmet.”

      “… So?”

      “Tomoko, too—when her body was discovered, she seemed to have been tearing at her head. Her fingers were tightly entwined in her own hair.”

      Asakawa had met Tomoko on several occasions. Like any high school girl, she paid a lot of attention to her hair, shampooing it every day, that sort of thing. Why would a girl like that be tearing out her precious hair? He didn’t know the true nature of whatever it was that had made her do that, but every time Asakawa thought of her pulling desperately at her hair, he imagined some sort of invisible thing to go along with the indescribable horror she must have felt.

      “I don’t know … Now listen, you. Are you sure you’re not coming at this with preconceptions? If you took any two incidents, you could find things in common if you looked hard enough. You’re saying they both died of a heart attack. So they must have been in a lot of pain. So she’s pulling at her hair, he’s struggling with his helmet … It actually sounds pretty normal to me.”

      While he had to recognize that this was a possibility, Asakawa shook his head. He wasn’t going to be defeated so easily.

      “But, sir, then it would be the chest that hurt. Why should they be tearing at their heads?”

      “Now listen, you. Have you ever had a heart attack?”

      “Well … no.”

      “And have you asked a doctor about it?”

      “About what?”

      “About whether or not a person having a heart attack would tear at his head?”

      Asakawa fell silent. He had, in fact, asked a doctor. The doctor had replied, I couldn’t rule it out. It was a wishy-washy answer. After all, the opposite sometimes happens. Sometimes when a person experiences a cerebral hemorrhage, or bleeding in the cerebral membrane, they feel stomach discomfort at the same time as a headache.

      “So it depends on the individual. When there’s a tough math problem, some people scratch their heads, some people smoke. Some people may even rub their bellies.” Oguri swiveled in his chair as he said this. “The point is, we can’t say anything at this stage, can we? We don’t have space for that stuff. You know, because of what happened two years ago. We won’t touch this kind of thing, not lightly. If we felt fine about speculating in print, then we could, of course.”

      Maybe so. Maybe it was just like his editor said, it was a freak coincidence. But still—in the end the doctor had just shaken his head. He’d pressed the doctor—do heart attack victims really pull out their own hair? And the doctor had just frowned and said, Hmmm. His look said it all: none of the patients he’d seen had acted like that.

      “Yes, sir. I understand.”

      At the moment there was nothing to do but retreat meekly. If he couldn’t discover a more objective connection between the two incidents, it would be difficult to convince his editor. Asakawa promised himself that if he couldn’t dig up anything, he’d just shut up and leave it alone.

4

      Asakawa hung up the phone and stayed there like that for a while, motionless, his hand still on the receiver. The sound of his own unnecessarily excited voice, hanging on the other person’s reaction, still echoed in his ears. He had a feeling he wasn’t going to be able to do this. The person on the other end had taken the phone from his secretary with a suitably pompous tone, but as he’d listened to Asakawa’s proposal the tone of his voice had softened somewhat. At first he’d probably thought Asakawa was calling about advertising. Then he’d done some quick calculating and realized the potential profit in having an article written profiling him.

      The “Top Interview” series had begun running in September. The idea was to spotlight a CEO who had built up his company on his own, focusing on the obstacles he’d overcome and how. Considering that he’d actually succeeded in getting an appointment to do the interview, Asakawa should have been able to hang up the phone with a little more satisfaction. But something weighed on him. All he’d hear from this philistine were the same old corporate war stories, boasts about what a genius he was, how he’d seized his opportunities and clawed his way to the top … If Asakawa didn’t thank him and stand up to leave, the tales of valor would go on forever. He was sick of it. He detested whoever had come up with this project. He knew, all too well, that the magazine had to sell ad space to survive, and that this kind of article laid the necessary groundwork for that. But Asakawa himself didn’t much care if the company made money or lost it. All that mattered to him was whether or not the work was engaging. No matter how easy a job was physically, if it didn’t involve any imagination, it usually ended up exhausting you.

      Asakawa headed for the archives on the fourth floor. He needed to do some background reading for the interview tomorrow, but more than that, there was something that was bothering him. The idea of an objective, causal relationship between those two incidents fascinated him. And then he remembered. He didn’t even know how to begin, but a certain question had come to him in the furtive moment that his mind had wrested free of the voice of the philistine.

      Were these two inexplicable sudden deaths indeed the only ones that had occurred at 11 p.m. on September 5th?

      If not—that is, if there had been other, similar, incidents—then the chances of them being a coincidence were practically nil. Asakawa decided to take a look at the newspapers from early September. Part of his job was reading the newspaper meticulously. But in his case, he usually read only the headlines in the local news section, so there was more than just a chance that there was something he’d missed. He had a feeling there had been. He had the feeling that about a month ago, in the corner of a page in the local news section, he’d seen an odd headline. It had been a small article, on the lower left-hand page … All he remembered was where it had appeared. He remembered reading the headline and thinking, hey, but then someone from the desk had called to him, and he’d gotten so distracted by work that he never actually read the article.

      With the buoyancy of a child on a treasure hunt, Asakawa began his search with the morning edition from September 6th. He was certain he’d find a clue. Reading month-old newspapers in the gloomy archives was giving him a sort of psychological uplift he never got from interviewing a philistine. Asakawa was much more cut out for this kind of thing than for running around on the beat dealing with people of all sorts.