🟩 Ring (1991) Review - My BFF, the Sex Offender | Book Waffle

 

Ring (1991) written by Koji Suzuki

Japanese fiction never fails in the weird department.

"My rando classmate told me he assaulted someone. In fact he's a serial rapist. But it's okay. We're actually besties now."

Beg your pardon?

You bet your bollocks I had to rewind and replay that exchange a few dozen times.

Let's just say that if you are one of those people so married to contemporary Eurocentric gender roles that you can't enjoy media otherwise, then this may not be the book for you.

In a notable departure from the famous movie series this book spawned, the source material follows reporter extraordinaire Kazuyuki Asakawa. Our hero is a family man who's always on the hunt for that next scoop. So when he catches wind of a group of teens that all die at the same time and in the same gruesome way, he sets out to investigate.

He tracks their previous whereabouts to a resort cabin where the teens spent a week before their deaths. There he discovers an unmarked videotape that shows bizarre imagery. Asakawa reaches out to his best friend and professor, Ryuji Takayama. Together they journey across the Japanese islands as they puzzle through the tape's contents.

I found this book surprisingly good! I enjoyed looking at this from the Japanese lens. I never knew that this book was written at the beginning of the Lost Decades, but that anxiety feels palpable throughout. 

Uncertainty. A society torn between past and present. Economic boom and economic bust. It's almost Gothic in how it portrays these two competing worlds. Maybe "Gothic" is not the right term when the key item in the story is a VHS tape, but you get what I mean.

I admit, I didn't see the twist coming. Yes, there's a fair amount of clunky foreshadowing with the whole talk of viruses, but I was still caught unawares. The way it subverts classic horror tropes is something I found refreshing, and, frankly, just really cool.

The two main characters are straight awful. They are fascinating to follow, though!

It was also refreshing to follow a couple of garbage humans. You root for them because of what they are doing, not because they are noble people that you'd love to see survive. You don't see many antiheroes like that in horror fiction. Or, at least, I don't. Not ones that aren't simultaneously annoying, that is. Ryuji may be a self-proclaimed rapist, but the guy is hella goofy. Both sinister and sad, now that I think about it.

It does become aimless at times as the protagonists flail about from place to place. There will be a whole chapter where Asakawa and Takayama travel somewhere. Then ten pages later someone bluntly tells them they wasted their time. I guess you could call those red herrings? IDK. They were not the easiest sections to chunk through. 

But, in the end, Ring was still a great read. Highly recommend if only for the change of pace that a non-Western writer brings to the table.

🟩 Rating: 8/10