There is a long history of spooking the reader in Japan. The humid summer months are supposed to be alleviated by spine-chilling ghost stories and scary Edo Period dramas. But no particular season makes contemporary Japanese horror any less terrifying.

Ring, by Koji Suzuki Translated by Robert B. Rohmer & Glynne Walley.
Vertical, Fiction.

Koji Suzuki¡¯s 1991 novel ¡°Ring,¡± begins in a Yokohama condominium, where nobody seems aware of their neighbors existence until night, when their windows are lit up. The narrator sets the scene: ¡°Off to the south the oily surface of the ocean reflected the glittering lights of a factory.¡± The fact that an industrial plant is more attractive than the sea establishes an early abnormality, a degraded physical milieu in which the grotesque can thrive.

Studying alone at home, Tomoko Oishi detects that, ¡°The sour stench of rotting flesh melted into the air around her, enveloping her. It couldn¡¯t be anything corporeal.¡± In ¡°Ring¡± the sources of such emanations of evil are not rotting floorboards or sealed armoires, but TV screens, or more precisely, a videotape that warns of the viewers¡¯ imminent death. When an investigative journalist undertakes to solve the mystery, he is drawn into rural Japan and into contact with the technopathic skills of a frightening young woman called Sadako ¡ª a character now synonymous with Japanese horror.

More than 20 years since its release ¡°Ring¡± remains as unnerving as ever. People may no longer have VCRs in their homes, but they still have fear in their hearts.

Each week ¡°Essentials¡± introduces a work of fiction that should be on the bookshelf of any Japanophile.