Ghosts in the machine

WordsWORTH

Japanese fiction reflects a conflict between ancient mysticism and the mechanical sterility of modern life. Koji Suzuki's "Ring" series introduces these concerns into pulp fiction.

It's a viscerally creepy scene, familiar to many horror-movie fans: a videotape is played, a montage of dreamlike black-and-white images appears on the TV screen, a pallid, zombie-like girl emerges and slowly walks towards the very edge of the frame "" towards the person viewing the tape "" before crawling out of the screen and into the real world. This scene is from any of the three film versions (Japanese, Korean and American) of a Japanese horror novel first published in 1991: Koji Suzuki's Ringu (Ring), about a mysterious videotape that causes the death of anyone who watches it. Ringu and its sequels Rasen (Spiral) and Rupu (Loop), the English translations of which are now available in Indian bookstores, make for a compelling pulp trilogy. Though they have some of the limitations of genre fiction "" occasionally clunky writing, sketchy characterisations, a reluctance to spend too much time on descriptions "" they are solid page-turners that provide a mix of horror, sci-fi, scientific fact and medical gobbledygook, along with philosophical musings about the evolution, nature and future of life on our planet.

In Ring, a journalist must work against the clock to uncover the tape's secrets; he discovers that it was created by a woman named Sadako Yamamura, a long-dead psychic who is making some very innovative use of modern technology to facilitate her return to the world of the living. (Hence the device of a videotape that perpetuates a deadly virus, and the image of Sadako crawling out of the TV set; the latter, strictly speaking, doesn't come from the novel but is a nice visual encapsulation of Suzuki's ideas.) The second book, Spiral (my personal favourite of the three), expands the scope of the original story, shifting its focus "" and narrative perspective "" to a medical one; the third, Loop, though it makes a somewhat random connection with the events related in the first two books, is a virtual-reality thriller that evokes Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" as well as the Jim Carrey-starrer The Truman Show.

A quality that this series shares with much of contemporary Japanese fiction is the juxtaposing of old-world mysticism with the banality of urban, modern-day existence. Any generalisation about a national character is problematic, but a cursory look at Japanese pop culture in the last century suggests that the ghosts of a complex past seem constantly to be shifting beneath the orderly modern face of the country. A not-very-subtle example is the Godzilla myth, one of Japan's best-known contributions to 20th-century paranoia, wherein radiation from atom bombs results in the birth of a giant primordial lizard that then sets about wreaking vengeance on the urban world. As an allegory for primitive impulses clashing with the tenuous securities of modern life, the spectacle of Godzilla weaving his way around Tokyo's skyscrapers is at least as potent as that of King Kong thumping his chest after scaling the Empire State Building.

Discomfort with the present and ambivalence about the past (marked by a longing for a time where cultural identity had not yet been subsumed into a corporate world based on the Western model, and a simultaneous guilt about Japan's strident military history) has led to a body of literature that features slightly withdrawn protagonists reflecting on the nature of the world and entering shadowy twilight zones. These elements are frequently found in the books of the best-known Japanese writer globally, Haruki Murakami. As with all great writers, Murakami is a force unto himself "" it would be constraining to look at his work purely through the prism of the country he comes from "" but many of the motifs are self-evident.

In the novel Dansu Dansu Dansu (Dance Dance Dance), for instance, a typically passive Murakami narrator returns to the site of a tiny dump of a hotel he had been to once and finds that in its place stands a "gleaming, 26-storey Bauhaus Modern-Art Deco symphony of glass and steel". Later, as the narrative turns increasingly bizarre, he discovers that the past is still alive in a hidden corner of this building. A weary creature called the Sheep Man "" a relic from a lost age? "" says to him, "Everything's getting more complicated. Everything's speeding up. So tell us, what's the world outside? We don't get much news in here." Of course, as in all of Murakami's fiction, this could be taking place inside the narrator's mind, but even that would suggest atavistic impulses buried deep in his subconscious.

Japanese comics have explored such themes with success too, often drawing on the pioneering work done by the great Osamu Tezuka, known as the godfather of manga. Tezuka's most popular work in India, for obvious reasons, is his staggering eight-part series on the Buddha (translations of which have been made available here by HarperCollins), which treats the holy man's life and teachings with respect even as it employs distinctly modern language and cheeky visual gags. But another Tezuka book I would strongly recommend is the medical thriller Ode to Kirihito, a moving allegorical story set in 1970s Japan about a strange disease that transforms people into dog-like beasts. In sophisticated hospitals, doctors struggle to understand the nature of this ailment in terms of modern science (while taking part in elaborate power struggles on the side), but the protagonist Dr Kirihito, himself afflicted by the disease, spends most of the story in the countryside, trying to come to terms with his own humanity and that of the other unfortunates he encounters. Needless to say, some very strange things happen in this book, but Tezuka presents them matter of factly, with all the rigour of realistic fiction.

But for the reader who is not yet ready to plunge wholeheartedly into the world of manga or serious literary fiction, Suzuki's Ring series is a valuable entry point, a chance to experience the flavours of Japanese writing within the framework of genre fiction. Be warned, though, that some of the content isn't for the faint-hearted: these are not books to be read when you're home alone late at night, especially if there's a TV set nearby!