Have You Ever Been Handed a Wet Towel and Gone, “Arrggghhh!”?

Well, Dr. Mitsuo Ando has.

I finally finished reading Spiral, the second novel in Koji Suzuki’s Ring trilogy at around 5:50 p.m. yesterday, and if you’ve read that book before, you know that it leaves you with something. But it’s not time to say exactly what that something is, yet. I’ll first have to read the last book in the series before I try and articulate any thoughts, but I suspect that the end of the second book might be trying to leave me in a similar place as the end of the first book. Asakawa was wrong. Now, how about Ando?

You really have to love that towel scene. I’ll never forget it.

But I think I can say without spoiling anything that one of the most interesting things about the sequel to Ring is the fact that it mentions the Ring movie and the Ring video game within its own universe. It also mentions why the movie and the game must be different from the book! Say what you want the series’ perspective, but I can’t remember the last time I encountered something so incredibly clever.

Speaking of such, the title of this blog post has gotten a little too clever. It started out in my first post as a Hot Fuzz reference that Dr. Ando has unwittingly completed. Well, I’m not done with it yet, but this is probably the last time I’ll mention it.

So, to me, Spiral answers the question that this video most certainly imparts to the viewer as, “What’s with all this wacky different Ring stuff?” For years, I’ve wondered how someone might explain what I call the Rashomon aspect of Japanese media. We have all seen how different video games, manga, and anime will have different sequels and spinoffs that, to the Western mind, disrespect the original cannon. However, this particular criticism seems to be an imposition of the West, demanding something of Japanese culture with which its people have no interest in producing. It is also worth noting that this sort of story variation was also popular in the West, during what is commonly referred to as the “silver age of comic books.”

Perhaps a better question, then, is, “Why are we demanding canonicity now?”

Was Ryuji right? Are we being pulled apart, with one pole being an innate desire for conformity and the other being the unequivocal human dilemma of boredom? Is this the tension that drives humanity forward? Carrying with it the unasked, but unavoidable question left hanging at the end of the spiral: Why now?

But as for Grimbeard, not now. He’ll get his own post later.

Maybe it was that thing Sadako’s mother found in the water.