Rating: 
Summary: Truly Gripping - despite unlikeable characters
Review: Ring is a great book, filled with suspense and fingernail gnawing moments. I was drawn into the novel from the first page, and found myself manically turning pages despite the fact that the characters weren't particularly nice or noble or kind or, well, likeable. In some ways this became an interesting edge to the book and didn't negatively effect the mounting tension.
Asawaka is a journalist who, through the deaths of his niece and some of her friends, stumbles upon a cursed video and must go on a quest to find out what he has to do to stop himself dying in a weeks time. I expected Asawaka to be a typical leading `hero' character, perhaps a loving family man with a tenacious desire to find the truth. Instead he was a workaholic who couldn't even be bothered to take time off work to go to his niece's funeral (in fact, he only becomes interested in her death when he realises that it relates to other strange deaths). Worse still, his best friend is a self-confessed rapist - and yet Asawaka does absolutely nothing to get him to stop or to tip the police off. I mean, come on, we aren't talking about somebody stealing paperclips here, this is RAPE.
Don't get me wrong, the book was compulsive. I can't wait to read the next two in the trilogy and am excited to see where it all goes from here as the ending was a bit of a cliffhanger. I agree with the other reviewers who say that the book read like a translation, it certainly didn't flow like most of the books I read. Some of the prose sounded awkward and the phrasing could be clunky. But somehow because I knew this was a Japanese book it seemed to fit and didn't annoy me.
Overall Ring is a great thriller and a real page-turner. I feel compelled to say that there was quite a sexist element running through the story, particularly in the way Asakawa referred to and treated his wife. Some examples are when his friend scolds Asakawa for becoming emotional:
`You're talking like a woman now. If you've got time to bitch and whine like that you ought to use your head a bit more.'
And when Asawaka doesn't like the question his wife asks him (although it is a very reasonable question):
`He wished his wife would act like her name, which meant `quiet'. The best way to seal a woman's mouth was not to reply.'
At one point there is a particularly odd section when Asawaka meets his best friends stunning girlfriend, Mai. Remember that at this point Asawaka is trying to crack the code to save his and his friend's life and yet he drifts away and imagines Mai `wet and naked'. With only a few hours left to save himself and his family? Absurd!
JoAnne
Rating:
Summary: Pretty good....
Review: Ring of course the movie is based on this book; in Japan it was released on the title Ringu, and it was remade in America as The Ring staring Naomi Watts. Now of course the book is TOTALLY DIFFERENT from the American version. Investing the deaths of four young people, under their autoposy showed they died from heart failure. Now Asakawa a reporter is now investing the death's of these young people. Now he traces their steps to this hotel he rents for the night. It is then he discover's a tape that is unmarked. On that tape is a strange images on the tape. At the end of the tape it say's whoever is watching this tape will die in seven days. So now with only a couple of more day's to live, he the teams up with a serial rapist Ryuji to help him discover some of the images on the tape. One of them being a volcano in rural Japan. As they get deeper, it gets scarier! In a long time, I have never read a novel that chilled me through the bones. Koji Suzuki has been called the Stephen King of Japan. This novel is worth reading to anyone who wants to be scared. Especially King fans.
Rating:
Summary: The book that started it all-well-written suspense thriller
Review: When it comes to Ringu the movie, The Ring the Hollywood remake, The Ring the manga, and the original source for this series of runaway hits, Koji Suzuki's novel Ring, straight off I'd classify it more as an investigative suspense thriller rather than horror.The whole story takes place between 5 September and 21 October 1990, with quite a bit of action taking place during a particular week. Journalist Kazuyuki Asakawa is drawn into the deaths of two teenagers, one of them being his niece Tomoko, the other a boy who suddenly keeled over on his motorcycle and died. The coroner's verdict for both: sudden heart failure. Not only are the causes of death similar but so are the times of death, around 11:00 PM, and the fact that it was as if they were trying to pull their hair out. Soon, he learns of a young teen couple who died the same way in a car, and that all four were friends. A couple of clues leads him to the Villa Log Cabin resort where he watches a bizarre video full of abstract and real images, which gives him the following message at the end: "Those who have viewed these images are fated to die at this exact hour one week from now. If you do not wish to die, you must follows these instructions exactly..." The problem is, the rest of the tape has been erased so there is no way to prevent death. And as Asakawa has established that the four teenagers spent the night at the cabin a week before their deaths, he is in panic mode, as he has a wife and child. He turns to his classmate and Ryuji Takayama for help. Ryuji, now a cynical philosophy professor, may be a bit on the twisted side, as he boasted once that he assaulted young women in high school, and he has a bit of a libertine attitude, but he's intelligent, methodical, and quick to suss out clues from the video. He is quick to take charge, being the more assertive of the two, and there are some actual intelligent conversations about science between them. The situation becomes more urgent for Asakawa when... guess who else accidentally ends up watching the video? Asakawa seems to have more of a conscience, whereas Ryuji is more jaded. As he tells Asakawa after being asked if he felt guilty about the crime he committed against one of his victims, "Try slamming your fist into a brick wall every day. Eventually, you won't even feel the pain anymore." With the countdown to Asakawa's life ticking away, the reporter's sense of urgency is felt in the book, while Ryuji seems to be taking it all in casual, confident of a resolution. Having read the original source, I see how so many liberties were taken in even the 1998 Japanese theatrical version--there was even a TV movie version before the 1998 version--notice that it's a woman whose life is at stake in both movie versions. However, Suzuki's writing is accessible, or should I say the people who translated his book, with a contemporary touch. This is the first in a trilogy, the story being continued in Spiral and Loop, which will doubtless reach the US sometime in the future. As for the title, it has nothing to do with "before you die you see the ring" re the Hollywood remake--it's more conceptual rather than concrete. I read this all in one sitting, a few hours, minus time for lunch, so go figure.
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