Dark Water

Rating:
Summary: With water as a running theme
Review: Dark Water is a collection of short stories by Koji Suzuki, propelled to fame by his novel The Ring, made into Japanese, South Korean, and American film versions. The running theme (pardon the pun) is water. Some are indeed dark, while others are mysterious.

The first story, "Floating Water," is already a movie in Japan and soon to be an Americanized film starring Jennifer Connelly, is about a single mother, Yoshimi Matsubara and her daughter Ikuko who move into an apartment, whose complex was abandoned when the bubble economy burst. However, it turns out that there was an incident on the second floor that occurred years ago. Tied in with this is a red bag with a kitty motif (Hello Kitty, I wonder?) that Ikuko is attracted to. Despite it being disposed of, it keeps reappearing. Yoshimi's daughter also finds an imaginary friend whose name begins with "Mi..."

"Solitary Isle" doesn't fit into horror/mystery genre. It deals with a burned out teacher, Kensuke Suehiro, who receives a surprising call from his mentor on whether he is up for an expedition to a ghost island, where there is an ecological site dubbed Battery No. 6. That leads to reminiscing over Toshihiro Aso and a strange girl he mistreats, Yukari Nakazawa, who vanished due to the machinations of Aso.

"Dream Cruise" takes Masahiro Enoyoshi, who's on the yacht of the successful aggressive sales-oriented Ushijima, a high school classmate of his who is trying to recruit him. Finding a kid's shoe Kazuhiro on the heel seems unimportant, but then, Ushijima's boat, named Minako after his wife, catches on something...

"The Hold" is a somewhat more unpleasant story, dealing with an abusive fisherman with a violent streak within him. "Surge of irritation," "eruption of anger," is used to describe Hiroyuki Inagaki's moods. One day, his wife Nanako goes missing, and it's when he goes fishing that he finds out why. And why does he have a throbbing headache?

In "Adrift," Kazuo Shiraishi, an engineer on the fishing boat Wakashio VII, is about to finish his third year-long tour fishing, and maybe settle down. However, before the W7 reaches Torishima, they discover an abandoned yacht whose circumstances resemble that of the famed ghost ship, Marie Celeste. Kazuo volunteers to stay on board as the yacht is being towed by the W7, but when he wakes up...

I wasn't too impressed with the other two, "Watercolors" about a theatrical troupe about to hold production in an abandoned discotheque, and "Forest Under The Sea" about two spelunkers who get more than they bargained for when they go into an unexplored cave.

Note: for geographic orientation. In the story "Adrift," the Ogasawara Islands are way south of Japan, 28 N by 142 E roughly. Torishima is around 30.5 N, with Hachijo-jima higher up at 33 N. And the Miu Peninsula, or Miu Hanto mentioned in the prologue, is the peninsula in Kanagawa Prefecture a few miles from Tokyo which forms the enclosed waters that is the Tokyo-wan (Tokyo Bay).

Water tells stories, reveals secrets, takes men's lives, and holds answers to unfinished stories. Short stories really aren't my thing, as I prefer novels. Still, not a bad collection of stories from the Ringmaster.

Rating:
Summary: A weak adaptation
Review: I have neither seen the acclaimed film, nor read the original short story collection of "Dark Water" (Honogurai mizu no soko kara - direct translation is "From the gloomy waters") My only exposure to Koji Suzuki's infamous tales of watery woe is this manga, adapted by Meimu who also adapted Koji Suzuki's "Ring 2" and "Ring 0: Birthday."

Each of the four stories involve, as expected, something creeping in from the unseeable depths of murky waters, both physical and metaphorical. Like a comic pulp-anthology from the 50's, maybe "Tales from the Crypt" or "Vault of Horrors," the tension relies on less of a twist ending than a sense of rising horror as things come bubbling to the surface in a sequence or unrelated tales.

The initial story, "Dark Water," involves a murdered child speaking with a ghostly voice, imprisoned in a water tank on the roof of a building. She seeks to make her voice known, through possession and rage. This is followed by "Island Cruise," with another dead child facing off against the innocent power of positive thinking. "Adrift" is strictly comic-relief, with bikini-clad sailors pulling up something terrible on their fishhooks. The final entry, "Forest Beneath the Waves," is the least horrific but the most emotional at the same time.

While interesting, unfortunately the stories are not well adapted. Meimu's style does not lend itself to the subject matter, and the stories do not come off as scary. Possibly it comes from attempting to fit too much into too small a volume, or possibly it is something in her art style, but the horror in the tales is lost. There is enough of a kernel here to make me want to seek out the original collection, but this manga just doesn't do it for me.

Rating:
Summary: "Dark Water" Promises Thrills, Comes Up Shallow
Review: Koji Suzuki can definately be a very intriguing and suspenseful writer yet somehow falls definately short in many respects with "Dark Water." For starters, the book is written in short segments, comprised of a few 40 page mini-stories. This wouldn't exactly be a negative attribute if indeed the stories contained were thrilling (*hint* they were not).

Each story in some way contained an element of water and each including intense forshadowing. If you are a light to even moderate reader, you could predict the fateful endings from about two pages in (seriously). In most of the narratives, Suzuki informs the reader early on that a tragedy has occurred many years ago. The stories then develop and (surprise!) a ghost or victim of those tragedies returns to reak havoc.

Some of the stories are downright boring; I distinctly recall two of them which didn't even get me remotely interested in the story (not to mention they contained literally NO suspense). Some just have a twisted or bizarre ending but nothing shocking enough to even remotely make the reader take notice. I am unsure as to whether this Japanese title was translated to English or indeed written for English but regardless, there were also a few odd or awkward sentences. A few words seemed out of place and many segments were just written in a difficult manner ('difficult' used to mean understand, as this book was definately not a 'hard read').

I cannot deny this author any acclaim however as I must say, her first narrative is indeed both suspenseful and frightening. "Dark Water" could have been greatly improved if only the author had continued with the style consistantly through the next multiple stories, which unfortunately he doesn't. I would only recommend this title to SERIOUS fans of the author (and I mean SERIOUS). Otherwise, I would suggest you check out his other works which hold much more merit than "Dark Water."

Rating:
Summary: Great novelists often make mediocre short story writers.
Review: Koji Suzuki, Dark Water (Vertical Press, 2004)

Despite Hideo Nakata having made a film of the same title, Dark Water is, in fact, a collection of short stories. (The film is based on the first story in here, but it's hard to imagine how Nakata managed to get the film out of this story.) Suzuki is a crack novelist, to be sure, but his short story-writing capabilities are less obvious; the stories here all follow a sort of structural pattern which may be common in Japanese short stories, though it's not to be found in most other Japanese short story writers whose work exists in translation; I have to believe that the problem lies not with a structure defined by what's popular in Japan, but with Suzuki's writing itself. It's all the more puzzling because one of the things Suzuki does best in his novels is their endings; the epilogue of Spiral is what pushes it from a very good novel to a great one. Thus, it's doubly puzzling that the stories in Dark Water (yes, every one of them) have such abrupt, unsatisfying endings. By "unsatisfying" here, I don't mean "ambiguous;" in fact, the story here with the most ambiguous ending, "Adrift," is also the best stand-alone piece in the book. No, Suzuki spends a good deal of time building his characters and situations, then suddenly decides to wrap everything up in a paragraph or two, completely changing pace and structural details. I could see it in one story, but in all of them?

Those of you who pick this up on the strength of Nakata's film, be aware that the movie is, in this case, better than the material upon which it is based. Everyone else will probably feel somewhat cheated that such brilliant setups get such short shrift at the end of each story. The setups, though, are reason enough to read the stories here. Just hope Hideo Nakata has the rights to a number of them. ***