Tag: Suzuki Koji

Excessive Reader

Books in 2014

If there is one thing I regret from 2014, it’s the lack of time I had to read.

I love reading, I always love it as much as watching movies. But every since I live in the school dorm, I have less and less time to read. I like reading while I am riding public transportation and now I rarely use public transportation and therefore it reduces my reading time 😦

People make new year’s resolution…for me, my resolution is to read more!!

I hope in 2015 I can read more books than what I read in 2014.

Anyway, here are the books I read in 2014: Continue reading “Books in 2014”

Novroz11 Comments
Excessive Reader

Spiral by Suzuki Koji

SpiralFrom Goodreads

Dr. Ando who has yet to recover from his son’s death at sea, conducts an autopsy on an old friend who has died under unusual circumstances. The corpse, that of cynical philosophy professor Ryuji Takayama, has something to tell him. And Ryuji isn’t the only one who chooses to make a reappearance in this story.

You don’t know what the RING is yet. The terms of the curse of the videotape undergo a jaw-dropping reconfiguration in this novel, the horror master’s stunning reinvention of his own bestselling tale. “Spiral “is written as a stand-alone work; for Ring fans, its’ a sequel that redefines the word

Spiral is the second book in Ring Trilogy…they are stand alone trilogy, meaning that you can read it separately without feeling left out in the story. The connection is only Sadako and her curse. Some people are also mentioned but the book explains who they are.

I LOVE Ring so much and once I finished reading it, I straight away read this. I have finished reading Spiral about a month ago but I was so darn busy I didn’t have time to write a review.

I will try to share my thought without giving spoiler to the first book, Ring.  Continue reading “Spiral by Suzuki Koji”

Novroz8 Comments
Excessive Reader, Excessive Watcher

Ringu: The Origin, The Adaptation, the Screw-up

This is my first post for Hello Japan Mini Challenge, for August and September Challenge. This time, Tanabata asked us to write comparison of many things, she gave us 2 months to complete the challenge. To know more about the challenge, please click on the picture.

There are so many things to compare and the first thing that comes into my mind is Ringu, my all time favorite horror movie. There will be 3 things to compare. The book by Suzuki Koji as the origin, the movie by Hideo Nakata as the adaptation and Hollywood remake on Ringu called The Ring as the screw up.

The Origin

I’ve written about the book review few years ago in here (alert: it is full of spoilers). In my opinion, the book is more like psychological thriller rather than horror. I’m not going to talk much about the book because it can be read in my earlier post.

The Adaptation

To write a complete review for this challenge, I re-watched Ringu few days ago…although I practically remember all scenes without having watching it again because I’ve watched this movie more than 5 times. I love this movie very much. Ringu is my number 1 horror movie. Read more about Ringu in here, I wrote my complete review in different post because I haven’t written my review on this great movie in English.

Comparison of Book and Movie

There are so many differences between book and movie. Fortunately I watched the movie first before reading the book…I didn’t even know that Ringu is an adaptation from a famous novel when I first watched it. Why did I say ‘fortunately’? Because usually, when I like a book and then saw the movie and they changed it a lot…I tend to dislike the movie. My recent example is The Shining by Stephen King. However, there are some movies that I like as much as I like the book, like The Lord of the Ring, The Mist, etc. So, it might also possible that I’ll still like the movie even if I watched it after reading the book.

The basic story is the same, but the whole detail is so different. Let’s take a look at the difference!

Continue reading “Ringu: The Origin, The Adaptation, the Screw-up”

Novroz8 Comments
Excessive Reader

Ring : The novel behind the movie

 

Caution: This review contains SPOILER!!

kojs01.jpg“We’ll never know what happen because the future happen by itself” by Koji Suzuki.

This novel has plenty of differences with the movie (The Japanese version), basically the outline of the story was the same but the details were different.

It started with Tomoko, a high school student who was left alone by her parents. She died of a heart failure. At the same time, a taxi driver, Kimura, saw a 19 years old boy died because of heart failure right next to his taxi. A month later, Asakawa, a reporter from Daily News, coincidentally get on Kimura’s taxi and Kimura told him about that event. His curiosity was aroused by that story because Tomoko, his wife’s niece, died the same way and at the same time. He found out that there were 4 people died at that time, they were Tomoko Oishi, Shuichi Iwata, Haruko Tsuji and Takehiko Nomi.

His investigation brought him to Villa Log Cabin B-4 which belongs to Pacific Land Resort at south Hakone. At that cabin he found a tape, a mysterious tape. It begun with words saying “Watch it till it’s over” and then there were some abstract pictures of blood, some real images like old woman saying something, an erupted mountain, an old television, a baby boy, many faces and a face of a man. The weird thing about that video was that Asakawa felt it like it wasn’t a video, he felt the sensation of holding the baby, felt like those faces insulting him and felt hatred toward that man. It ended with words saying “whoever watches these pictures was destined to die at the same time a week from now. If you don’t want to do, please follow this direction……..” the video was deleted by someone. He couldn’t find out how to save himself. He wouldn’t believe that tape if he didn’t know about the death of those four teenagers. He watched it at 11.04 pm on October 11, Thursday

He told Ryuji Takayama about that video and asked Ryuji to help him. Ryuji was his high school friend who has a unique personality. Ryuji asked Asakawa to copied that video and give it to find so that he could study it. Ryuji watched it around 9 pm on October 12, Friday. Asakawa tried to find the 1st clue, where is the mountain? He found that mountain, it was Mount Mihara at Izu-Oshima. They also found that the tape was accidentally recording those pictures. Ryuji noticed that there were some black frames in the video. On Sunday, October 13 at 11.00 o’clock, Shizu and Yoko, Asakawa’s wife and daughter, watched that video too. Asakawa became more determine to find its counter curse.

On October 15, Monday, Ryuji found out that the video wasn’t made by any camera at all, the abstract pictures were made from someone’s thought and the real images was seen by someone, Ryuji figured this out because the black frame wasn’t a total blackness, there was vague white mist hanging in that blackness, something that people see every time they blink. This new fact brought them to Tetsuzo Miura Memorial, Miura was a professor who studied supernatural things. Ryuji thought that the image in the video was made by someone with high supernatural ability, that someone was a female. They found Sadako Yamamura. Continue reading “Ring : The novel behind the movie”

Novroz5 Comments