"Ring" by Koji Suzuki
Jan. 20th, 2007 03:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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darkling_talesI recently chanced upon a nice hardback copy of Ring, the Japanese horror best-seller penned by Koji Suzuki which inspired the famous gaggle of films, in a charity shop. I had no idea that such a novel existed, and at first I assumed it must be a spin-off of the film, as the find seemed almost too good to be true. Anyway, I got home and began hoovering up the contents of the thick creamy pages, and here are my thoughts on it all.
Sadly, the first thing that struck me about Ring was its terrible translation. Despite being translated by two people, Robert B Rohmer and Glynne Whalley, it features some of the most clumsy, tautology-ridden, contorted language I’ve ever come across. I don’t know what the original was like - maybe that too was badly-written, like many blockbuster novels in the West - but the writing lacks all sense of style, and sometimes basic coherence. Sentences are fouled with unnecessary adverbs (the worst being ‘questioningly’, one of the most clunky words ever) and so badly put together that you wonder if the translators didn’t just stick the whole novel through Babelfish while they went for a cigarette. Howlers like “may I ask what this is in regards to?” appear with jarring frequency, and I only studied English up to A-level so god only knows the effect this stuff would have on a writer or academic.
The overall impression is that of a first draft - if the novel was a room, it would be furnished with just enough sticks of hastily-built IKEA stripped pine furniture to ensure that you banged your shins on a hard corner everywhere you turned, but devoid of carpets, ornaments or heating. To make matters worse, the awkward, bare sentences are wreathed in clumsy Americanoid colloquialisms (I can hardly blame the authors for speaking in American, because they are from the US, but the slang sits so badly with the stilted formality of the rest of the novel that it all seems a thousand times more foreign than it should.) And this has nowt to do with the nature of Japanese-to-English translation, it's no elegant minimalist bit of Mishima.
It says a lot for Suzuki that despite this, and despite having seen the film before reading the book, I found the novel growing on me. The author has some really cracking ideas, and the book’s plot differs in many ways from the film. The ‘witch’ Sadako has a very different history and fate (there’s a +big+, Ian Banksy surprise in store!) the fateful video itself is composed of even odder images than in the film, and perhaps most importantly the theme of viruses and their war with man is explored in a fascinating (though at times laboured) way.
Fans of Japanese civilization may be disappointed to find precious little details about the Nippon way of life, and it’s not a novel for fans of memorable imagery either (Sadako doesn’t put in any of her dramatic appearances here) but the tornado-darkened island where our heroes Asakawa and Ryuji go to look for Sadako is well evoked. The characters at first put me off by their great coldness - Asakawa is a selfish husband and also thinks nothing of forging a life-long (if slightly ambiguous) friendship with a man (Ryuji) who boasts constantly of the rapes he’s committed lately (and from the way it’s written, it doesn’t seem like the reader is supposed to condemn Asakawa for this either.) However, both characters gather humanity as the novel goes on. There are some imaginative metaphors and while the novel as a whole is low on your classic horror 'atmosphere', the scene down the well is creepy and tragic enough for anyone. And of course, the plot is to die for!
All in all, this is a book that deserves a better translation - in its present state, it’s mainly of interest to Japanese horror nuts, though entertaining enough and even something of a page-turner once you get into it.
And here's a review by Steven Poole from The Guardian online, plus one by Rick Kleffel from The Agony Column, if you'd rather read a professional's bletherings ;)
Finally (wearing my moderator's hat):marlowe1 I'm afraid I had to delete the previous post as I kept getting complaints about it not being lj-cut - I did comment on the post to ask you to cut it but you weren't able to respond in time. Sorry! If you want to post it again with the cut that's fine.
Sadly, the first thing that struck me about Ring was its terrible translation. Despite being translated by two people, Robert B Rohmer and Glynne Whalley, it features some of the most clumsy, tautology-ridden, contorted language I’ve ever come across. I don’t know what the original was like - maybe that too was badly-written, like many blockbuster novels in the West - but the writing lacks all sense of style, and sometimes basic coherence. Sentences are fouled with unnecessary adverbs (the worst being ‘questioningly’, one of the most clunky words ever) and so badly put together that you wonder if the translators didn’t just stick the whole novel through Babelfish while they went for a cigarette. Howlers like “may I ask what this is in regards to?” appear with jarring frequency, and I only studied English up to A-level so god only knows the effect this stuff would have on a writer or academic.
The overall impression is that of a first draft - if the novel was a room, it would be furnished with just enough sticks of hastily-built IKEA stripped pine furniture to ensure that you banged your shins on a hard corner everywhere you turned, but devoid of carpets, ornaments or heating. To make matters worse, the awkward, bare sentences are wreathed in clumsy Americanoid colloquialisms (I can hardly blame the authors for speaking in American, because they are from the US, but the slang sits so badly with the stilted formality of the rest of the novel that it all seems a thousand times more foreign than it should.) And this has nowt to do with the nature of Japanese-to-English translation, it's no elegant minimalist bit of Mishima.
It says a lot for Suzuki that despite this, and despite having seen the film before reading the book, I found the novel growing on me. The author has some really cracking ideas, and the book’s plot differs in many ways from the film. The ‘witch’ Sadako has a very different history and fate (there’s a +big+, Ian Banksy surprise in store!) the fateful video itself is composed of even odder images than in the film, and perhaps most importantly the theme of viruses and their war with man is explored in a fascinating (though at times laboured) way.
Fans of Japanese civilization may be disappointed to find precious little details about the Nippon way of life, and it’s not a novel for fans of memorable imagery either (Sadako doesn’t put in any of her dramatic appearances here) but the tornado-darkened island where our heroes Asakawa and Ryuji go to look for Sadako is well evoked. The characters at first put me off by their great coldness - Asakawa is a selfish husband and also thinks nothing of forging a life-long (if slightly ambiguous) friendship with a man (Ryuji) who boasts constantly of the rapes he’s committed lately (and from the way it’s written, it doesn’t seem like the reader is supposed to condemn Asakawa for this either.) However, both characters gather humanity as the novel goes on. There are some imaginative metaphors and while the novel as a whole is low on your classic horror 'atmosphere', the scene down the well is creepy and tragic enough for anyone. And of course, the plot is to die for!
All in all, this is a book that deserves a better translation - in its present state, it’s mainly of interest to Japanese horror nuts, though entertaining enough and even something of a page-turner once you get into it.
And here's a review by Steven Poole from The Guardian online, plus one by Rick Kleffel from The Agony Column, if you'd rather read a professional's bletherings ;)
Finally (wearing my moderator's hat):
marlowe1 I'm afraid I had to delete the previous post as I kept getting complaints about it not being lj-cut - I did comment on the post to ask you to cut it but you weren't able to respond in time. Sorry! If you want to post it again with the cut that's fine.
