Lost in Adaptation: Ringu From Novel to Screen through a Feminist Lens
Note: this article contains spoilers for Ringu
Beginning in the late 1990s, Japanese Horror Cinema experienced an extremely creative and financially successful period. Chief among the films responsible for the boom was Nakata Hideo’s Ringu (1998), which is based on the 1991 Suzuki Koji novel of the same name. The story concerns a reporter named Reiko Asakawa (Nanako Matsushima) who faces a race against the clock to break the curse of a videotape containing a collage of disjointed, disturbing images that kills everyone who watches it in seven days. While attempting to find a way to break the spell, Asakawa uncovers the mystery of the woman behind the tape, the now deceased, seemingly unappeasable Sadako Yamamura. In the end, the only way to survive is to copy the tape and pass it along for someone else to watch, thus propagating the curse infinitely.
Since the film’s release, and the subsequent American re-make, The Ring (2002), little to no scholarly attention has been paid to Suzuki’s original novel and how issues of gender were handled in the process of adaptation from book to screen. The film changes many elements related to gender and sexuality, and panders to its intended male audience, removing many of the more complex psychosexual elements from the novel. There are also several important narrative differences between the two. First, the protagonist Asakawa is changed from a married man with an infant daughter to a divorced, working mother raising a seven-year-old clairvoyant son on her own. Second, the character Ryuji is changed from a cynical, unlikeable, self-proclaimed rapist to the sullen but brilliant ex-husband of Asakawa, who, like his son, is psychically empowered. Third, and most importantly, Sadako is changed from an intersex rape victim into an asexual hybrid human/seamonster.
Both versions of Ringu effectively espouse the perceived benefits of adhering to traditional gender roles, regardless of whether the protagonist is male or female. In changing the protagonist from male newspaper reporter, Kazuyuki Asakawa, to female Television reporter, Reiko Asakawa, Ringu the film serves several functions within the maternal component of feminist film theory. Exchanging Kazuyuki for Reiko introduces maternal issues not present in the novel.
Reiko’s difficult relationship with her son, Yoichi, is compounded by how busy she is with her career. Yoichi is also different from other children: he possesses clairvoyant abilities and is quiet and serious in his mannerisms. But, as we see in his first scene in the film, he and his mother have reversed roles: he readies her clothes for her and even helps zip up her dress. With the absence of a male presence in the house, Yoichi has stepped into that role. Certainly, the scene where Reiko catches Yoichi watching the cursed tape is indicative of her inability to protect him in a traditional maternal fashion. In short, she’s struggling to juggle career and motherhood without a male partner around to support her. The Asakawa of the novel is also career-focused and rarely helps his wife with their daughter Yoko, although he does not suffer for it. He is happily married and he and his wife each fulfill their classic gender specific roles in the home. It is only the female version of Asakawa who suffers in her relationship with her child when she focuses on her career.
If both the book and the film cling to such notions, why then, did the filmmakers even bother to change Asakawa’s gender? One possible reason might be to pander to the genre’s key demographic. As author of Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992), Carol J. Clover asserts, “Male viewers are quite prepared to identify not just with screen females, but with screen females in the horror-film world, screen females in fear and pain.” An off-shoot of the Final Girl trope. Another reason for the change may have come from the source material itself. When male Asakawa watches the tape for the first time and reaches the point in the recording when the people who tormented her in life begin to flash onscreen, he sees (and feels) Sadako’s memories as she feels them, filtered by her point of view, exemplified in the following excerpt from Suzuki Koji’s Ringu novel,
By now there were perhaps a thousand faces: they had become nothing but black particles, filling the screen until it looked like the television had been turned off, but the voices continued. It was more than Asakawa could bear. All that criticism, directed right at him. That's how it felt.
In a sense, when Asakawa watches the tape, he briefly inhabits the feminine, indeed, the mother, perhaps giving inspiration to the filmmakers to change Asakawa from a male to a female in the process of adaptation. Additionally, it lends credence to author and academic Barbara Creed’s argument in her seminal book, The Monstrous Feminine: Films, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (1993), for a fluid notion of identification between audience, victim, and monster, specifically in terms of Sadako’s “mothering and reproductive functions.” It is never clearer than in the following passage from Suzuki,
On-screen, he could now see hands holding the baby. The left hand was under its head, and the right was behind its back, holding it carefully. They were beautiful hands. Totally absorbed by the image, Asakawa found himself holding his own hands in the same position. He heard the birth cry directly below his own chin. Startled, he pulled back his hands. He had felt something. Something warm and wet-like amniotic fluid, or blood-and the weight of flesh. Asakawa jerked his hands apart, as if casting something aside, and brought his palms close to his face. A smell lingered. The faint smell of blood - had it come from the womb, or...?
Asakawa is not the only character changed drastically. In the novel, Suzuki chose to give the character Ryuji the greatest understanding of Sadako. An interesting choice given that he is a man who claims to have raped at least three different women in his lifetime. He holds a disdainful outlook on people and life in general and is coded masculine, in every sense of the word; he is described as athletic, with angular features, and when asked by Asakawa about his dreams for the future he responds casually with, “While viewing the extinction of the human race, I would dig a hole in the earth and ejaculate into it over and over again.” Ryuji hates the feminine so much he would create a vagina in mother earth and violate her repeatedly, degrading her with his semen. In the film, the issue of Ryuji being a rapist is removed and, instead, he is given the role of Reiko Asakawa’s ex-husband. Not coincidentally, he is also an absentee father to their son, Yoichi.
Indeed, rape is one of the key facets of the novel that is entirely removed from the film version of Ringu. This change removes much of Sadako Yamamura’s status as victim, causing her reasons for revenge to lose some of their impact and necessitating a device to render her more frightening. The film achieves this through changing her into a literal monster, who is half human and half sea-demon. This fact is surmised in the scene describing Sadako’s mother Shizuko, sitting for hours watching the sea and also by the repeated phrase “Frolic in brine, goblins be thine.”
Sadako’s dehumanization is achieved visually in the film as well. Whereas in the novel she is described as possessing a great, delicate beauty, in the film, we never see her face. Even in the scenes where she is shown in flashback before her death, her visage is entirely covered by her long black hair, her posture is hunched and her movements jerky, creating an air of disturbing mystery around her. This manifestation of a hybrid monster helps to remove the empathy the reader feels towards the character and renders her an instrument of evil up until the scene in the well where Asakawa cradles her remains as a mother cradles a child.
In the book, it is the character Dr. Nagao who comes across as inhuman, not Sadako. He coldly describes her rape in lieu of discovering that she is intersex as, “A necessary trial if she were to go on living as a woman.” He is further shown to be calculating and cruel, when he kills her in order to save himself from her imminent wrath. The inner conflict he feels at having not only committed rape, but also having done so to a beautiful woman and with male genitalia is quite clear in the dialogue when he says, “On the one hand, I desired the destruction of her body, but on the other hand, I didn’t want her body to be marred.” He desires her, but he also fears for the loss of his own sexual identity after having raped an intersex person with masculine physical traits.
This entire plotline within the novel contains conventions within the rape-revenge sub-genre of horror films explored by Clover and other scholars. The book clearly paints Dr. Nagao as the bad guy and Sadako as the victim, making the novel something akin to a supernatural rape-revenge saga. Perhaps the film’s producers feared this would be too much for young male audiences.
Clover cites author Marco Starr with regards to the phenomenon of the “woman-identified” man in reference to perhaps the most notorious rape-revenge film of them all, I Spit On Your Grave (1978). In the discussion, the fact that men were uncomfortable watching the film gets to the heart of why it is likely that the filmmakers of Ringu (1998) who are male, dropped the subject from the film adaptation of Ringu the novel. Clover states,
Watching a film as personally intense as I Spit on Your Grave is, to some degree, an upsetting experience under any circumstances. To watch it in the presence of a large, mostly male audience, however, is to witness the film with some terrified viewers, despite appearances to the contrary. The realization that one’s fellow viewers are potential rapists can be devastating when one is relating to the experience of being raped.
In the film, it is Sadako who is the greater monster, with few redeeming qualities. Intriguingly, both the film and the novel illustrate her monstrosity with her inability to reproduce in the traditional way. As intersex in the novel, she has no uterus and can therefore not bear children. Although, it is through the sex act with Dr. Nagao (who has the smallpox virus at the time of the rape) that Sadako is actually able to reproduce herself when her supernatural abilities combine with the virus and create her otherworldly offspring of ceaseless regeneration. It is the act of reproducing the videotape that allows the cursed viewers to survive. In the film, it is through her gaze that Sadako Yamamura kills her victims. It brings to mind Creed’s use of the phrase “The Medusa Gaze,” which draws immediate parallels between the myth of Medusa and the myth of Sadako Yamamura in the Ringu franchise,
When Perseus slew the Medusa he did not – as commonly thought – put an end to her reign or destroy her terrifying powers. Afterwards, Athena embossed her shield with the Medusa head. The writhing snakes, with their fanged gaping mouths, and the Medusa’s own enormous teeth and lolling tongue were on full view. Athena’s aim was simply to strike terror into the hearts of men as well as remind them of their symbolic debt to the imaginary castrating mother. And no doubt she knew what she was doing. After all, Athena was the great Mother-Goddess of the ancient world and according to ancient legend – the daughter of Metis, the goddess of wisdom, also known as the Medusa.
Like Medusa as described by Creed, Sadako is not vanquished at the end of the film, but continues on and on through the video, which must be reproduced to break the curse. In this sense, anyone who watches the tape and figures out the secret to survival becomes one of Sadako’s children in the same way that Athena propagated the myth of Medusa, her mother.
It is perhaps appropriate that the novels and films themselves have propagated the world over in the same manner as Sadako’s cursed tape. Perhaps someday an adaptation truer to the source material will be made. Perhaps written and directed by a woman with enough creative freedom to explore some of the more complex issues present in the novel. Would audiences accept a more sympathetic cinematic version of Sadako? Time will tell.
Jennifer Upton is an American writer/editor in London. A horror fan since age 6, she has a BA in Media Arts and spent many years working in the film and TV industries in L.A. at 20th Century Fox Studios. In 2011, she moved to London to pursue her MA at SOAS London where she wrote her dissertation for the Media and Screen Studies department on J-Horror. She currently works as a ghostwriter of personal memoirs for Story Terrace London and writes for several blogs on topics as diverse as film history, punk rock, women’s issues, and international politics. Find her work online or send her a Tweet @Jennxldn
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