All Things Small Web

Over the last week in the hotel room, I finished going through all of TBS's radio adaptation of Ring from 1996, an entirely new piece of media to me in the franchise, the entire drama animated by, I think, a fan, and uploaded to Niconico in 2011, and then machine translated sometime in the last few years.

In every sense of the word, this is an adaptation. So much of the framework of Suzuki's original story had been shifted slightly in order to move the setting to a radio station and present Asakawa as a hot-headed late night disc jockey who has a habit of sharing spooky stories. One such story involves a cursed broadcast that kills its listeners in seven days, and when the show's AD drops dead in the middle of a live recording, Asakawa is forced to confront the fact that something is very rotten at his workplace, and that the station's president, an older man named Kashiwagi, may well be planning to use this cursed recording of the broadcast as a publicity stunt.

This adaptation goes places I didn't expect. One of the most significant changes is the replacement of Takayama with an original character, Asakawa's former childhood friend, Ryoko, who is a little wild, a little careless, and a lot genuine. The story uses her status as an older woman to talk a bit about motherhood, and what that means in a way that surprised me, her experiences reflecting Sadako's own inability to naturally have children. Sitting alone in the hotel room, these little details got to me. I've seen, heard, and read a lot of adaptations of this story in the years since I first fell in love with it, but this drama was the first one that explicitly spoke of motherhood from this perspective. I was really taken aback by it, to be honest.



It's not perfect, of course, and it's not always tactful either, being a product of the late '90s. If I had to compare it to anything, it would be to the Rasen TV show that followed it several years later, as both are attempts to bring Sadako kicking and screaming into the digital age, both explicitly drawing a comparison between a biological virus and a computer virus in a pique of Y2K fever. The ending is a little disappointing, the additional plotline involving Kashiwagi and the radio station's dark history wrapped up with surprising swiftness as the show struggles to tie up loose ends, and there are slightly too many characters to really make it effective, especially when the only people you're going to care about are Asakawa and Ryoko—and at times, you might possibly not even care for Asakawa either, mostly when he gets into discussing his past trauma and how it informs his present regret. That aside, if you're a historian of this franchise, this is a wonderful find and something well worth your time just for the angle it presents. It's October! This is seasonal content! And whilst I'm very much campaigning for "spooky season" to be renamed "Shiori Season," it could also very well be "Sadako Season."

I don't have an intelligent way to sell this to you, guys, but I think you should give it a listen nonetheless. I really love this stuff. I think I might re-watch the television dramas later this month too.