Dark Water [Paperback]

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.

Water, it has a stong effect on our subconscious, whether it be a stream, lake, pond, or ocean. It bring us back to our primordial past, back to the womb, therefore it is full of mystery and sometimes unsettling feelings. All the tales in Dark Water relate to water in one manner or another.

The first story is chilling enough to make one never want to drink tap water ever again. I can see why this was made into a movie, an everyday thing in our lives has been transformed into something completely vile.

Although Koji Suzuki is more known for his stories that relate to horror/supernatural, not every story in this book has a supernatural slant, some are just plain though provoking and strange. Solitary Isle and Forest Under the Sea aren't as supernatural and rely more on those primal, subconcious feelings.

For fans of the supernatural there are chilling stories like The Hold, and Dream Cruise, one speaks of a man's descent into madness after the disappearance of his wife, and the other tells of a man's wish to sail in a yacht when the crew on his fishing boat find an abandoned one on the ocean.

I can see why some people see Koji Suzuki as the Japanese Stephen King, his writings are able to capture the imagination in fantastic ways that can leave one feeling unsettled for hours after reading.

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. ***

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