Book 1

The Ring

by Koji Suzuki

Published 1 May 2003

A mysterious videotape warns that the viewer will die in one week unless a certain, unspecified act is performed. Exactly one week after watching the tape, four teenagers die one after another of heart failure.

Asakawa, a hardworking journalist, is intrigued by his niece's inexplicable death. His investigation leads him from a metropolitan tokyo teeming with modern society's fears to a rural Japan--a mountain resort, a volcanic island, and a countryside clinic--haunted by the past. His attempt to solve the tape's mystery before it's too late--for everyone--assumes an increasingly deadly urgency. Ring is a chillingly told horror story, a masterfully suspenseful mystery, and post-modern trip.


Book 2

Spiral

by Koji Suzuki and Glynne Walley

Published 1 May 2004
Stunning, cutting-edge thriller with a chilling supernatural twist from Japan's stylish new literary star, the acclaimed author of Ring. Pathologist Ando is at a low point in his life. His small son's death from drowning has resulted in the break-up of his marriage and he is suffering from traumatic recurrent nightmares. Work is his only escape, and his depressing world of lonliness and regret is shaken up when an old rival from medical school, Ryuji Takayama, turns up on his slab ready to be dissected. Through Ryuji's bizarre demise Ando learns of a series of mysterious deaths that seem to have been caused by a sinister virus. From beyond the grave Ryuji appears to be leading Ando towards a suspicious videotape -- could this hold the answer to the riddle of the strange deaths? Or is it merely the first clue? When Ando meets Mai, an attractive former student of Ryuji's, his desire to solve the puzzle transcends curiosity and becomes a matter of life or death. Spiral is the stunning sequel to the highly acclaimed Ring, and can also be read as a standalone.

Book 3

Loop

by Koji Suzuki

Published 1 January 1990
The Inspiration for the New Major Motion Picture RINGS

Learn the final truth about the Ring!

In this much-awaited conclusion of the Ring trilogy, everything you thought you knew about the story will have to be put aside. In Loop, the killer mimics both AIDS and cancer in a deadly new guise. Kaoru Futami, a youth mature beyond his years, must hope to find answers in the deserts of New Mexico and the Loop project, a virtual matrix created by scientists. The fate of more than just his loved ones depends on Kaoru's success.

Loop is written as a stand-alone work though it is best enjoyed by fans of Ring and Spiral. The author's own favorite of the trilogy, this astounding finale is an emotionally resonant tale that scales conceptual heights from an angle all its own. Fiction about fiction has rarely been so gripping.

Book 4

Birthday

by Koji Suzuki

Published 12 December 2006
Basis of the Hit Movie Ring 0: Birthday!

Birthday is Ring-master Koji Suzuki’s return to the Ring universe, a collection of short stories focusing on the female characters with a theme of birth. An exploration of extraordinary circumstances from the perspective of memorable women, this expansion of the Ring, Spiral, and Loop world was adapted into a hit movie less than a year after the book’s publication.

Thirty years before the tragic events of Ring, Sadako Yamamura was an aspiring stage actress on the verge of her theatrical debut. The beautiful and ravishing Sadako was the object of every male’s desire involved with the company including n the director. There was one thespian she was interested in, but…

Fast forward past the events of Ring, Ryuji Takayama’ s distraught lover, Mai Takano is struggling in the wake of the professor’s mysterious demise. Mai visits Ryuji’s parents’ house to find the missing pages of his soon-to-be published article. There she is drawn to a curious videotape and a fate more terrifying than Ryuji or Kazuyuki Asakawa’s.

Reiko Sugiura questioned the purpose of bringing a child into a world where there was only death. She already lost one son, and the father of her unborn child, Kaoru Futami, had disappeared in search of a cure to the deadly disease that threatened all life. Despite Kaoru’s to meet again in two months, he has not returned. Despondent but driven for answers Reiko is led to the Loop project, where she will discover the final truths of the Ring virus.

Book 5

S

by Koji Suzuki

Published 19 December 2017
Twenty-one years after the legendary bestseller Ring, which spawned blockbuster films on both sides of the Pacific, and thirteen years after Birthday, the seeming last word on iconic villain Sadako and her containment, internationally acclaimed master of horror and Shirley Jackson Award-winner Koji Suzuki makes his much-awaited return to the famed trilogy’s mind-blowing story world with a new novel, S.

Takanori Ando, son of Spiral protagonist Mitsuo, works at a small CGI production company and hopes to become a filmmaker one day despite coming from a family of doctors. When he’s tasked by his boss to examine a putatively live-streamed video of a suicide that’s been floating around the internet, the aspiring director takes on more than he bargained for. His lover Akane, an orphan who grew up at a foster-care facility and is now a rookie high-school teacher, ends up watching the clip. She is pregnant, and she is…triggered.

Sinking hooks into our unconscious from its very first pages with its creepy imagery, and rewarding curious fans of the series with clever self-references, here is a fitting sequel to a tale renowned for its ongoing mutations.

Books 1-3

The Complete Ring Trilogy

by Koji Suzuki

Published 5 November 2015

Together for the first time, in ebook form, the stunning, cutting-edge thrillers with a chilling supernatural twist from the Japanese master of suspense. THE RING is the famous novel that spawned the big-budget blockbuster US horror movie of the same name.

Asakawa is a hardworking journalist who has climbed his way up from local-news beat reporter to writer for his newspaper’s weekly magazine. A chronic workaholic, he doesn’t take much notice when his seventeen-year-old niece dies suddenly – until a chance conversation reveals that another healthy teenager died at exactly the same time, in chillingly similar circumstances.

Sensing a story, Asakawa begins to investigate, and soon discovers that this strange simultaneous sudden-death syndrome also affected another two teenagers. Exactly one week before their mysterious deaths the four teenagers all spent the night at a leisure resort in the same log cabin.

When Asakawa visits the resort, the mystery only deepens. A comment made in the guest book by one of the teenagers leads him to a particular vidoetape with a portentous message at the end: those who have viewed these images are fated to die at this exact hour one week from now.

Asakawa soon finds himself in a race against time – he has only seven days to find the cause of the teenagers’ deaths before it finds him. The hunt puts him on the trail of an apocalytpic power that will force Asakawa to choose between saving his family and saving civilization.