Literary luminaries and scary prose from Japanese resorts

May 10 to May 16, 1976 I read:

After the Good Gay Times: Asheville-Summer of '35, A Season with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Anthony Buttitta

I don't know if it's a blessing or a curse to have both Fitzgerald's talent and a life that was even more interesting than what he wrote. My favorite book of his has always been The Crack-Up, maybe because it was so wrenchingly honest, elegantly sad, and defiantly funny. Somewhere I ran across a reading of The Crack-Up, or a portion of it by Jason Robards, Jr., which was incredible. It was in the days before video recording from television broadcast. But if it exists, I have hope of tracking it down to hear again.

Ogilvie, Tallant & Moon, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

My recollection is that this was a fun read.


May 10 to May 16, 2006 I read:

Ring, Koji Suzuki

I don't read a lot of truly frightening literature. But in a way it's taken the place of other sanity-defying things I used to do in younger days. I'm not risking life, limb or sanity--only some sleepless nights. A review convinced me that Ring wasn't so much terrifying as suspenseful, so I decided to give it a try. It is the first in a trilogy and has gone on to both Japanese and US movie adaptations--which sound too scary for me to watch. The book didn't scare me, but it conspired with other events in my life to make me very, very anxious. Not an enjoyable feeling. I put it down for a day or two and then came back to finish it.

Major suspense. The characters were presented with a certain distance, so I didn't find myself getting overly involved enough to care a lot whether they escape the curse they had stumbled into. But the premise of a video tape that doomed everyone who saw it to death exactly a week later... except that there might be a remedy, if only the hero could find out what it was. It was more a matter of seeing if the hero and his friend could solve the puzzle to get out of it. Lots of twists at the end. Will the characters survive? Yes! No! Yes! Maybe not... Um, kinda... Clearly the set up for the sequel.

One unexpected reaction I had was nostalgia for the mountain part of Japan--every trip I've made there has involved pilgrimage in the Mount Fuji area. Although my stays were about spiritual development and didn't have the overtones of doom the book brought out, it is true that along with the peacefulness, the mountains there have a kind of loneliness and a sense of human frailty facing an implacable natural world. I was also somewhat familiar with the resort areas around Hakone and Atami, which made it easier to envision the outdoor scenes there. The American movie version of The Ring was set in the Pacific Northwest and that seems to me like an interesting equivalent.