Characters
- Kazuyuki Asakawa: The book's protagonist, he is a Tokyo newspaper reporter whose reputation was somewhat tarnished in the past in connection with a fad for UFOs and ghosts. He has a wife, Shizuka (the Vertical, Inc. English translation of the novel incorrectly renders her name as Shizu), and daughter, Yoko.
- Ryuji Takayama: Asakawa's friend whom he enlists to help him solve the riddle of the tape. He was a doctor but later became a Philosophy professor of a famous university due to the time the story occurred. Being of an odd mental disposition, and is also something of a genius, Ryūji usually stated that the purpose of his life is to gaze at the end of humanity. Ryūji also claims to be a rapist, although whether these claims are true or not is unclear, as it maybe just a little hoax he used in order to befriend the quiet Asakawa. He was actually a lonely person who struggled to live peacefully within society. Ryūji will have even more significant roles in the sequels Spiral and Loop.
- Shizuka and Yoko Asakawa: Asakawa's wife and daughter respectively. When Shizuka unknowingly watches the cursed video with Yoko on her lap, they become Asakawa's primary motivation for solving the riddle of the tape.
- Sadako Yamamura: The book's unseen antagonist who vanished thirty years ago; also the person behind the incident of the cursed tape. She was, in fact, a hermaphrodite with special powers similar to ESP. Due to, and despite her hermaphrodism, she was said to be extremely beautiful.
- Shizuko Yamamura: Sadako's mother, who possessed powers similar to her daughter's. She threw herself into the crater of Mt. Mihara after a demonstration of telepathy, which she failed due to the present reporters' ill wishes, and was branded a fraud.
Read more about this topic: Ring (Suzuki Novel)
Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them. Their susceptibilities will clash against objects that remain innocently quiet.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of human history.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That’s what their substance is.”
—Jonathan Miller (b. 1936)