Loop
Stunning Japanese novel with a chilling twist – the follow-up to Ring and Spiral.Kaoru's father, Hideyuki, lies dying in a Tokyo hospital, his body ravaged by viral cancer. This nightmarish incurable disease has sprung out of nowhere and has begun to affect organisms all over the planet.Twenty years ago Hideyki worked on a virtual reality project which replicated evolution on earth, called the Loop. The project failed when the organisms within it inexplicably stopped reproducing normally and started cloning. Nearly all of the other scientists who worked on the Loop are already dead – from cancer.To get to the heart of the mystery, Kaoru must travel to the other side of the planet, to the Mojave desert. The secret he encounters there will overturn everything he thought he knew about the world – and his own identity.In this suspense-filled follow-up to ‘Ring’ and ‘Spiral’, Suzuki masterfully confounds the reader with a stunning new twist on the Ring mythology.
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LOOP
KOJI SUZUKI
Translation
Glynne Walley
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2015
Copyright © Koji Suzuki 2005
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2006
First published in the USA by Vertical, Inc 2005
Originally published in Japan as Rupu by Kadokawa Shoten, Tokyo, 1998
Cover photographs © Sean Murphy/Getty Images (dust cloud); Karl Weather/Getty Images (motorcycle).
Koji Suzuki asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007179091
Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2015 ISBN: 9780007331598
Version: 2015-10-06
Contents
Part One: At the End of the Night
Part Three: Journey to the End of the Earth
He opened the sliding glass door, and the smell of the sea poured into the room. There was hardly any wind—the humid night air rose straight up from the black water of the bay to envelop his body, fresh from the bath. The resulting immediacy of the ocean was a not-unpleasant feeling for Kaoru.
He made a habit of going out onto the balcony after dinner to observe the movements of the stars and the waxing and waning of the moon. The moon’s expression was constantly, subtly changing for him, and watching it gave him a mystical sort of feeling. Often it would give him ideas.
Gazing up into the night sky was part of his daily routine. He’d slide open the door, feel around in the darkness below until he found his sandals, and step into them. Kaoru liked it up here on the twenty-ninth floor of the apartment tower, on this balcony thrust into the darkness. It was where he felt most at home.
September was mostly gone, but not the heat of summer. The tropical evenings had arrived in June, and while the calendar now said it was autumn, they showed no sign of faltering yet.
He didn’t know when the summers had started getting longer. All he knew was that coming out onto the balcony like this every evening never cooled him off. It just brought him face to face with the heat.
But then the stars rushed right down to him, so close that he felt like he could touch them if he only stretched out his hand, and he forgot the heat.
The residential part of Odaiba, facing Tokyo Bay, boasted an overgrowth of condominium towers, but not many residents. The banks of windows only gave off a limited amount of light, little enough in fact to allow a clear view of the stars.
An occasional fresh breeze took the sea out of the air some, and his hair, just washed and still clinging to the back of his neck, began to dry.
“Kaoru, close the door! You’ll catch cold!” His mother’s voice, from behind the kitchen counter. The movement of the air must have told her that the door was open. She couldn’t see the balcony from where she was, though, so Kaoru doubted she realized that he was outside, fully exposed to the night air.
How could anybody catch cold in this heat, he wondered, exasperated at his mother’s over-protectiveness. Not that it was anything new. He had no doubt that if she knew he was out on the balcony, she’d literally drag him back inside. He shut the door behind him so he couldn’t hear her anymore.
Now he was the sole possessor of this sliver of space jutting into the sky a hundred yards above the ground. He turned around and looked through the glass door into the apartment. He couldn’t see his mother directly. But he could read her presence in the milky band of fluorescent light that shone from the kitchen onto the sofa in the living room. As she stood in front of the sink, cleaning up after the meal, her movements caused slight disturbances in the rays of light.
