Ring (Ring, #1)

by Kōji Suzuki

No matter how easy a job was physically, if it didn’t involve any imagination, it usually ended up exhausting you.

It was more convenient to indulge in the scientific explanation, no matter how unconvincing it was.

No matter how much scientific knowledge they fill themselves with, on a very basic level, people believe in the existence of something that the laws of science can’t explain.

Asakawa was lost in thought, and didn’t want to be bothered. He wished his wife would act like her name, which meant “quiet”. The best way to seal a woman’s mouth was not to reply.

It made sense—to a degree—to marshal the power of science in facing down supernatural power. He wasn’t going to get anywhere fighting a thing he didn’t understand with words he didn’t understand. He had to translate the thing he didn’t understand into words he did.

Listen, Asakawa, I’ve told you before: I’m the kind of guy who’d get front-row seats for the end of the world if he could. I want to know how the world is put together, its beginning and its end, all its riddles, great and small. If someone offered to explain them all to me, I’d gladly trade my life for the knowledge.

These days, philosophy as a field of inquiry had drawn ever closer to science. No longer did it mean amusing oneself with silly questions such as how man should live. Specializing in philosophy meant, basically, doing math without the numbers. In ancient Greece, too, philosophers doubled as mathematicians.

Most phenomena in the universe can be expressed with differential equations, you know. Using them, you can figure out what the universe looked like a hundred million years ago, ten billion years ago, even a second or a tenth of a second after that initial explosion. But. But. No matter how far we go back, no matter how we try to express it, we just can’t know what it looked like at zero, at the very moment of the explosion.

See, we don’t know the beginning and we don’t know the end; all we can know about is the in-between stuff. And that, my friend, is what life is like.”

A fundamental sense of terror is built into us humans, on the instinctual level.”

But listen, devils never drive humanity to extinction. Why? Because if people cease to exist, so do devils.

“Woman” wasn’t even the right word. The biological distinction between male and female depended on the structure of the gonads. No matter how beautifully feminine the body, if those gonads were in the form of testes it was a male.

“Think! There’s nothing certain in our future! All we can hope for is a vague continuation. But in spite of that, you’re going to keep on living. You can’t give up on life just because it’s vague. It’s a question of possibilities.

A woman’s resentment toward the masses who had hounded her father and mother to their deaths and the smallpox virus’s resentment toward the human ingenuity