R.I.P. Koji Suzuki, creator of Sadako and author of Ring

Born in Hamamatsu in Japan in the 1950s, Suzuki published his first novel, a fantasy romance called Paradise, in 1990. The next year, he followed it up with a much darker story, inspired by a mental image of several teenagers all dropping dead at the same time, despite not being in the same place. From there, thoughts of a haunted video tape and the deadly ghost inhabiting it coalesced into Ring, which sold more than 500,000 copies by the time filmmakers got hold of it in 1998. Hideo Nakata’s film version took the ticking clock and surreal rules of Suzuki’s novel, added a few visual flourishes—notably, the imagery of the work’s villain, hyper-influential ghost girl Sadako, crawling out of a TV set to claim her doomed victims—and catapulted the novel into the Japanese mainstream. (Gore Verbinski would repeat the trick Stateside, on a significantly higher budget, in 2002.)

Suzuki’s post-Ring books—including sequels Spiral, Loop, Birthday, S, and Tide—help illustrate how ill-at-ease he sometimes was with the popularity of his work in the horror genre. (Despite happily noting that one of the ways he resembled King was in the way his sudden success in the genre rocketed his family from struggle to a life of ease.) Suzuki was rarely, if ever, interested in writing simple ghost stories building on his earlier work, and the later Ring books are often complicated (some might argue convoluted) efforts to jam scientific thinking, theories about viruses and supercomputers, and other odd obsessions into the rules laid out by the original book. (Japanese filmmakers bit, but the Americans notably didn’t; in a 2004 New York Times interview, Suzuki laughed when asked about the writers of The Ring Two pretty much jettisoning all of his ideas in favor of their own script, saying, “It’s a little like the virus idea of The Ring, itself. It just keeps getting replicated, and I have no control over it.”)

Suzuki continued to write regularly, with adaptors picking and choosing from his more marketable ideas. (Jennifer Connelly film Dark Water, based on a short story, was pushed into theaters to capitalize on The Ring‘s popularity in 2005, while one of Suzuki’s stories about his beloved sailing, “Adrift,” got a film treatment in 2006.) The author seems to have been both bemused and delighted by his success: He reportedly spent his days sailing, taking motorcycle trips across America, and visiting the homes and haunts of the literary heroes he grew up on. (He also, we add with no judgment, once published a novella written on toilet paper; The Drop was apparently available for very frightened, but very regular, readers in three-roll packs circa 2009.) Suzuki published his final novel, a return to the horror genre titled Ubiquitous, in 2025. An English translation is reportedly in the works, although no release date has been publicized.