A review by emsemsems
S: Es by Kōji Suzuki

3.0

‘It was hard to accept that a simple mutation of the virus—so pernicious that it could form a sarcoma in the coronary artery—rendered it completely harmless to the human body. He found it rather more reasonable to think that the virus, once transformed, had grown even more virulent.’

Not sure if reading this in the midst of a global plague makes it uncannily appropriate or madly, darkly inappropriate. Regardless, this felt oddly nostalgic to me (since I grew up watching (probably too many) horror films including the ‘Ring’ franchise). I think this would have worked better as a film than a book. The peak/climax of the story was very rushed – and too many twists. Would have preferred one or two mind-blowing twists rather than a bunch of half-arsed and could-have-been-too-confusing ones. Could it be that Suzuki was coping (not so well) with a tight deadline?

Glad to have read this but would have loved a more satisfying end as this one felt like a strange blur – somewhat cinematic but not glorious enough. Stunning cover design though, which I’ll have to admit was that that made me pick up Suzuki’s novel so quickly. I’ve not read any ‘horror’ stories in a very long time, and this was only moderately satisfying which is still alright because it makes me want to read more horror for sure. If I could describe the entire thing in on sentence it’d be: long live Sadoko Yamamura? Lol .

‘Say there were a hundred apples lined up in a wooden box. Left outside in the elements, at least one of the apples would start to spoil and become rotten. Call this first rotten apple “A.” If one got rid of A when it started going bad, the decay could be prevented from spreading, but if one did nothing, the decay would be transferred to the next apple and then the next apple, and thus the damage would spread everywhere.

Now, assuming that the good apples had the right to isolate apple A, which had gone bad, there were two conceivable ways to stop the infection from spreading. You could transfer the bad apple to another box and cut off contact forever or burn the apple and erase its existence completely.

Nevertheless, apple A hadn’t wished to become rotten. It was simply a law of nature that one apple in every hundred goes bad, and in keeping with this law, it gathered up all of the other apples’ potential to become spoiled and borne their sins all by itself. The good apples should sigh with relief that decay had come not to them but to apple A first, and they ought not demolish it out of hatred.

Could there even be a society where not one of the hundred apples would ever go bad? Trying to make it so would necessitate the use of a lot of very powerful antiseptics, and then things such as liberty, vitality, pleasure, and joy would all vanish. Making a perfect society where rotten apples never existed represented a dilemma in that all apples would be deprived of the chance to be happy.

One could either agree to a society where decay would arise according to the laws of nature, or agree to a draconian, fascist society, where the causes of decay would be suppressed and removed beforehand.

If one desired the former, then the good apples should bear no hatred toward apple A’s misfortune. Rather, they should isolate it out of a sense of sympathy, mercy, and pity. The only ones permitted to abhor apple A were the ones directly harmed by it, and it would not be right for the entire box of apples to uniformly adopt the emotions of those individuals.’

Also, the story within the story about the fucking apples was more scary/frightening to me than the novel as a whole, I think. It definitely gives more of a lingering, ‘haunting’ vibe.