I'm up to the point where the main character has watched the tape. One thing that's stuck out to me is the apparent contrast between the young, modern and Western and the old, traditional and Japanese. There's a lot of mention of Japanese-style rooms and Western-style rooms.

This is presumably a translation of more ordinary terms in Japanese that don't stand out as much, so they're probably don't make themselves felt as much in the original text, but they are used a lot and I feel like there's deliberate contrasts. One of the girls who died after watching the tape has a Western-style bedroom, her parents have a Japanese-style one. She also died while drinking Coke.

The schoolkids who died watched the tape at a cabin in a brand new holiday resort where they rent tapes to guests, pretty much all of them American sci-fi or horror movies. These kinds of contrasts definitely stand out to me in a story that's about a piece of modern technology (VHS tapes, it was written in 1990) becoming the means of transmitting a curse. I wonder when Sadako comes more into the plot if her life reflect this theme as well.

Other thoughts: The main character, Asakawa, a journalist who's a little bit more inclined to believe in the occult than his editor is, makes some strange leaps in logic. His attempt at a scientific explanation of how four teenagers simultaneously died of a heart attack is that they all contracted a brand new type of virus. That arrived on Earth by meteor impact.

He thinks people are scared of things either by evolutionary response or they're taught to be afraid of them. His small daughter was not frightened of seeing a Godzilla statue but was scared of a demon mask. Therefore there must be an evolutionary reason to be afraid of demons.

One bit I liked was that when he was driving out to the cabin where the kids watched the tape he was imagining some old, run-down scene out of Friday the 13th (Friday the 13th gets mentioned a few times) but the place is brand new, built less than a year ago, full of modcons.

Also, unlike the more famous adaptations, there's a bit at the end of the tape stating that there is a way to avoid dying of the curse as long as you follow the following instructions. The teenagers who watched the tape before have taped over the instructions with an advert.

That tension between the old and new doesn't become too central to the plot but I feel it never fully goes away either. Sadako is from Izu Oshima island and spends her life between there and the mainland in Toyko, which never treats her well. Her mother is from there as well and had her own psychic powers, which seemed to manifest after she restored a Buddhist shrine that was desecrated by occupying American troops after the Second World War.

The central idea of the book is strong: The curse as a memetic virus, carried by the tape that doesn't just want to kill, but to spread. Ideas are compared to something something half alive, like a virus, and the theory of viruses as rogue, broken pieces of DNA is brought up.

The word meme is never used but it's absence is felt. It also sticks the landing very well. Strong ending. Same fake-out happy ending as the films, with only two short chapters at the end where everything unravels and the main character realises what was really happening.