I experienced The Ring on my trip

I thought I’d tell a story about my last trip to Japan, since it turned into a bit of a disaster that was eerily like the horror novel.

First of all, I found Ring by Koji Suzuki in my local library and decided to give it a read a couple months before I went to Japan. For those who don’t know it, it’s (roughly) about a VHS that’s found in a ryokan in Hakone that, once watched, kills you in seven days.

Fast forward, and my fiancé and I are in Japan! A few super fun days go by, but one morning, the morning we plan on heading to Hakone, I start feeling a little ill. Mostly just a stomach ache, so I assume I ate something weird and that it will go away on its own.

We carry on with the day, walk around Tokyo a little before getting on the train towards Hakone. Stomach is still hurting, feeling a little nauseous. We arrive in Hakone and it’s beeeaaauutiful. However, the ryokan we booked is way up the hill. We’re trying to save as much money as possible, so we decide to walk it. Not the greatest idea, as I was doing with with a bad stomach, anemia, and just generally not being an active person. I’m blacking out a little on the hike up those brutal hills BUT we make it.

The ryokan is amazing, we get a private little cabin to ourselves, we enjoy the hot springs. I notice the lobby has a row of DVDs you can take back to your room to watch and joke about one being cursed. I see a Gaki no Tsukai DVD and we take it back to our room to watch it. I’m a little bummed that my stomach STILL hurts and it’s making it difficult to really enjoy this amazing experience, but I’m hoping that a good night’s rest will clear it up.

Bad news, it didn’t. It actually got much, much worse.

We tried to tough it out because we had a fun day planned. We headed to the open air museum and it was super cool, but at this point, the pain is so bad that it’s making me dizzy. I begrudgingly decide that we can’t ignore it any longer, and we spend the next few hours traveling back to Tokyo to get to the international hospital. They immediately take me in for emergency surgery, and I get my dying appendix removed that night.

Luckily, the hospital was amazing and I was able to leave in a couple days and enjoy the rest of my trip! The scariest part of the whole ordeal was not setting up my travel insurance properly and being asked to pay the whole two million yen up front. So crazy that I go my whole life without ever being seriously injured or needing a surgery, and then it randomly happens when I’m traveling. If anything, this is a warning to always get travel insurance. But I thought the parallels were so funny.

TL;DR – I read Ring, went to a ryokan in Hakone, watched a video, and had to get an emergency surgery the next day.