WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — I don’t have cable. That saves me $600 or more a year. I have patience instead.

A few weeks ago, ABC finally got around to showing the American version of the Japanese horror film and novel, "The Ring." I never saw it in a theater. The premise - a videotape that kills people, accompanied by an eerie phone call that says you only have seven days to live - seemed ridiculous to me.

But it wasn’t. advertisement

"The Ring" proved to be one of the most subtly shocking thrillers I’d ever seen. Even cut for TV, it was pretty spooky. In the closing credits, the name of the author who wrote the original book, Koji Suzuki, flashed past briefly. I needed to know more. I went online.

Suzuki, one discovers, is a 45-year-old Japanese author whose "Ringu " has sold 10 million copies in Japan and has now been made into Japanese, Korean and American movies. It is part of a trilogy, "Ring," "Spiral " and "Loop," whose first two parts have been translated into English and whose third is due to appear in America this fall.

Suzuki has been called the Japanese equivalent of Stephen King. It’s almost an insult. He is far better than King, a much more lucid, spare, clever writer. "Ringu " has spread across the world like the accursed videotape it describes.

Thanks to him, a bunch of dripping, squelching, soggy-footed and soaked-to-the-skin Japanese ghosts a couple of hundred years old are invading Hollywood, to give us cold chills.

"J-Horror," or Japanese Horror, as the new genre is called, is proving a rich vein for American remakes of movies that are based on novels, kabuki plays and old Buddhist ghost stories from half a world away.

The American remake of "The Ring" made $249 million worldwide. ""The Ring 2" pulled in a respectable $154 million. "The Grudge," starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, was remade from the Japanese original, "Ju-On," and is now out on DVD. "Dark Water," based on an anthology of short stories by Suzuki, is in theaters now starring Oscar-winner Jennifer Connelly, though reviews have been tepid.

What is really interesting about this is the ease with which Buddhist-based horror has crossed the Pacific and struck a chord in a country that is predominantly Christian. Even more, the books are so different from the movies that it is a singular thrill to read them and find out what Suzuki originally envisioned.

There are some very bizarre touches in them, stuff that can’t be shown on any screen, or mentioned in a family newspaper. Yet it is all so coolly laid out, with such unsettling impartiality, that it provokes a shiver of curiosity, with only the tiniest tingle of repulsion.

What scares the Japanese seems to scare us too. The films inspire fear not with crude slashings and chain saw massacres, but with subtle, creepy touches: shadows of things, fleeting glimpses of beings that ought not to be there, and above all, dripping, streaming, sluicing, raining water.

The real-life Suzuki says he doesn’t believe in ghosts at all. He wrote his successful book with his daughter sitting on his lap, taking care of her at home. It was published in 1991 and took 11 years to become phenomenally successful.

"I’m basically a logical sort of person," the author said in an interview with the Japanese magazine Kateigaho. "I don’t believe in wispy things like ghosts. I’m not interested in them. I hardly ever read horror novels or see horror films."

Suzuki, in fact, hasn’t read much of Stephen King at all. He prefers Hemingway. He has seen Alfred Hitchcock’s "Psycho," and William Friedkin’s "The Exorcist," but they don’t seem to have influenced him at all. "Ring " and its sequel, "Spiral," are basically detective novels that begin with a lot of hard gumshoeing and newspaper archive research, then gradually branch into weirder and weirder realms of evil and horror.

At first everything seems explicable. Suzuki’s "Ring " begins with four dead teenagers, found with ghastly expressions of terror on their faces. They died in the act of ripping out their own hair by the roots. The hero-reporter is a man (changed to Naomi Watts in the American films) who tries to find out what happened.

Gradually, his research leads him into the realm of the paranormal, but that realm is solidly moored in real life, which makes it all the more disturbing. Suzuki has his reporter travel through modern Tokyo, in a real-life landscape with common recognizable names: Shinjuku, Aoyama, Omotesando. The tale takes the reader by ferry to an island where the secret of the lethal videotape is gradually revealed.

The book ends with its hero, reporter Kazuyuki Asakawa, driving madly with his wife and child to the house of his in-laws. Unlike the movie, it is not enough to make a copy of the tape to escape death. You have to show the tape to someone else. He has decided to endanger his in-laws, to save his wife and little girl. The in-laws will have to show the tape to someone else in turn.

"Black clouds moved eerily across the sky. They slithered like serpents, hinting at the unleashing of some apocalyptic evil," is the last line in the book.

In "Spiral," the second segment of "The Ring" trilogy, we learn Asakawa doesn’t make it in time. He, his wife and child, are all found dead in their car, their faces terrible to behold.

"Spiral " is even spookier. It opens with an dreadful autopsy and depends on solving a code. The "spiral" is the double helix of DNA. By now, the evil girl-ghost has moved beyond videotapes. She’s trying to insert herself like a virus into the very flesh of humanity.

Two elements of Japanese culture that permeate Suzuki’s novels and have made it through to the American movie remakes are water and female ghosts.

"Walking along a body of water, you sense ghosts being born," said Suzuki in the Kateigaho interview.

He also noted that in Japan, scary figures tend to be female, whereas in Western books and movies they tend to be male.

What is extraordinary is how far back Suzuki’s nightmare vision goes in Japanese belief. In the unforgettable climax to the American version of "The Ring," the evil child Samara crawls out of a well, passes through the glass screen of a television set, her feet dripping water, her hair a dark wet curtain half-veiling her ghastly blue eyes and scowling mouth. She floats up to the panicked, prostrate ex-husband of the movie’s heroine.

She scowls at him malignantly through her hanging hair. In an instant, she sucks out his soul and crumples his face.

This image of a ghost rising up from a well is nearly two centuries old in Japan. The story behind it is even older.

In the early part of the 19th century, the legendary Japanese woodblock artist, Hokusai (1760-1849), did a very scary print showing a folk tale about the accursed maid, Okiku, rising from a ruined well in which she had committed suicide for shame. She had been accused of breaking a plate. The plate was part of an expensive set of 10 owned by her employer.

In Hokusai’s print, Okiku floats up into the night, a disembodied angular head seen in profile, with bluish cheeks against a blue background, that wet hair trailing behind her, knotted around the precious plates. A wispy curl of smoke comes from her mouth. Around the ruined wooden well, mulberry leaves are growing, and mulberry leaves are where silkworms spin their cocoons.

So not only is Okiku a ghost, she is part-worm. The trailing plates resemble the bulbous, segmented body of a caterpillar and the silk-like thread of smoke reinforces the image of wriggling terror.

In the tale, Okiku’s ghost would scream from the depths of the well, counting up to nine and stopping. Perhaps this is the origin of the seven-day limit in "The Ring," the seven days you have from the moment you watch the unholy videotape, to the moment you die. Okiku’s ghost is finally laid to rest by a Buddhist monk who waits for her to howl her numbers, then suddenly shouts: "Ten!" She is defeated at last.

What else will crawl up out of Japan’s wells and watery depths to affright us, remains to be seen.

Call the psychic plumber. In the new American horror movie, our nightmares have sprung a leak.