Stunning Japanese thriller with a chilling supernatural twist. The novel that inspired the cult Japanese movie and the Hollywood blockbuster of the same name. Asakawa is a hardworking journalist who has climbed his way up from local-news beat reporter to writer for his newspaperâ¤s weekly magazine. A chronic workaholic, he doesnâ¤t take much notice when his seventeen-year-old niece dies suddenly â¤" until a chance conversation reveals that another healthy teenager died at exactly the same time, in chillingly similar circumstances. Sensing a story, Asakawa begins to investigate, and soon discovers that this strange simultaneous sudden-death syndrome also affected another two teenagers. Exactly one week before their mysterious deaths the four teenagers all spent the night at a leisure resort in the same log cabin. When Asakawa visits the resort, the mystery only deepens. A comment made in the guest book by one of the teenagers leads him to a particular vidoetape with a portentous message at the end: Those who have viewed these images are fated to die at this exact hour one week from now. Asakawa finds himself in a race against time â¤" he has only seven days to find the cause of the teenagers⤠deaths before it finds him. The hunt puts him on the trail of an apocalytpic power that will force Asakawa to choose between saving his family and saving civilization.