is a fictional character and the main antagonist of Koji Suzuki's Ring novel series and its eponymous film series. Her backstory varies between continuities, but all depict her as the vengeful ghost of a young psychic who was murdered and thrown into a well. As a ghost, she is dressed in a simple white dress usually with long black hair hiding her face, and uses , her most distinctive power, to create a cursed videotape; whoever watches the tape will be haunted by Sadako and die exactly one week later unless the tape is copied and shown to another person, who must then repeat the same process. The titular "ring" from the novels and films refers to a ring-like visual that appears on the cursed videotape, which depicts the top of the well as seen by Sadako from its bottom. Korean and American films reimagine the character as Park Eun-seo () and Samara Morgan, respectively, with similar backgrounds and features.
Sadako has been played by several actresses in films, including Rie Inō, who premiered the role in Ring (1998) and Ring 2 (1999), Bae Doona in The Ring Virus (1999), and Daveigh Chase in the first American film (2002). Two film adaptations largely differ from her traditional depictions: Ring 0: Birthday (2000), in which she is portrayed by Yukie Nakama, follows the events leading to her death and features her as main protagonist rather than as an antagonist, while Sadako vs. Kayako (2016), in which is portrayed by Elly Nanami, is a crossover pitching her rivalry against Ju-On and The Grudge antagonist Kayako Saeki and briefly with Toshio Saeki.
Sadako and her American version, Samara, are both regarded as popular horror characters, notably spreading the appearance of ghosts with -like looks of pale girls with long dark hair in popular culture.
Appearances
In literature
Novels Sadako was born in 1947 to Shizuko Yamamura and Dr. Heihachiro Ikuma in Oshima Island. The year before, Shizuko gained psychic powers after retrieving an ancient statuette of En no Ozuno from the ocean. Shizuko also gave birth to a baby boy, but he died four months later due to an illness. Planning to move to Tokyo with Ikuma, she entrusted her mother to take care of baby Sadako. At Ikuma's encouragement, Shizuko displayed her psychic powers during a publicized demonstration. However, Shizuko bowed out of the demonstration due to migraines brought on by her powers. The press denounced Shizuko as a fraud because of this. Depressed, Shizuko eventually returned to Oshima Island and committed suicide by jumping into Mount Mihara. Meanwhile, Ikuma attempted to unlock the psychic powers of his own by meditating beneath a waterfall, which ended up causing him to contract tuberculosis, requiring him to recuperate in a sanatorium in the Izu Peninsula, leaving Sadako to be raised by Shizuko's relatives. Like her mother, Sadako was a powerful psychic; whereas Shizuko could only burn images onto paper, Sadako could also project images into electronic media, such as TV.
At the age of nineteen, Sadako joins a Tokyo-based acting troupe. As revealed in the short story Lemon Heart, she falls in love with the sound operator, Hiroshi Toyama. He learns of her powers, but he accepts them. However, an early form of the curse is created in the form of a sound recording that kills four people, including the troupe's director, resulting in a heartbroken Sadako leaving Toyama. Eventually, Sadako visits Ikuma in the Izu sanatorium, only to be raped by a doctor named Jotaro Nagao, who is unknowingly infected with smallpox. During the assault, he discovers that Sadako has testicular feminization syndrome, and has the genitalia of both sexes. Sadako bites him on the shoulder, causing her to be infected with the smallpox virus that Nagao contracted. Finally, Nagao throws her down a nearby well and seals her within. Foreseeing herself being reborn years later, Sadako vows revenge on the world before she dies. Her psychic powers mutate the smallpox virus into a new strain of virus, called the "ring virus", one that causes anyone who contracts it to die, seemingly of fright, within a week.
By Ring, in 1991, the Izu sanatorium, including the well that Sadako was thrown into, was rebuilt into a mountain resort. The well is located right below a TV screen of one of the resort's cabins. When a vacationing family forgets to bring home their videotape after one night, Sadako projects the new virus onto the TV screen, taking the form of a video, and the VCR records it onto the tape. The next visitor at the cabin, 17-year-old Tomoko Oishi, inadvertently discovers and watches the tape, leading Sadako to kill her. Tomoko's uncle, journalist Kazuyuki Asakawa, begins investigating her death and watches the tape, leading to him being cursed by Sadako. He learns about Sadako's origin and writes a journal detailing his investigation.
As revealed in Spiral, the ring virus originally had an escape clause that allowed it to propagate itself, but Tomoko and her friends, not believing any of it, mischievously overwrote the part where the tape gave the solution as a prank. As a result, the virus had no means to inform its viewers on how to multiply itself, so it mutated when the next viewer of the tape, Kazuyuki, watched it and copied it for his friend, Ryuji Takayama. Two strains then emerged: a ring-shaped one, which would invariably kill its viewers within a week, and a spermatozoon-shaped one, which would lay dormant within the viewers unless they were ovulating women, whose ovum would be infected by the virus and transformed into a Sadako clone. This was because Sadako wanted to be reborn, something she could not biologically do because she was intersex. Finally, though the original tape and its copies had been disposed of by the events of Spiral, the virus found its way into a new medium: Kazuyuki's journal, which his brother published after he died in a car accident. Kazuyuki's survival was actually not because he copied the tape for Ryuji, but rather because he unwittingly helped the virus propagate. This was why Kazuyuki survived, while his wife and daughter, who also copied the tape per his instruction, did not.
The dormant virus infects the ovulating Mai Takano when she watches the tape, causing her to give birth to a Sadako clone who assumes the name Masako. She is described as a "complete hermaphrodite" as she has fully functional male and female reproductive organs. After her identity is revealed, Sadako tells Mitsuo Ando that she made a deal with Ryuji: in exchange for his resurrection, he would help her be reborn, something he did when he attracted Ando into the case. She then blackmails Ando: in exchange for not activating the dormant ring virus that he contracted when he read Kazuyuki's journal, he would refrain from stopping it from being published. As an incentive, Sadako, who can clone a person by implanting their genes into her, will bring his deceased son, Takanori, back to life. Realizing that Sadako would win no matter what he does, Ando reluctantly cooperates.
In the third novel, Loop, which revealed that the events of the previous two books were set in a virtual reality called LOOP, it is stated that the ring virus unwittingly escapes into the real world after its creators clone Ryuji, who is dying from the virus. The virus separates from Ryuji and mutates with a bacterium, creating a highly dangerous cancer called the Metastatic Human Cancer (MHC), which threatens all life. The cloned Ryuji, who is raised as Kaoru Futami and has no memories of his life in LOOP, eventually has to reenter the virtual reality to get the cure for both the ring virus and the MHC. In the short story "Happy Birthday", Kaoru finds a cure that neutralizes all clones in the virtual reality, causing both himself and the Sadako clones to rapidly age and die within a matter of years.
The fifth novel, S, reveals that Masako was impregnated by Ryuji and gave birth to a girl named Akane Maruyama. Akane, unlike the Sadako clones, does not inherit the defective genes that had imperiled the clones, including Masako, who dies a few years after she is born. Meanwhile, Ryuji tries to stop the ring virus from propagating through Kazuyuki's journal but relents to allow four Sadako clones to continue existing, thinking that they have short lives and therefore pose no threat. However, the clones are killed off one by one by Ryuji's student Hiroyuki Niimura, who feels he must destroy Sadako once and for all.
Manga In Sadako-san and Sadako-chan, set after the 2019 film Sadako, Sadako seeks to move on from her tragic past and spread the curse via videotape by navigating the modern era of YouTube and social media with a young girl known as "Little Sadako", a reincarnation of herself. Little Sadako, a young child and fledging YouTuber who spends all day in a small closet at her mother's request, befriends Sadako when she arrives seven days after watching her tape and not being afraid of her, creating a joint YouTube channel with her dubbed "Twodako".
In the post-apocalyptic Sadako at the End of the World, Sadako is summoned after two young girls watch her videotape to find that an apocalypse has occurred since she was last summoned, and that the two girls are apparently the last humans alive. Conflicted over what to do when the girls' seven-day period is up, Sadako assists the pair in searching the world for more victims for her under the guise of friendship, as the trio's growing bond increases the possibility of Sadako herself finding peace and her curse being broken. Ultimately, after killing the last hairdresser on the planet after having their hair done and meeting with Okiku, Sadako reluctantly elects to take both girls' lives on the seventh day, ending her curse and reuniting with them in the afterlife.
In film Sadako's past is portrayed differently in the film series. In this continuity, Sadako is not the biological child of Dr. Ikuma and Shizuko but is implied to be the result of sexual intercourse between Shizuko and an enigmatic sea demon after Shizuko spent hours staring at and talking to the ocean. In Ring 2 it is revealed that shortly after childbirth, Shizuko left baby Sadako in a cave, hoping the waves would take her away. When she was still there come morning, Shizuko instead took Sadako home. Shizuko's brother Takashi later learns of her psychic prediction of Mount Mihara's eruption and tells everyone about it, making her an instant celebrity. Dr. Ikuma, eager to prove the existence of ESP, encouraged her to participate in a demonstration at Tokyo. During the demonstration, Shizuko was successfully able to prove her psychic abilities, but a spiteful journalist, Miyaji, accused Shizuko of being a fraud, inciting other journalists to join in the slanderous uproar. Sadako, who watched from backstage, killed Miyaji in a rage.Takahashi Hiroshi, "Ring", translated by J. Lopez, [unpublished, from http://www.curseofthering.com/RingText.txt ]
Sadako eventually split into identical twins, one good and innocent, and the other wrathful and destructive. After Shizuko committed suicide, Ikuma moved to Izu with the twins. The good Sadako grew into an adult and became an actress, while the evil twin was locked up by Ikuma and drugged to stunt her growth. Akiko Miyaji, the fiancée of the journalist whom Sadako killed, leads an angry mob to kill the evil Sadako, only for the twins to merge into one and slaughter her tormentors. Ikuma then wounded and threw Sadako down the well behind his house. Sadako survived for 30 years, dying shortly before the events of Ring, creating the cursed videotape.
At the end of Sadako 3D 2, it is revealed that Sadako has a daughter, who is briefly described as "the seed of despair, growing, and ready to bloom".