Koji Suzuki is a household name in horror in Japan, much like Stephen King or Clive Barker, but his debut was in Sci-Fi. In 1990, his first full-length work, Paradise, won the Japan Fantasy Novel Award and launched his career. When Suzuki's Ringu (Ring) originally appeared in Japanese in 1991, it went more or less unnoticed by the larger public. The horror genre was still marginal in Japan. It was actually the publication of Ringu's sequel, Rasen (Spiral), which earned Suzuki the Yoshikawa Eiji Young Writer Award, and greater fame. Both books were adapted to screen, and in a marketing coup, released as separate features on the same day. Koji Suzuki claims that Promenade of the Gods took 8 years for him to finish, because a cult crime occurred in Tokyo just before he was set to publish the book in 1995. The crime was too similar in nature to events in the original story, so he had to amend the book.