in Rasen and Kōji Seto in Sadako 3D and Sadako 3D 2. Unlike in the novel S, which has him as the protagonist, he is only a supporting character in the novel's adaptations, although he still played major roles; the role of protagonists are instead given to his girlfriend, Akane, and his younger sister, Fuko, in Sadako 3D and Sadako 3D 2, respectively. Sadako Yamamura is the primary antagonist in most novels in the series. Sadako was born intersex (she has the body of a woman but possesses a male and female genitalia) and is a powerful psychic. In the novels, she is the daughter of Shizuko Yamamura, a fellow psychic, and Heihachiro Ikuma, a professor who was married to another woman, making her a bastard child. Despite this, she was raised in a loving household, until an incident during Shizuko's demonstration which eventually led Shizuko to take her life and Ikuma to develop tuberculosis, abandoning Sadako to the care of Shizuko's relatives in her hometown of Izu Ōshima. As a teenager, she moved to the mainland to become an actress, but her hopes were dashed when she was implicated in the death of her theater director, forcing her to become a recluse caring for her ill father in a TB ward in the Izu Peninsula. It was there that she was raped by Jotaro Nagao, who then threw her down a well upon finding out that she was intersex. Because Nagao was sick with smallpox when he raped her, Sadako was infected by the smallpox virus, which mated with Sadako's inherent psychic powers to project her hate against the world onto a television screen that records a videotape, creating the infamous cursed tape. In the film series, Sadako is not hermaphrodite but fully female, and Ikuma is not her biological father but rather a man who took care of Shizuko when she became sick. She is portrayed by Ayane Miura in Ring: Kanzenban, Rie Inō in Ring and Ring 2, Hinako Saeki in Rasen, Yukie Nakama in Ring 0: Birthday, Tae Kimura in the TV series Ring: The Final Chapter and Rasen, and Ai Hashimoto in Sadako 3D and Sadako 3D 2. Sadako has counterparts in remakes from other countries. In the American film series, Sadako's counterpart is Samara Morgan, played by Daveigh Chase in The Ring, Kelly Stables in The Ring Two and Bonnie Morgan in Rings (2017),