Virus: The Day of Resurrection

by Sakyo Komatsu

  “Anything unusual going on?” Yoshizumi asked Tatsuno as he was about to pass him by. Tatsuno was carrying in one hand a katakana manuscript that was apparently freshly typed. He typed one-handed when communicating on the ham radio.

  “Nothing terribly interesting,” Tatsuno said, raising up the manuscript a little to show him. “Another general election, and again no change in government. Influenza and polio are going around again. Aside from that, hmm, signs of a major epidemic of suspected distemper …”

  “Distemper?” Yoshizumi laughed. “You mean that disease that dogs get?”

  “Yeah. Since around the end of March, most of the dogs and cats in western Japan seem to have come down with it. I’ve got three fine hunting dogs myself, so I’m climbing the walls worrying about them.”

  “Dogs, eh?”

  Yoshizumi thought suddenly of the dog he had been raising back home. That half-blood Akita mutt never barked, was not especially smart, and certainly wasn’t brave, yet somehow there was a sense that he and the dog understood each other. That dog was already pretty old and so was sluggish. All he did was bask in the sun. It was a strange thing, but when Yoshizumi thought of that stupid dog’s wet, black nose and those sleepy eyes he could barely keep open—eyes truly characteristic of Japanese mutts—he could also see the hedge of miniature orange trees that ran along one side of the doghouse, the hill climbing up out of the plum orchard, the old and weathered roof of his home peeking out from among the shrubbery surrounding it. The small white frame of his ever prim, ever proper mother also rose up before his eyes. He had asked his elderly mother, and his nephew who was in elementary school, to take care of Gonbei—that was the goofy name he had stuck on that dog. They were the only two other people Gonbei would listen to. If it was anyone else talking, that hateful dog would put on an act of thorough incomprehension and at times be nothing but uncooperative.

  “It’s pretty rare for distemper to go around,” said Yoshizumi. “Is it that bad?”

  Tatsuno suddenly cracked up with laughter. “Well, look at the date of this paper. It’s the April first edition.” He was suddenly holding his stomach laughing as he waved around the kana newspaper in his hands. “I’m gonna make everyone guess which stories in here are real.”

  For some time afterward, Yoshizumi continued to idly reflect on the spring scenery of his hometown. About this time, the trees on the terraced hills at the gentle foot of that mountain would all be putting out buds, and the row of cherry trees that ran alongside the winding path to the headwaters would already be starting to put out leaves. But the Somei Yoshino cherry trees off away from the hills and that grove of Yaezakura cherries might be in full bloom now. The water flowing clear in that creek, the mountain and village indistinct in a thick veil of spring haze—a sky of faded indigo, the brilliant pink of the peach blossoms, white butterflies fluttering amid yellow fields of rape blossoms … Suddenly, Yoshizumi felt right at his ears the sounds of warm spring rains that watered the land as it burst forth with new grass. Of course it was just an illusion, and outside the window of the tubular passageway, the polar snow was beginning to fall without a sound.

  Yoshizumi came near to the small double window that had been carefully processed with silicon so that snow wouldn’t stick to either side and looked out. All that morning, the weather had been stunningly beautiful, with a sky so clear and blue it seemed as though it would sound like a gong if struck. But now it was covered with a layer of gray cloud, and like black dust, fine grains of powdery snow fell on and on, accumulating. There was no wind whatsoever now, but if the past were any guide, fierce blizzards would surely strike later. Spring in his hometown, and winter at the very ends of the earth—that Japanese spring, so soothing to his heart, was by latitude a hundred degrees away, and by distance over forty-one thousand kilometers, practically on the opposite side of this watery sphere, almost right beneath his feet. The blizzards of cherry blossoms, the crush of people at flower-viewing parties, that lighter mode of living that burst forth and overflowed in the cities, the new school year, the opening of the pro baseball season—what realistic connection was there between a world overflowing with the energy and vulgarity of these things, and life on its opposite side? Thirteen million six hundred thousand square kilometers of barren, nigh-uninhabited continent, violent and cruel, crying out with the grinding and creaking and rumbling of trillions of tons of ice and snow. Aside from those people who thought about them and worried about them, what percentage of their hundred million countrymen, in the middle of that riotous spring, cared anything for the hundred who lived huddled together in the polar region? For all its being published once every two weeks, how many people read and cared about the “Antarctic Diary” that ran in the paper’s arts and sciences column?

  Humans, Yoshizumi suddenly thought as he lightly knocked on a corridor wall where reinforced plastic, insulation, and aluminum plate were all pasted together … we live much farther apart from each other than we’ve always believed.

  He was thinking such things now because as his thoughts had leapt from the dog to the Japanese spring, he had remembered a certain woman who had loved that season. Shortly before he had left, he had met a reporter who had come to do a story on him. She had once been a childhood friend of his, though by the time they met again they were little more than passersby in one another’s lives. She was a city girl and terribly sophisticated—a woman who preferred a quiet restaurant at two in the morning, or perhaps a rowdy bar, to roughing it in the great outdoors with a mountain climber like him.

  That’s right, Yoshizumi thought lazily, right about now she’s probably in a hotel lounge somewhere, out on the town with a bunch of cityslicker types, decked out in refined, light spring fashions and tasteful accessories. “Mr. Yoshizumi? Ah, yes. That fellow who went to Antarctica?” Would she even remember that much about me? No way! Yoshizumi had to grimace at the rambling of his thoughts. He moved away from the window.

  It was true. Humans lived much farther apart from one another than everyone imagined.

  It was true that international communication networks lay wrapped around the globe like a net and relay satellites could bring the sights of European streets to viewers in New York. The net of airplane routes brought the capital of every nation to within twenty-four hours of travel time of each other, and materials and supplies moved in rapid streams, flowing daily from east to west, west to east, north to south, and back again. At the thin glass building of the United Nations gathered the representatives of ninety some-odd countries, spying on every corner of the world, arguing day and night, to the point where some people said that if France showed signs of moving in on Cuba, the neutral government of Cambodia would immediately be overthrown in a right-wing military coup d’état. If White House aides dropped a few unofficial hints suggesting there was talk of a possible tariff hike in America, the Dow average would plummet on the Tokyo exchange right away, and if it really did get hiked, you could lose your job. Even if it didn’t come to that, the effects would still be reflected in your bonus. In Roppongi, Tokyo, you could learn the stats of yesterday’s Dodgers game, and in Cairo, you could learn the details of that morning’s earthquake in Alaska.

  However, the mass media had made the world of the twentieth century like the holes in a net, and even if people everywhere could learn about events happening all over the globe each day, there was still a regular organizational system and ranking of import in the reporting, so that things far removed from this established order tended to slip through the holes in the net.

  For example …

  Suppose that one fine spring morning, you find your pet Java sparrow, which had been fine the day before, lying cold on the bottom of its cage, even though you quite properly brought the cage in and put a cloth over it last night. If that were to happen, could you tie the death of your lovely pet bird to the fuss that had started ten days ago in the entertainment columns and celebrity magazines over the sudden death of “hunk of the century” Antonio Se
vellini in a car crash, a death which female fans worldwide were weeping their hearts out over now?

  No, this might be impossible. So let’s say that one day you are suddenly informed that a friend of yours with whom you’d just shared a drink the day before had fallen flat on his face and died shortly after you’d left him, just as he had been about to climb up onto the step of a bus. Of course, you’d feel a powerful sense of your own mortality, and when you thought about the time you’d spent with the dead man, you’d probably think something like I need to pay a little more attention to my own health. But would you think to tie such a thing to a small article somewhere around the bottom of page two of the morning paper that read mystery DISEASE IN TAIPEI—MASS HEART ATTACKS?

  Most likely, nobody would.

  Also, setting aside assassinations and homicides, death itself has a much smaller societal significance than you probably think. But no matter how famous and cosmopolitan the man who died was, when his death is lumped into what is in a broad sense the category of “natural death” or “death from illness,” people will just lower their eyes a little and afterward wonder not about the cause of death, but about who will fill the hole this person left in society, and how society will change as a result. Their focus will be on the problems of the living. As long as the death is not unnatural—even if the victim is on the center stage of world politics—it will be swept away using words like, “Well, when you gotta go, you gotta go,” or “Oh, that’s so sad that he died so young.” No, in this rowdy age of global civilization, “death” was hardly unusual; it was an everyday occurrence. As an experiment, let’s take the newspaper for one day and have a look at the lower portion of the society page. How many obituaries will you see on just one day? And those are just the ones who were well known enough to be mentioned in the paper. Now look up to the top of the page. Count the number of deaths from traffic accidents, fires, accidental explosions, and crime. Go a page or two farther, and read about the war in East Asia and the coup d’état, and try to estimate the number of deaths by the scale of the conflict.

  That’s how many deaths appear in the newspaper in just one day. Now add in deaths from old age and disease and expand that to a global scale. Please imagine the sanitary conditions in those underdeveloped regions of the raging tropics and subtropics, and those places where there are neither medical facilities nor doctors. In advanced countries, heart disease resulting from intemperate living and cancer due to air pollution are deadly new epidemics caused by the advance of civilization. Every year, about eight hundred thousand of Japan’s one hundred million people will die—a number rivaling that of the total population of its outlying cities and towns. Fifty million people will die worldwide, out of a global population of three billion—a number about equal to the population of England.

  That’s what life is like for the human race.

  So when mass die-offs of field mice were seen in the Lombardia plain in northern Italy’s rice-producing region from the middle of March through the start of April, it became only a minor topic of discussion inside Italy. In Japan, one agricultural newspaper’s “Tidbits from Abroad” column gave a little bit of space to the story. It stated, “the Fiume Po briefly overflowed with dead mice floating downstream,” though that was a bit of an exaggeration. However, this column never followed up with the fact that just a little while later, the same kind of mass die-offs of field mice were witnessed in Breslau in southwest Poland all the way to the plains of Poznań. When the people of northern Italy heard about mice dying off, they were immediately visited by inauspicious thoughts of the Black Death. As you know, Boccaccio’s Decameron used the city of Florence as its setting. It was the site of the greatest tragedy of the 1340s, that decade in which twenty-five million people—a quarter of the entire population of Europe—were killed by a massive epidemic of the plague.

  The people were relieved when northern Italy’s health authorities immediately announced that the mouse die-offs appeared to be nothing more than an epidemic peculiar to mice, and that at this time no effect on humans had been detected.

  Because of this, they just couldn’t make a connection between the radiating wave of unexplained deaths of sheep, goats, and cattle near the headwaters of the Fiume Po—in particular, among those that grazed in the foothills of the Alps—and the mass deaths of field mice downstream, even though both events occurred within the borders of the same country.

  “Mama! I’m quitting this shepherding business and going to the city!” cried the desperate voices of countless shepherd boys. “These sheep aren’t running much of a fever, and they haven’t eaten any bad grass, but all of a sudden they bend their legs all the way down—like they’re kneeling to pray—and just quietly die. Today alone, we lost as many as twenty. They must surely be possessed by the Devil.”

  It was already mid-March by the time the European Economic Community’s Agriculture and Livestock Health Organization finally began to pay attention to the loss of milk cows in Switzerland and Austria, and to the strange deaths of livestock that began in Holland, Germany, and France and then began to spread everywhere. However, when things finally got serious enough to open an investigation, they could find no signs of hog cholera, fowl plague, anthrax, glanders, or any other known contagious disease of livestock.

  At any rate, as of the middle of April awareness of the problem still went no farther than Western Europe’s EEC and those associated with the livestock. Among the sheep of Australia and the milk and beef cattle in the American southwest, the signs were too small and were not yet causing any problems.

  On the other hand, from around the middle of March, epidemics of influenza and polio began to be a problem for southern Italy, the rest of Europe, and central Asia. The polio and influenza that had started in central Asia—it’s a strange thing, but in the periods between epidemics, the contagions that cause polio, influenza, plague, smallpox, and other serious epidemic diseases seem to mostly wait in hiding in the Himalayan region—began to spread their black wings across the east and west more and more. Bit by bit, the westward advance of these two viral diseases proceeded, and by the beginning of April they had already reached Hong Kong. And night and day, boats and airplanes were running ceaselessly between Hong Kong and Japan …

  3. The Second Week of April, Part 1

  “Hey, Noriko,” the society column’s desk editor shouted across the newsroom. “You say you’re headed over toward Akasaka? While you’re over there, can you drop by the Ministry of Health and Welfare and ask them about this flu and polio that are going around?”

  “Excuse me?” said Noriko, her eyes opening wide in surprise. “I thought I covered arts and entertainment now.”

  “You were on the health and medicine beat before that, weren’t you?” the desk editor said with a scowl. “Help me out here, will you? Things are really busy, and two of my rookies are laid up. I hear one ran into a car—and warm as it is—the other went off skiing and broke a leg.”

  “Those guys. As long as there’s snow somewhere, they’ll get out in it.” Noriko gave a little smile. “Can’t you send Tame?”

  “His job in the Kansai region took a little longer than expected. He’ll be flying back this evening. The society page is a little sparse. There’s nothing going on that’s really begging to be reported. So let’s go with the flu.”

  “Isn’t it a little early for that?” Noriko said turning her head. “It’s still stalled out around Taiwan, isn’t it?”

  “Hong Kong,” the desk editor said. “But it’ll be here soon. There’s already a mass outbreak in Kita-Kyushu, and anyway they say this is going to be a year for big epidemics of both.”

  “Not again.” Noriko frowned. “Flu again? And they’re saying we’ll have nice weather from here on.”

  “Please do it. Just forty lines will be plenty. Phone it in if you need to.”

  The weather was nice outside. A warm wind was catching up dust from the pavement. People who were already dressing quite lightly were out wa
lking to enjoy the spring sunshine.

  Not again! Inside the car, Noriko looked up at warm scenery and a sky tinged reddish brown from soot and smoke and cringed. And I come down with it so easily!

  She had come down with a terrible flu several years ago. Headache, stuffy nose, coughing, a steady fever of forty degrees, difficulty breathing, and no matter what kind of medicine she was prescribed nothing helped. She had been flat on her back for ten full days.

  Whenever she thought of the difficulty of those days, the loneliness of her solitary life would come suddenly crashing in on her.

  This dust is awful! Noriko thought, holding her breath and frowning as she rolled up the window all the way. And these exhaust fumes. There’s been a lot of fuss for some time now about this city smog causing lung cancer, but they don’t reduce it in the slightest. The world isn’t making much progress at all.

  There was a little time before her interview in Akasaka, so she went to the Ministry of Health and Welfare first and asked to see Mr. Shibata, a technical official whom she had often used as a source on her old beat.

  “Well, hey there!” the pale, thin-faced official said, giving her that bookish smile of his. “You have returned.”

  “Just for today,” Noriko said. “I’d like to hear about the flu and polio outbreaks.”

  “Oh, that?” he said as though it were nothing to be concerned about. “It’s reached Tokyo already. Four hospitalized in Shinagawa.”

  “For what?”

  “Polio. The flu arrived in Kita-Kyushu.”

  “What’s being done about it?”

  “For the polio, there’s quite a lot of live vaccine ready to go. As for the flu, well …”

  “Don’t clam up on me. City Hall is—”