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When I started serving as headmaster of Keio Academy of New York in 2022, that is, in the heyday of COVID-19, what I planned was a movie night featuring KOMATSU Sakyo and FUKASAKU Kinji’s science fiction movie VIRUS (1980), helping the students comprehend the essence of pandemic more deeply. For various reasons, however, I couldn’t accomplish the plan five years ago.

Therefore, when some students told me recently that they were trying to host the movie night featuring VIRUS on May 16^th, 2026 (Saturday), I was happy to join them; my dream came true finally!   Many thanks for the students who produced the event and shared unique opinions with me.

Historically speaking, Komatsu’s second novel Virus: The Day of Resurrection (復活の日)　was originally published by Hayakawa Publishing in 1964, coinciding with Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove, filmed by FUKASAKU Kinji in 1980, and translated into English by Daniel Huddleston (Haikasoru) in 2012.  While Kubrick's narrative centers around the fear of full-scale nuclear war, Komatsu's story gives an insight into the possible coincidences between natural disaster and artificial disaster, which we were to witness on March 11, 2011, in Japan, nearly 50 years later than the original publication of the novel. In the 2020s when wars broke out on a global scale, it is highly likely that we will experience similar disasters in the near future.

Now let me outline the story of Virus: The Day of Resurrection.

Somewhere in the 1960s, a shady transfer is happening in England between an East German scientist, Professor Gregor Karlsky, and a group of secret agents. It is revealed that MM88 is a deadly virus sampled in outer space and created accidentally by an American geneticist that amplifies the potency of any other virus or bacteria it gets mingled with. However, the secret agents are only interested in recovering the MM88 as a bio-weapon, which was stolen from a lab in the US the year before. Escaping an attack by East German soldiers, the spies crash their plane and the virus is released, creating a world-wide epidemic initially known as the "Italian Flu." Within seven months, the world's entire population has died off except for 863 scientists and support personnel wintering in Antarctica. The virus becomes active at -10 degrees Celsius, and the polar winter has spared the 855 men and eight women stationed on the Antarctic continent. The Nereid, which was on patrol at the time the epidemic began, joins the scientists after sinking a Soviet submarine whose infected crew attempt to make landfall near Palmer Station. However, just as the group begins to repopulate their new home, it is revealed that an earthquake near Alaska will set off the United States nuclear arsenal, since Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Garland (Henry Silva) activated the Automated Reaction System (ARS) before his death, believing that the Soviet Union would use the confusion caused by the pandemic to launch an attack on North America.. The Soviets have their own version of the ARS and will fire off their weapons when the American missiles hit their targets. This is the way the mass destruction weapon caused the end of the world.

This outline will convince you that in 1964 Komatsu already predicted the total apocalypse to be caused by a coincidence between natural disaster such as tremendous earthquake and artificial disaster as represented by full-scale nuclear war. What impresses me is that featuring a guy who went by the handle of "Ahab" over Australia's Mawson Station in Antarctica (p.190) , Komatsu seems to be conscious of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851) with Captain Ahab as the protagonist. As Moby-Dick dramatizes the apocalyptic shipwreck of the whaler Pequod, whose name recalls the genocide of a native American tribe Pequots in 1637, so Virus: The Day of Resurrection reveals the logic of total apocalypse leading to the genocide of the whole humankind. What makes the novel more intriguing is that even though no country is inhabitable on earth, something else inherits human tradition. Admiral Conway states: "Even if the North American continent is uninhibited, something there still lives.  ... Humanity's hatred. ... The germ of hatred has survived the destruction of humanity in an uninhabited land, and it is what is tying together Antarctica and this great earthquake in Alaska" (263).  Now he refers to ARS (Automated Reaction System) itself as a symptom of humanity's hatred which will survive even the total apocalypse.

After its original publication, Virus was supposed to be made into a film in Hollywood. However, although the screenplay was completed in English, financial problems failed the completion of the film. It is rumored that it is Michael Crichton, a young novelist working in Hollywood, who was to be well-known for Jurassic Park (1990) and Rising Sun (1992), had a chance to read the screenplay of Virus and came up with the idea of his novel Andromeda Strain published in 1969. Crichton's novel also depicted coincidences between fatal bacteria from outer space and nuclear war.  I don't accuse Crichton of plagiarism here. I would just want to say that more than 60 years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, we are still haunted by nightmares of total apocalyptic coincidences between natural disaster and artificial disaster, which were deeply symptomized by the novels written by Sakyo Komatsu and Michael Crichton back in the 1960s. 

At this point, let me remind you that in his Omnibus “Tricultural” lecture last November, Junot Diaz, the Pulitzer winner, who has long been into FUKASAKU Kinji’s movie version of VIRUS (1980), emphasized the rise of Sadopopulism (for more detail, see Headmaster’s Voice #47). Junot’s deep love of VIRUS is evident in his major novel The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead, 2007):

At night, unable to sleep, he watched a lot of bad TV, became obsessed with two movies in particular: Zardoz which he’d seen with his uncle before they put him away for the second time) and Virus (the Japanese end-of-the-world movie with the hot chick from Romeo and Juliet).  Virus especially he could not watch to the end without crying, the Japanese hero arriving at the South Pole base, having walked from Washington D.C., down the whole spine of the Andes, for the woman of his dreams. (Oscar Wao, 33).

Given that VIRUS ends with the protagonist’s dramatic reunion with the survivors at the southern end of South America, it is interesting that the story inspired the Dominican-American “Japanophilic” novelist. This is one of the reasons why VIRUS has gained transnational popularity over the past 45 years.