Virus: The Day of Resurrection

VIRUS: THE DAY OF RESURRECTION
Fukkatsu no Hi © 1964 by Sakyo Komatsu

First published in Japan in 1964 by Hayakawa Publishing Corporation, Tokyo.
English translation rights arranged with IO Corporation/ Sakyo Komatsu Office, Tokyo, through Japan Foreign-Rights Centre.

English translation © 2012 VIZ Media
Cover design by Fawn Lau
All rights reserved.

No portion of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the copyright holders.

HAIKASORU
Published by
VIZ Media, LLC
295 Bay Street
San Francisco, CA 94133

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Komatsu, Sakyo.
[Fukkatsu no hi. English]
Virus : the day of resurrection / Sakyo Komatsu ; translated by Daniel Huddleston.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-4215-4932-3
1. Virus diseases—Fiction. 2. Science fiction. I. Huddleston, Daniel. II. Title.
PL855.O414F8 2012
895.6'35—dc23
2012036690

Haikasoru eBook edition
ISBN 978-1-4215-5090-9

To K.T.
, and to
everyone who
has to battle
with illness.

PEOPLE POWER
by Miyuki Miyabe

 I
n late September, I suddenly developed a high fever due to a cold and found myself bedridden.

I’d been feeling perfectly fine the day before, but a little while after I’d gotten up, I suddenly came down with this terrible fever. I shut myself up in my room, and I’d put on a gauze mask just to go out into the hall. I had my meals left on a tray outside my door, and my family was thoroughly engaged in gargling, handwashing, and disinfecting things with alcohol.

You may think that doing all that was a little much for just a cold. Well, we were halfway laughing at ourselves as we did it, but we were also halfway serious as well. This is because we have a pretty scary memory from about twenty years ago when influenza hit our family, and we all went down like dominoes.

I say “family,” but in reality, it was four households, including mine, which consisted of only me. But we all lived in the same neighborhood, and because the first one to show symptoms was my three-year-old niece, we were all worried. As we took turns looking in on her, the infection spread. The number of patients grew, and at last we all moved over to my parents’ house, since it would be easier on everyone and more comforting as well if we were all under one roof. The result was a pitiful state indeed: you could open that door over there and find two people lying in bed, and open up the sliding paper door over here to find three others lying down. Every time my elder sister and I went wobbling out of the house, supporting each other as we made a food and ice run, we would tremblingly murmur the same thing to one another:

“This is
Virus
 … ”

People power—the highly advanced and flexible software that runs society—is destroyed by an unknown virus. As a result, the fragile hardware that is society steadily, irreversibly collapses.
Virus
, which depicts this state of affairs, was a truly frightening novel for the fifteen-year-old high school girl I was when I first read it.

In the story, there’s one scene where a woman (one of the major characters of the first half) goes out of her apartment in a disease-weakened state dragging a bucket along to draw water from a nearby pool. Both the elevator and the running water have stopped at her apartment. Even now, that bit still flits through the back of my mind from time to time—with nightmarish detail and with such clarity I can almost smell it—like reliving a trauma.

But on the other hand, in order to operate the hardware that is society, the software of people power is essential. If society has even something as simple as electricity, it’s not like it’s just merrily circulating all by itself; it’s the work of each and every person that’s driving it along. You can’t have a society without people. This is also something that my fifteen-year-old self learned through this novel.

This is why when people get together, they can build a society and make it run. Even in the harsh, cruel environment of Antarctica.

It taught one less-than-outstanding schoolgirl what it means to live in society. At the same time, it also gave that girl—and then, by extension, her family—a shared reference point that still hasn’t faded even after all these years, by which the words “This is
Virus
 … ” are enough to say it all.

That’s how close it gets to the reader’s heart and how rooted in reality, how prophetic, and how timeless it is. It never gets old.

This is the kind of book I want to call “literature.” At least, the literature I’ve always admired is this kind of book.

Mr. Komatsu, thank you very much. May you rest in peace.

—from “Tsuitou: Komatsu Sakyo” (published by Kawade Shobo Shinsha in Japan)

Miyuki Miyabe’s first novel was published in 1987, and since that time she has become one of Japan’s most popular and best-selling authors. Miyabe’s 2007 novel
Brave Story
won The Batchelder Award for best children’s book in translation from the American Library Association.
ICO: Castle in the Mist
is Miyabe’s seventh book to be translated into English. Her other titles include
The Book of Heroes
and the mysteries
All She Was Worth
and
The Sleeping Dragon.

MARCH, 1973

 “B
low!” ordered Captain McCloud.

“Da, Capitan … ” said Petty Officer Ivan Mihailovich. Mihailovich, red of hair and large of nose, nostrils wide like those of some Chinese lion, had made a conscious choice to answer in Russian. He smirked. It was his way of snubbing his strict American captain, a man hard in both mind and body.

The burly captain, however, ignored the words of the Slav, so the petty officer briskly opened the air valve, releasing just a small amount of compressed air into the main ballast tank. In the parlance of his trade, he had “given it a tap.” A faint shudder ran through the floor.

“Separation,” said Mihailovich, this time in strongly accented English. “Depth 850 … 830 … 810 … 800 …”

“No obstacles ahead of us,” reported the navigator, watching both the undersea radar and the undersea video monitor.

“Seafloor plateau at forty degrees. Seven miles to the continental shelf.”

“Maintain present course and take us in slow,” the captain said, furrowing his brows until they bristled. “Raise rudder five degrees. Ascend to fifty meters.”

The rudder control of
Nereid
, like that of all nuclear submarines in its class, looked just like the control stick on an airplane. By gently pushing or pulling on the stick’s fan-shaped grip, Orrin—
Nereid
’s helmsman—could control the directional rudder and work the diving planes that jutted out from bow, stern, and conning tower.

Might as well be flying a bloody passenger plane!
Orrin was thinking. Such thoughts were never far from the helmsman’s mind.
Just once in my life, I wanna take this six-ton behemoth into a somersault!

As Orrin kept his eyes on the gyro-horizon, the pelorus, and the depth gauge, he pulled the stick back slightly toward himself. Maintaining its speed of eight knots,
Nereid
gradually began to raise its nose. The floor tilted slightly forward and backward before coming to a perfectly level stop. Apart from the faint engine vibrations transmitted through the floor, the space within the submarine was filled with silence.

Shortly, however, a shudder ran through the entire vessel and a slight vertical pitching began to rattle the ship. Here the North Equatorial Current—the Black Stream—collided against the continental shelf, creating an upward flow of water.

“Depth fifty meters …” Orrin said.

“Hold current depth,” said McCloud. “Accelerate to one half of full speed.”

The vibrations from the engine grew more powerful, but the pitching was much less pronounced now.
Nereid
raced toward the top of the continental shelf at an undersea velocity of fifteen knots. While moving at that velocity, no one in the central control room would speak unnecessarily, but the redheaded Nizhnij Novgorod-born Soviet—no,
Slav
, since there no longer was a nation called the Soviet Union—was whistling a low, dry rendition of “Song of the Fatherland.”

The endless, boundless land …

The Fatherland, my Fatherland …

But Petty Officer Mihailovich’s “fatherland” no longer existed. And it wasn’t just Mihailovich; nobody had a “fatherland” anymore. Captain McCloud was no longer an officer of the US Navy. Navigator Vankirk’s “fatherland” of the Netherlands was gone, and the nationality of Orrin the helmsman was no longer British.

The bells of Moscow ring high in the east and west …

Sounding the peace of our eternal nation . . .

“We’ve entered the channel,” said the navigator. “One mile to shore.”

“Engine stop,” the captain said into his microphone. “Ascend to periscope depth and hold position. Get the snorkel ready, and prepare to activate the air sampler. And after that …” Here the captain paused to think for a moment. “… tell Yoshizumi to get up here.”

Nereid
stopped at periscope depth and lowered sea anchors from both stem and stern. When necessary, it was possible to maintain the ship’s equilibrium by extending “arms” from the left and right sides of the center of gravity and lowering balancer weights from them. Today, however, the waves were calm enough that there wasn’t any need.

Whenever the snorkel, with its porcine nose, was raised to the surface, a strange tension always enveloped the interior of the submarine—though it was not the tension of being on the lookout for the antisubmarine radar of some enemy. Enemies who could use radar to find them—who could sink them using depth charges and antisubmarine missiles—no longer existed anywhere.

Instead, a monstrous, pitiless, and ruthless enemy—an “enemy” that far transcended the common sense of the term—pervaded the realm just beyond the green, smooth surface of the sea.

“Yoshizumi here.”

A slender young man had entered the control room. He walked up and stood beside the desk. His tanned face still bore pale marks from the glasses he had been wearing out in the snow. Captain McCloud turned and glanced back at the man’s face—flat overall with cheekbones protruding slightly, well-balanced, fresh and youthful all the same.

Why do these Japanese still look like kids in the face even when they get past thirty?

“We are presently in the Uraga Channel at the mouth of Tokyo Bay,” said McCloud, turning his back on Yoshizumi to bend over the chart projector. “The nearest land is here, called … er …”

“Kannonzaki,” Yoshizumi supplied after a glance at the map. “On the easternmost tip of the Miura Peninsula. There used to be a lighthouse.”

“It’ll take about two hours to complete the atmospheric analysis,” the captain said, back still turned. “In the meantime, I’m sending up our inflatable ‘eye.’ You want to see your hometown?”

“You’d send up the balloon just for me?” Yoshizumi asked softly. “It’s very expensive, isn’t it?”

“I don’t mind,” said Captain McCloud without expression. “We’ve been using it all over the place. We’ll probably have to junk it before we cross the Tropic of Capricorn anyway.”

They turned on the compressor. One meter above the surface, the snorkel began audibly sucking in air, though not for the purpose of bringing in the ozone-tinged fragrance of a crisp, refreshing sea breeze. Since entering the northern hemisphere, the oxygen inside the submarine had been provided almost entirely by the electrolysis of water, with carbon dioxide being eliminated by air cleaners. Part of the nitrogen had been replaced by helium. As for the pipeline through which the snorkel took in air, it was sealed off so tightly as to make the crewmen who had sealed it seem paranoid. Nearly all the connecting sections were welded shut, and places where flanges were attached were welded shut from the outside and made completely airtight via a molecular sealant. Not even a single molecule of air could get into the rest of the ship. Taking into account past history, they had had no choice but to take such precautions when they first put out to sea. This was because if by some unlikely chance the worst should happen, the captain would on his own authority have to sink the ship and all its crew into the deepest depths of the ocean.

The air obtained by their hermetically sealed pump was forced into a sampling device consisting of layer after layer of specialized filtration disks. Within each layer, a small piece of impermeable colloid film was attached. By remote control, these could be inserted into a small electron microscope that was installed inside the system.

While the atmospheric analysis was beginning, a float resembling a sea turtle trailed cable as it rose to the surface of the ocean, seven meters up from the back of
Nereid.
The seas above were calm. On the color monitor in the control room, splashes of water quickly gave way to the piercing clarity of a blue sky in early spring. Against that backdrop, a shiny, yellowish-brown round object rose and quickly receded from the camera. It was a small balloon used to measure the force of the wind. At an altitude of two hundred meters, the skies were clear and blue, the wind speed four meters per second. Visibility was excellent.

The captain withdrew from the front of the video monitor and tapped Yoshizumi on the shoulder. Yoshizumi took the captain’s place in front of the screen and watched intently as the communications officer started up both the video recorder and the 16mm camera. At last, he flipped the blue switch.

When he threw the switch, a helium canister opened on top of the float. The view was shaken fiercely for a moment, and then the camera switched over to a horizontal view. As the inflated balloon rose higher and higher, the field of view quickly swung upward from the crests of the waves, rapidly sliding away from the gentle sea green of the water’s surface to face the dark land that lay beyond.

When the rocking image on the view screen reached an altitude of two hundred meters, the monitor showed the city of Tokyo, spread out wide across the distant northern horizon as a grayish, irregular unevenness.

At three hundred meters, the balloon’s tether had stretched as far as it could go. The camera switched over to an ultra telephoto lens, and Marine City jumped into view, looking like a line of white bricks directly in front of the camera. One closed window flashed brightly as its glass caught a ray of sunlight. Another forty-five kilometers of sea farther on lay the gargantuan corpse of the Greater Tokyo area, a once-cosmopolitan megalopolis that had at its height sheltered twelve million souls.

Tokyo Tower, aging yet unwilling to fall, rose high above the city like a spearhead piercing the sky. Crouched at its feet, the forest of Zoujouji Temple was as deep and black as ever, though not a single bird flew above it. In the skies over Omori, not a single airplane could be seen on final approach. Motionless cars dotted the pallid curves of the highways.

“Still too far …” the communications officer said sympathetically to Yoshizumi, who was leaning over the display now, engrossed in the images there. “I’ve set the focal length to two thousand millimeters. That’s the maximum magnification. Let’s look at someplace closer.”

The viewpoint zoomed out and then began panning to the right. Yoshizumi saw the sparkle and flash of the rolling Rokugou River. On the rusted tracks of the Tokaido line lay the overturned remains of several trains, including long passenger cars from the super-express bullet train. Those beautiful, egg-white cars were now gray and still, so changed from their former selves that it was hard for Yoshizumi to even bear the sight of them. The roads and avenues throughout the area were covered in grass so thick that they could hardly be called roads at all.

Come to think of it, the plants haven’t died even here,
Yoshizumi thought.
Plankton is living just a few centimeters beneath the surface of the sea. But even though the little fishes that eat it are still alive as well, the sea birds that floated on the surface are almost extinct. I wonder—what about the small fauna that live near tide lines?

Toward the brilliant green of the Tanzawa Mountains, something clear, sharp, and white rose unexpectedly into the frame. As soon as he saw it, Yoshizumi felt as though his chest were being squeezed in a vise. As though reading his mind, the communications officer tapped the key controlling camera rotation, stopping its horizontal pan.

The ageless outline of Mount Fuji rose up against a backdrop of deep Prussian blue, a few light brushstrokes of cloud painted into its background. The snow was beginning to melt just slightly up near the seventh station, beautifully, magnificently highlighting the ridgelines that draped down from the summit like folds in the train of some giant’s dress. For the first time, Yoshizumi felt something warm rising up in his chest.
Fuji … the green mountains and rivers of Japan … so beautiful, so rich in their delicate, pleated ridges and shades of color, so peaceful, so dear to the hearts of its people … but who on earth did this beautiful, ancient land even belong to now?