Everyone knows that Godzilla was, in its original context, a metaphor for the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, and by now a number of commentators have made the leap of seeing Cloverfield, whose advance publicity cited the veteran thunder lizard as some kind of role model, as either addressing or exploiting the memory of 9/11. Actually, American filmmakers have been trying, in one way or another, to deal with 9/11 in movies ranging from Oliver Stone's World Trade Center to Spielberg's The War of the Worlds to such indies as The Great New Wonderful. And Japanese filmmakers, including some of the greatest, took their best shot at dealing with the bomb and its aftermath, often in movies without rubber monster suits. Writing in Slate, Fred Kaplan argues that "If someone should feel compelled to make a film about 9/11 — specifically, about the social and psychic toll that the attacks have and haven't taken — a good model would be Akira Kurosawa's I Live in Fear, a relatively little-known film by perhaps the most revered of all Japanese filmmakers that's just been issued on DVD as part of the Criterion Collection's Eclipse series. The movie stars Toshiro Mifune as an industrialist who becomes obsessed with protecting himself from the bomb and from radioactive fallout. His solution is to sell his company and move himself and his entire family to Brazil — a plan that inspires his three sons to try to get him declared nuts so that they won't lose their share of the family business. (Kurosawa often openly ransacked Shakespeare for his movies, and this thread of the plot suggests King Lear turned inside out for the nuclear age.)

The punchline is that Mifune's character really does go mad and winds up being institutionalized — in response to the shattering realization that even exile to Brazil wouldn't be enough to ensure his safety in the event of a nuclear war. The punchline to the punchline is that, in Kurosawa's vision of "a world in which the most dreadful dangers are shrugged off as routine", the man locked up as crazy is the only one who seems to have trouble simply adjusting to the ever-present danger of being wiped out at the touch of a button. ("Sirens wail in the background all through this film; it's not clear what kinds of sirens [police, ambulance, air-raid drills?], and nobody pays attention anyway." This is, as Kaplan points out, "a rather unsubtle message, but Kurosawa compensates with an understated visual style. According to his autobiography, he started using three cameras around this time, letting them all roll while the actors played the whole scene as if in a stage play, then choosing the best angles in the editing room. It gives the film a documentary feel — many scenes are shot from behind the characters — as if we're peeking in on a slice of life." It also captures something that Kurosawa himself must have felt to the marrow — though he may never have addressed the subject again so explicitly, he was playing with images of nuclear devastation as late as thirty-five years later, in the 1990 Dreams. As it happened, the idea of a man set apart from his society because of his inability to deal with the thought of its destruction turned out to be a pretty good metaphor for the movie itself. Made in 1955, it not only bombed in Japan but didn't play in the American until it was shown at the 1963 New York Film Festival; it received limited U.S. theatrical release in 1967. It was issued on VHS back in 2001, but at no point has it ever — you'll excuse the expression — set the world on fire.