Disputed, locked down, and running a year late, the Tokyo Games begin at last on Friday night, a multinational showcase of the finest athletes of a world fragmented by disease — and an event steeped in the political and medical baggage of a relentless pandemic whose presence haunts every Olympic corner.

As the first pandemic Games in a century convene largely without spectators and opposed by much of the host nation, the disbelief and anger of those kept outside the near-deserted national stadium threaten to drown out the usual carefully packaged glitz and soaring rhetoric about sports and peace that are the hallmarks of the opening ceremony.

“‘The festival of peace’ is now starting in an unimaginably disastrous state,” the Asahi newspaper said in an editorial, citing “confusion, distrust, and unease.”

Hand in hand with this feeling of calamity is a fundamental question about these Games as Japan, and large parts of the world, reel from the continuing gut-punch of a pandemic that is stretching well into its second year, with cases in Tokyo approaching record highs this week: Will it be enough?