In spring 2024, I paid a visit to the home of my dear friend Erik Homenick in San Diego, California. We’d known each other for the better part of ten years, and I’d been familiar with his work before that, consulting his website www.akiraifukube.org whenever I needed information on the great Japanese composer. However, this particular meet-up constituted our first time seeing each other since before the covid-19 pandemic. I remember greeting Erik at his door and noticing how exhausted he was. He then showed me the cause of his fatigue. On his computer screen was a sizable Word document, one loaded with densely argued paragraphs and footnotes numbering in the hundreds. Erik, at the time, was a doctoral candidate at the University of California San Diego, and the text before me was his dissertation. The topic, of course: the music of Akira Ifukube. More specifically, how the music Ifukube wrote for Toho’s Godzilla series can be interpreted as an artistic expression of the composer’s philosophies of national identity, about which he was quite outspoken.
In years previous, Erik often regaled me with the vast knowledge he’d accumulated through decades of studying Japanese texts and Ifukube’s sheet music (not to mention speaking with the man’s students—e.g., pianist Reiko Yamada and composer Kaoru Wada—and forging a friendship with Ifukube’s now deceased son, Kiwami). Through our talks, I learned a great deal about Ifukube, as well as a multi-layered factoid about Godzilla (1954) that challenges the traditional notion of the auteur theory. Countless articles and book chapters have been written about director Ishiro Honda and the message he wanted to convey through that film. But to my knowledge, nothing had been written—at least in English—about how Ifukube, the man behind the film’s extraordinary music, looked at the same script and interpreted themes of a rather different stripe.
All that to say: I knew Erik to be a serious researcher and scholar. Hence my delight when I learned, a few months after our meet-up in San Diego, that the document I’d glimpsed had not only earned him his PhD but would serve as the basis for another big project—one that’d be enjoyed outside academe. His dissertation was to be transformed into the English-speaking world’s first book on Akira Ifukube.
Over the next year, I had the pleasure of helping rework Erik’s dissertation into a tome for commercial release. He first allowed me to examine his dissertation and study his arguments: how Japanese history, political movements, mythology, and imagery and music (both diegetic and orchestral) in Godzilla related to Ifukube’s world views and supported an interpretation of the film’s score as a nationalistic expression. Then, as the rewriting and revising process began, he’d send me individual chapters for proofreading and feedback. We’d also discuss his findings, and how a fire-breathing monster represented something far greater than a stand-in for nuclear weapons.
As one learns from this book, Ifukube was more ardent in his politics and philosophy than Honda, and he applied these when interpreting Godzilla’s story. To him, the monster was, firstly, a victim of the H-bomb, and—more broadly—nature’s tool for retaliating against a country that’d embraced Western technology and forgotten the sacrifice of the war dead. (To an extent, Ifukube’s interpretation of Godzilla is like director Shusuke Kaneko’s in the 2001 movie Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-out Attack. And let it be said the book’s detailed explanations of onryo will be immeasurably helpful to fans wanting to better understand the cultural context that informed that later movie.)
Erik and I went through his rewritten manuscript in toto at least four times—and individual sections countless times more. I’d make suggestions, he’d rewrite, and we’d exchange ideas and questions. Along the way, the text became refined with new information, perspectives, tangents—even complete chapters! While score analyses in the dissertation had focused on Godzilla (1954) and King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962), the book version advanced one film further by discussing Ifukube’s music for 1964’s Mothra vs. Godzilla. (Among other things, there’s great exploration of the linguistic origins and transformation behind diegetic island songs in the latter two pictures.) Other scores discussed at length include 1975’s Terror of MechaGodzilla (the application of Ifukube’s anti-technology theme here is particularly thought-provoking), 1993’s Godzilla vs. MechaGodzilla II, and 1995’s Godzilla vs. Destoroyah. Readers will also receive a newly written epilogue that neatly ties up the book’s themes and story. Indeed, while not a traditional biography, the text contains sufficient insight into Ifukube to help us understand how world events shaped his life and thinking—and how fascinatingly complex a person he was.
From all this emerged a truly multifaceted book. And it is with great elation that I share the best news of all: the completed tome is slated for publication! It has been picked up by McFarland & Company, and is anticipated to be released in fall 2026 under the title Scoring Godzilla: An Analysis of Akira Ifukube’s Musical Narratives.
I encourage all interested parties to read Erik’s book when it comes out. Within its pages is a treasure trove of information on a great many things: biography, history, politics, ethnology, music, etc. It’ll also prove valuable to film aficionados in and out of Godzilla fandom in how it pushes one to regard its subject’s artistry. This book demonstrates that Akira Ifukube wasn’t merely a technician who wrote exciting music to complement exciting imagery; he was a serious creator with an active mind and reasons behind his methods.
In an age when studies and conversations about cinema begin and end with the director, a book that shines the proverbial light on one of the many others involved in filmmaking is welcome and needed.
Scoring Godzilla can be pre-ordered from McFarland & Company.
