While most fans know Mothra for her role in the Godzilla franchise and Ishiro Honda‘s 1961 film, far fewer are aware of the rich literary roots that shaped the character long before she ever took flight on screen. In this interview, we speak with Jeffrey Angles, translator of works such as The Luminous Fairies and Mothra and a professor of Japanese language and literature at Western Michigan University. Our conversation explores his early fascination with kaiju cinema, the political and cultural ideas behind Mothra’s creation, the challenges of translating a text written by three authors and the deeper significance of one of Toho’s most iconic monsters.

Anthony Romero (Toho Kingdom): So first off, how did you initially become interested in kaiju cinema, particularly films like Godzilla and Mothra, and how has that interest shaped your work as a translator and scholar?

Jeffrey Angles: I suppose that my Godzilla origin story is similar to those of a lot of American fans. When I was a kid in the 1970s, I enjoyed watching reruns of old Toho movies on TV. Of course, it was fun to see big monsters raging through Japanese cities, but honestly, I was as interested in the people, buildings, and towns as the monsters themselves. I was intrigued by the landscapes and cityscapes, the vintage-looking clothing, the pastel colors, and the mid-century modern interiors. Things sort of looked like what I knew from my sheltered Midwestern childhood, but the unfamiliar, specifically Japanese twist on things really drew me in.  Since those Shōwa-era Toho reruns were the first films I ever saw from Japan, they left a big impression.

 

Romero: What first drew you to The Luminous Fairies and Mothra as a project worth translating?

Angles: Well, the idea came about thanks to a bunch of fans who were excited about my translation Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again that came out in 2023.  They wrote to the press to request that they publish The Luminous Fairies and Mothra next. My editor immediately turned around and I asked me if that idea interested me.

I became even more excited when I realized who the authors were.  Honestly, I had not read The Luminous Fairies and Mothra when I was first asked about it, but when I saw that all three of the authors were familiar names—folks who were among the most famous, intellectual, high-brow writers of the 1950s and 1960s—I immediately said yes!  The fact that there was not one but three authors was intriguing in and of itself, but I was already particularly fond of one of them, namely Takehiko Fukunaga, who wrote some sublimely beautiful novels, including a 1954 novel called Flowers of Grass about a young, bisexual man dying of tuberculosis while engaging in his last love affairs.

While doing the research for the book, I really enjoyed reading the work of one of the other authors—Yoshie Hotta, who was one of the most politically involved, internationally minded, liberal voices in the Japanese literary world at the time.  I felt sure that understanding him better would help me understand some of the motivations that went into Mothra, and I was right.  I found traces of his political ideas and consciousness everywhere throughout The Luminous Fairies and Mothra.  But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself here…

 

Romero: How did your approach to translating this novella differ from your work on the original Godzilla novelizations that were featured in your Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again book?

Angles: The whole reason I wanted to translate Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again and The Luminous Fairies and Mothra was because I wanted to understand what messages and social concerns were embedded in the texts.  Let me explain a little…

Shigeru Kayama was the sci-fi author who wrote the very first draft of the scenario, known as the “G-Project Scenario,” for the first Godzilla film in 1954. Kayama’s G-Project Scenario, which is easily available in Japanese, includes extensive such extensive dialogue, detailed descriptions of shots, and so many notes for production that many of the core components of the film are right there in Kayama’s first version. Apart from the possible exception of Toho’s tokusatsu specialist Eiji Tsuburaya, who was behind the special effects that literally gave the monster its form, I think Shigeru Kayama deserves to be credited as the “father of Godzilla”—probably even more so than director Ishirō Honda.  Kayama drew upon his own love of paleontology to develop a concrete, specific plot that links the ancient past to postwar Japan, thus turning Toho producer Tomoyuki Tanaka’s vague idea for a radiation-enraged monster into the specific reptilian, dinosaur-like kaiju we all know today.

Kayama’s novellas, which were written in 1955 around the time that the second movie Godzilla Raids Again came out, are important because in them, we find a distilled version of the story that does not have all the countless, small edits introduced to the plot by Takeo Murata and director Ishirō Honda—the ones who took Kayama’s G-Project Scenario and refashioned it into the final screenplay.  Plus, the film focuses on outward appearances, whereas the novelizations show us clearly what is happening in the characters’ heads. In short, the novellas give insight into Kayama’s original vision for the monster as well as the ethical concerns about the application of potential dangerous science, which Kayama felt was the critical problem that the film should raise.

So, when I sat down to translate Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again, my main purpose was to take a good, close look at Godzilla’s origins.  I wanted to see what light the literary manifestations of these stories would shed upon the stories and the monsters themselves.  As you can tell from my long afterword, I spent a lot of time thinking about the parts of book that differ from the movies, recognizing that they would give us insight into the ways that the story’s messages and broader implications were developed.

 

Romero: Did you approach The Luminous Fairies and Mothra with a similar strategy?

Angles: Yes, once again, I was really interested in the differences between the novella The Luminous Fairies and Mothra and the film Mothra, this time because the novella preceded the film.  It was published in January 1961, right about the time that the production of the film Mothra was kicking into high gear—about a half-year before the film’s release. The novella represents the earliest appearance of Mothra in any form, showing us the original vision for the story before Toho screenwriter Shin’ichi Sekizawa turned it into a screenplay.

Sekizawa is a skilled screenwriter, but as he adapted the novella into a film under the guidance of director Ishirō Honda and special effects director Eiji Tsuburaya, Sekizawa made a huge number of changes to the story.  Some are small, but some are enormous and important in terms of their implications.  Some of the differences are so extreme that I hope readers who know and love the film already will not fall over in surprise.  Adaptations always tell us revealing things about the ideology that went into a particular iteration of a story, as well as the process behind its production.

To give one example, the places that Mothra attacks in the book are quite different than what we see in the movie, and those adaptations have an enormous effect on how contemporary Japanese viewers would have thought about those scenes.  Understanding those changes in locale requires a lot of background information about the era’s history and the particular places where the action takes place, so I try to provide that in the long afterword I appended to the book.

 

Romero: Were there particular challenges in rendering the prose of three different authors into a unified English text? How did you address the shifts in tone and style?

Angles: That’s a really good question.  The authors wrote the story in relay: Shin’ichirō Nakamura wrote the first third; Takehiko Fukunaga wrote the second third, and the Yoshie Hotta (the most politically minded of the three authors) wrote the final third.  The name of each author appears at the top of their section as author.  As a result, the text is like three interrelated short pieces lined up back-to-back to form a novella.

Once again, my goal in translating the book was to show fans what the novella was like before it was adapted into the movie, so instead of trying to smooth over the differences between the parts, I did the opposite: I embraced them.  Rather than smooth over shifts and stylistic dissimilarities, I tried to bring out some of the quirky individualistic qualities that emerge in each section of the tripartite novella.

 

Romero: For the The Luminous Fairies and Mothra, the translators’ notes and afterword are almost as long as the story itself. How did you decide what contextual information to include for Western audiences?

Angles: Do I detect a note of criticism about how long the afterword was?  [Laugh] No, let me be serious…  The Luminous Fairies and Mothra is a very quirky text, but although it is chock full of interesting ideas, it hasn’t received nearly as much attention as, say, the 1954 Godzilla.  As I worked on it, I had a million questions that current scholarship didn’t even seem to consider—questions about the novella, the writing, the adaptation process, and the ideological shifts one can detect between novella and film.  As I translated, I kept jotting down new questions, and those questions were what guided my research.  I’ll be honest when I say that when I set out to do this translation, I didn’t dream that the afterword would take on such a life of its own.  However, as I kept exploring the little issues were bothering me about Mothra, the afterword grew to seventy-plus pages before I knew it. 

Let me give an example.  One question that wouldn’t leave me was “Why use a moth as a kaiju?” After all, people don’t typically see moths are very threatening, unless perhaps they live in a house full of valuable wool rugs.  In his recollections about the project, Nakamura said the team wanted their kaiju to undergo a transformation on screen so that Tsuburaya’s tokusatsu department could employ a variety of different, interesting effects over the course of the film.  However, why choose a moth for that purpose when any number of animals might fit the same bill?

Although no one to the best of my knowledge has conclusively stated this before, it became fairly clear to me that the idea for Mothra must have come from Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Doolittle series, which features a giant butterfly in three different books.  One of them, namely Doctor Doolittle in the Moon from 1928, has so many small plot points in common with The Luminous Fairies and Mothra that it seems utterly unfathomable that the three authors were not aware of Lofting.  When I looked into the publication history of Doolittle translations into Japanese, I found that the timeline fit just about perfectly.  The translation was being finished the same moment that the three authors were sitting down to write.  Moreover, the translation was by Masuji Ibuse, a brilliant and famous writer who shared some of the same sociopolitical and aesthetic concerns as the younger authors of The Luminous Fairies and Mothra, who looked up to Ibuse.  Through these questions, I ended up uncovering a fascinating web of literary connections that no one had written about yet, either in English or Japanese.

 

Romero: What can the novella tell us about the creative intentions behind the original 1961 Mothra film that isn’t obvious from the movie alone?

Angles: When contemporary audiences first watch the 1954 Godzilla, they have no trouble identifying the main geopolitical concern that inspired the film. Nuclear weapons and the horrifying prospect of more radiation unwittingly reaching Japanese shores, right? However, when contemporary viewers first watch Mothra, the social anxieties that inspired it aren’t nearly as obvious, even to Japanese audiences.  However, Mothra was inspired by a political message that was just as strong and concrete, perhaps even more so.

In 1960, Japan experienced the largest and most far-reaching protests in Japanese history, known as the Anpo Protests, which arose when the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty was up for revision.  Like everyone else in Japan, the authors of The Luminous Fairies and Mothra were keenly aware of these protests.  I go into a great deal of the history in the afterword, but the protestors did not want Japan to be protected by the American military, which included a massive nuclear arsenal—something that most Japanese thought to be morally reprehensible, given the nation’s horrifying experiences with atomic and hydrogen bombs.  Many Anpo protesters felt that neither of the Cold War superpowers—neither the Soviet Union nor America—should hold such strong power over Japan’s future or military affairs.  Instead of siding with one side in the Cold War, which threatened to boil over and consume Japan at any moment, many Japanese in 1960 felt that Japan would be better off charting its own course, allying itself with the small new nations that were emerging all over the Pacific, Asia, and Africa as the world underwent decolonization.

In the film Mothra, the Soviet Union and America are combined into a single, very pushy nation called Rosilica (ロシリカ) in the book and renamed Rolisica (ロリシカ)in the film.  In both cases, the name represents a combination of letters taken from the Japanese words meaning “Russia” (ロシア) and “America” (アメリカ).This superpower never works in the best interest of the Japanese people; in fact, in pursuing its own commercial and military interests, it puts all of Japan in danger by accidentally awakening Mothra.  Meanwhile, the Japanese characters in the story are sympathetic to the plight of the Infant Islanders and want to help them through providing attention, protection, and even aid.

It is clear to the scientists and reporters—figures specifically chosen by the authors to represent the enlightening, progressive members of the intelligentsia—that helping the oppressed people of Infant Island also helps themselves and even helps to save the entire world.  In short, the entirety of Mothra is a reaction to the Anpo-era questions about how Japan should position itself on the geopolitical stage as the Cold War unfolds.

 

Romero: In your afterword you explore the political climate of early 1960s Japan. How important do you think that context is to people reading this story today?

Angles: Knowing this context helps us enormously to understand what the authors and subsequent filmmakers were trying to accomplish.  Learning about these things helps to explain a lot of plot elements that don’t necessarily make a lot of sense at first glance.  For instance, who are the Rosilicans supposed to be?  (I use the spelling “Rosilican” here since you asked about the book.) What were the authors trying to accomplish by making the Rosilican character Nelson such a cartoonishly despicable character?  Why locate Mothra in a little island in the Pacific when Mothra could have conceivably come from anywhere?

Of course, many contemporary viewers, even in Japan, know relatively little about the Anpo Protests today, but they still enjoy the film, drawn in by the film’s strange, otherworldly beauty and quirky, often bizarre plot.  I think it is a testament to the great power of filmmaking that the movie works on multiple levels, both as a geopolitical commentary and as a visual, cinematic spectacle that we can still enjoy many decades later.

 

Romero: The novella reflects aspects of Cold War geopolitics that were diminished in the film adaptation. What were the biggest decisions you faced when translating material with political or cultural nuance?

Angles: Well, I suppose the biggest decision had to do with how much detail I wanted to include in the afterword.  I knew that I wanted to elucidate some basic facts about the historical background of the film and movie, since knowing that history sheds lots of light on the content of the story, but then I found that as I moved forward, there was almost no end to what I could say.  Almost every detail seemed to reveal something that hadn’t yet been discussed in the literature on Mothra.

For instance, as you noted, the film is even less overtly political than the original novella.  One of the three authors, Shin’ichirō Nakamura, recalled that at one point the producer Tomoyuki Tanaka personally stepped in and told them that the film’s content was too overtly political, and the studio needed to tone it down, presumably so as not to alienate children or viewers who were not of the same political beliefs.  We need to remember that the film came out about one year after the worst and most violent Anpo Protests, so the memory was still fresh in people’s minds.

Toho’s eagerness to make a less politically overt movie that would sell lots of tickets gave rise to some of the changes between novella and film, including one big change that I discuss at length in the afterword. I’m referring to Toho’s decision to move the site of Mothra’s Tokyo attack from the Diet Building, where the most memorable and violent of the Anpo Protests took place, to the politically unobjectionable Tokyo Tower.

As I began to look at things through this kind of historical-political lens, I felt like there was almost no end to the kinds of things that I could say.  I had to make some decisions about how much detail in the afterword to provide, how many scenes or changes to analyze, and how much I should leave up to the intelligence and imaginations of fellow fans.  It would be reductive to read The Luminous Fairies and Mothra while completely ignoring the real-world, geopolitical concerns in it, but I also worried about getting bogged down in too much details.  I realize that not every kaiju fan wants to hear about tons of unfamiliar political events when their goal is to read about one of their favorite monsters, so I tried to strike a balance between providing ideological context while not smothering readers with too many unfamiliar names, dates, or stories.

 

Romero: Were there any individual passages or scenes that you found especially difficult or rewarding to translate?

Angles: One of the scenes I enjoy the most is in the second section.  In it, Takehiko Fukunaga describes the mythology and creation myth of Infant Island.  I found myself particularly taken with these scenes because they greatly enrich the way we as outsiders see the Infant Islanders.  These scenes make it clear that the Infant Islanders are not an underdeveloped, primitive people, but an ancient civilization that has a complex cosmology and worldview, unique on the world stage.  These scenes reflect the authors’ progressive beliefs that the value of a people or nation is not determined by the technological level of their civilization but by the richness of their worldview and imagination.

I’m guessing that when he wrote these scenes, Fukunaga was remembering the visionary 1959 Toho production The Birth of Japan (renamed The Three Treasures when exported to the West). That film brought the Japanese creation myth to the screen in ravishing detail and was extremely successful in terms of critical response and box office sales.  I suspect that Fukunaga wanted to create some similar mythology-inspired spectacles in that would remain in viewer’s minds long after the end of Mothra.  Unfortunately, screenwriter Sekizawa seemed to have thought of these scenes as a distraction from the main plot and cut them entirely.  Or perhaps, the director Honda thought that filming these scenes would just be too expensive, involving too many new sets and designs.

In either case, leaving these scenes out significantly diminished the way Mothra portrays the Infant Islanders.  The novella presents the Infant Islanders as noble people living in perfect harmony with nature while maintaining ancient traditions and belief systems—a stance that looks relatively progressive today. On the other hand, the film tends to make them look like simple, unintelligent people, perhaps like even atavistic, Neanderthal-like throwbacks to an earlier stage of human development.  This isn’t really helped by the fact that the actors playing the Infant Islanders in the film are all Japanese dressed in purposefully “primitive,” poor-looking attire and cringy, dark make-up that brings to mind the offensive tradition of blackface in North America. In my opinion, the filmmakers are working against the major message of the novella, namely that thinking of other populations as primitive or somehow less than oneself is fundamentally misguided.  The authors sent a message that even if we come from different places on the planet, we all benefit by helping each other and treating one another as equals.

 

Romero: From reading comments on our forums, the 1994 Chikuma Shobō reprint referenced in the afterword includes several drafts of the story. I’m not personally familiar with the various drafts, so I was hoping you could shed some light on how the decision was made regarding which version to translate for this edition.

Angles: Let me just to clarify a bit.  Although I referred to a couple of editions of the novella, yes, my main source was the 1994 Chikuma Shobōre print of the novella, which is a fascinating and beautiful book that I wish would come back into print.  (The used copy I bought in Japan cost the equivalent of almost ninety US dollars!)  It contains five things:

1. the original novella
2. the first draft of the screenplay by Shin’ichi Sekizawa
3. the finalized draft of Sekizawa’s screenplay
4. lots of photos from the 1961 film
5. Shin’ichirō Nakamura’s recollections of working on the project

I just translated the original novella, not the two versions of the screenplay. I would probably need permission from Toho or something for that.  That might be a fine project for some other fan or scholar one day.
 

Romero: What do you hope kaiju fans, especially those familiar with Mothra only through film, will take away from this translated novella?

Angles: Well, I am definitely hoping that kaiju fans see Mothra in a new light.  Lots of us enjoy the film because the monster is so eerily beautiful and undergoes multiple transformations on screen, but I hope the translated novella encourages people to recognize that Mothra is more than just a series of charming visual spectacles.  It is a political allegory exploring the question of how Japan should position itself on the world stage.  It is a reflection on the Anpo Protests that took place the year before the film came out.  Also, it is a story about the importance of engaging in cross-cultural awareness and recognizing our shared humanity, even thought we might come from different nationalities or backgrounds.  In short, Mothra is fun, but it is also smart, progressive, and socially relevant today.

 

Romero: How do you see the role of literary translations in expanding appreciation for classic Japanese pop culture properties like Mothra among international audiences?

Angles: People tend think of kaiju in terms of cinema, but I want to show the world that there is a literary dimension to the kaijuverse as well.  One of my goals in translating Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again and now The Luminous Fairies and Mothra is to show that kaiju stories do not only belong to the screen.  They are part of a multimedia mix that spans decades and genres, ranging from high-brow literature to more visual genres such as manga and film.  If my translations can help to find more fans or show some of the complexity of these stories that might not be immediately visible on the screen, then I feel I’ve done my job.

Both of the translations have sold very well.  I would love it if their success opened up a space for more translations of other, different kinds of kaiju literature.  Since embarking on this work, I’ve been collecting more kaiju stories each time I go back to Japan.  I’ve found mountains of stories that only exist in book form and have never been made into films.  Some are spectacularly good and have important philosophical ramifications.  Godzilla and Mothra have a high level of name recognition that helped my translations reach readers, but I am confident that international audiences would eagerly devoir some of these other stories too.

For instance, I would one day love to translate the bestselling author Miyuki Miyabe’s riveting, nearly 580-page novel Kōjin (The Rampaging God), which describes a kaiju showing up in old Japan and rampaging through northeastern Japan.  This novel was written after the 2011 Fukushima meltdown in northeastern Japan, and in between the action scenes, Miyabe describes the complex history of this historically impoverished region—a legacy that is in large part responsible for the decision to put numerous nuclear reactors there in the mid-twentieth century.  Miyabe is one of the most popular, bestselling mystery and historical writers in Japan today.  Some her novels have been translated and even became prize-winning bestsellers in America, but no one has done The Rampaging God yet.  I am 100% positive it would be a success.  If there are any publishers out there reading this who want add a surefire winner to their catalog, please get in touch with me! I’m joking here—well, perhaps maybe not.  LOL

 

Romero: Has your own understanding or appreciation of Mothra as a character changed as a result of working on this project?

Angles: Absolutely!  When I first watched Mothra many years ago as a teenager, I thought it was one of the weirdest movies I had ever seen.  I had no idea what to make of some of the odd plot twists and funky, imaginative moments, but they stayed with me, long after the final shot of Mothra flying off into the distance. All these years later, I feel honored to have had this chance to return to Mothra do this extra-deep dive, which made the splendidly lovely, pastel-tinged, Eastman color world of the film come to life in a whole new way for me.  I hope that readers of the translation feel that way too!