Chris Mirjahangir engages in an insightful interview with Jeffrey Angles, the translator of the recently released Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again novellas. Answers to why these books were chosen and what other books may be on the docket can be found after the jump!
How did this project come about?
Like many Japanese studies professors in the United States, after the Fukushima meltdown of 2011, I created a course on disaster in modern Japan. In it, we explored a lot of comparatively realistic literature about World War II, atomic bombings, industrial accidents, and so on—tons of heavy stuff. I also added the original 1954 Godzilla to the syllabus as a chance to reflect on how disaster-related anxiety manifested itself in imaginative genres like science fiction. Even though most of my students knew Godzilla, relatively few had seen the original movie from 1954. Even fewer realized that Godzilla was a reflection of the anxiety that gripped Japan during the Cold War as it fretted over the threat of radiation from nuclear fallout. We should remember that in Godzilla, nuclear testing and fallout in the Pacific is what awakens Godzilla, who then goes to take revenge on humanity for the destruction of his underwater habitat. Plus, it struck me that Godzilla is a perfect metaphor for what is happening now in the Anthropocene: humankind has wounded nature so seriously that nature has no choice but to fight back.
In any case, as I showed the movie, a line in the opening credits caught my attention—“Based on the work of Shigeru Kayama.” In fact, that’s the second credit to appear on screen, right after the director’s name! I recognized Kayama as a prolific sci-fi writer of the immediate post-World War II period, known for writing in popular, even pulpy outlets. I wanted to know more. “Are there novels?” I wondered. English-language scholarship hardly mentions Kayama’s role in the Godzilla story so I started poking around, looking at Japanese sources this time.
I soon learned Kayama had been brought on board in May 1954 to turn a vague idea for a movie from Tomoyuki Tanaka, one of the Toho Studio producers, into a workable story. Kayama quickly brainstormed and sketched out the main contours of the Godzilla story. He wrote these down as a scenario, which includes so much dialogue and detail that it became the basis for the screenplay. This first-ever written version of the Godzilla story, written by Kayama, is often called the “G-Project” scenario in English, and it is widely available in Japanese for interested fans to read.
Tanaka gave Kayama’s scenario to director Ishirō Honda and his assistant Takeo Murata who worked with special effects director Eiji Tsuburaya to rewrite and develop Kayama’s scenario into the film we now have. That is the reason that in the credits for the film, the screenplay is listed as written by Takeo Murata and Ishirō Honda—they developed Kayama’s screenplay-like scenario in the final version of the screenplay we have today.
The first Godzilla film was so successful that soon after, Toho asked Kayama to come up with the story for a second film: Godzilla Raids Again (1955). However, soon after the release of the latter film, Kayama rewrote the stories of the first movies as a set of novellas, which he published in mid-1955—and those novelizations are what I have translated.
When I read about all of this in Japanese, I was fascinated. I quickly got ahold of Kayama’s G-Project scenario and novelizations. The novelizations were particularly striking. I thought, “How could these never have been translated?” After all, they’re the fullest expression of the Godzilla story as envisioned by the fellow who created the story to begin with!
I found out that there was an Italian translation already out and a French translation on the way. Why not English too? And thus the idea for the project was born.
Roughly how long would you say this project has been in the works for? Were there any roadblocks along the way?
Although I first had the idea of translating Kayama’s work around 2017 or 2018, it was only after the covid pandemic started in 2020 that I decided to make it happen. Like so many other people during the worst of the pandemic years, I was cooped up at home, working in front of my computer from morning to night. I found myself longing for something exciting, something out of the ordinary, something different than the projects I had done in the past. Deciding to work on Kayama’s Godzilla novellas gave that to me, so in a way, Godzilla saved me and made all that lost time feel worthwhile.
I did a fairly quick translation of the first novella Godzilla then submitted it to University of Minnesota Press. Almost immediately, Minnesota signaled interest. It took some time to secure the rights, but in the meantime, I reworked my rough translation, added historical notes, did more research, and translated the second novella Godzilla Raids Again. The last thing I did was write a long afterword for scholars and fans who want to understand the context of the films and book more deeply.
I think it took about two years from initial queries to the finish line. That may seem like a long haul, but meanwhile, I was teaching online at Western Michigan University while translating late at night, a few hours here, a few hours there. Overall, it was a super interesting couple of years, living and thinking with the monster.
This was a massive surprise for Godzilla fans and fans of Japanese novels. Were you surprised by the excitement and anticipation generated for this book?
The excitement is greater than I ever anticipated. I am so, so thrilled that people want to read the book! It means the world to me. I’ve translated around a dozen books before, but those were all projects that mainstream American audiences had never heard of. However, everyone knows Godzilla so when I mentioned this project to folks around me, everyone got excited.
It was fun to realize that every Godzilla fan has an “origin story”—a story about their first memories of the films, about playing Godzilla as youngsters, or about relating to the monster in very personal, special ways. Even people with no special connection with Japan love Godzilla, and I got positive reinforcement every time I mentioned the project. All that enthusiasm just made me want to complete it the book the more.
This project comes from the author’s estate and not from Toho. Can we expect any other translations of Kayama’s work?
I think that there is a lot in Kayama that would appeal to Godzilla fans, and so I want to do a collection of his shorter works—a “best of Kayama” anthology. Quite a few of his works feature motifs that also recur in the first two Godzilla movies. For instance, Kayama made his debut in 1947 with a short story called “The Revenge of Oran Pendek,” a mystery-adventure story which involves humanity encroaching on the environment of a previously unknown ancient hominid, which then lashes out at the people destroying its environment. Sound familiar?
Kayama wrote a lot, and he wrote quickly. There is a set of his complete works that consists of fifteen thick volumes, enough to fill up one wide shelf. The challenge would be to pick which of his many, many short stories, novellas, or novels to translate. Still, I’ve pitched the idea to the University of Minnesota Press, which is mulling the idea over. Of course, none of his other stories will have the same name recognition as Godzilla, but I am convinced that Godzilla fans would love his other work.
Speaking of which there are quite a few other novels and Manga Toho made to promote their films in the past. With one notable entry being the novel The Luminous Fairies and Mothra. Any chance we could see a release of that translated or any others based on Toho’s films or characters?
[Laugh] You know, after word spread on the net that Minnesota was publishing Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again, a number of folks wrote to the press to request that they publish The Luminous Fairies and Mothra next, so that’s an idea the press is seriously considering. I would love to do it for them. I have lots of friends who tell me that Mothra is their absolute favorite kaiju film, just because the idea of the giant moth is so quirky and beautiful. Incidentally, here in Michigan, there was a choreographer who recently turned Mothra into a ballet—absolutely incredible. Anyway, I digress…
Just so that readers are aware, the 1961 film Mothra was based on a short novella co-authored by three of Japan’s bestselling, high-brow, mid-century writers—in this case, the written text preceded the film. I have a copy of The Luminous Fairies and Mothra on my shelf, and it’s really fun, although the writing is quite uneven, since there were three different people involved. Shin’ichirō Nakamura wrote the first part about the expedition to Infant Island; Takehiko Fukunaga wrote the middle part about the fairies being coerced into performing on stage, and Yoshie Hotta wrote the last part about Mothra attacking Tokyo and Rolisica.
There are quite a few things that might excite Mothra fans in there, such as the fact that in the novella, there are four fairies, not two. On the other hand, there are some things that might disappoint. The scenes with Mothra in Tokyo are very sketchy, and some of the most memorable scenes, including the one where Mothra makes a cocoon on the shattered remains of Tokyo Tower isn’t in there. (There is a cocoon, but no Tokyo Tower.) Still, I think there is enough there that fans of the films would really enjoy it.
Kayama also worked on at least two other big film projects for Toho: the yeti story Half Human (1955) and the charmingly retro-futuristic film The Mysterians (1957) about alien invaders. We have Kayama’s scenario and novelization for Half Human in print in Japanese, but honestly, I think there are other stories that I personally would prioritize.
Any chance we could see a hardback release of this at some point?
I don’t know the answer to this offhand, but it sure would be fun to see a hardback, wouldn’t it? By the way, I want to say how thrilled I was when I saw the cover of the paperback. The designer did such a fantastic job!
While it’s not the same as this, could the success of this lead the publisher to perhaps reprint some older Godzilla books? Perhaps even ones that were released in the US like the Random House series by Mark Cerasini?
That’s a question that we should ask the editors at University of Minnesota Press. I should point out that one of the main reasons I approached them in the first place is that in recent years, they have published translations of a handful of iconic postwar science fiction novels from Japan, and so I thought this might be up their alley. Plus, how much more iconic can you get than Godzilla?
While I’m at it, I’d like to encourage sci-fi fans to check out some of the other Japanese sci-fi translations that Minnesota has published. Death Sentences by Chiaki Kawamata was unforgettable—a quirky story about a poem that moves through time and space affecting everyone it encounters. Even more striking was Hybrid Child by Mariko Ōhara—an impossible-to-classify futuristic android story that explores the ways that individual identity is always grounded in the copying of the other.
What was it like working with the Kayama estate while working on this book?
Actually, I was spared the trouble of working with the estate. Once I found out the name of the agent who had arranged for the French and Italian translations of Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again, I turned that information over to the press, and they negotiated with Kayama’s estate through him. That left me with more free time to delve deeper into the history of Godzilla and work on the text itself.
Could this lead to any interest in reprinting some other non Toho giant monster novels that are long out of print?
Gosh, I don’t know, but I could imagine some press somewhere doing a big omnibus of kaiju and kaiju-adjacent monster stories. This reminds me, but in Japan, there was a useful book published in 1998 called Complete Collection of Kaiju Literature, edited by Masao Higashi, a scholar of fantastic, speculative, and imaginative fiction. It is filled with kaiju-related stories, tales, and essays of all kinds. It even includes the novella The Luminous Fairies and Mothra, as well as Matango, a short story connected with the bizarre, retro Toho film of the same name. Lots of kaiju treasures in there, and it could serve as a model for a collection of the type you mention.
Was this project always intended to cover both Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again?
To me, it did make sense to do the two together, since Kayama published the two novellas together as a single book in 1955. They appeared as the first volume in a new series of books called “Shōnen bunko,” meaning “Youth Library” or “Library for Boys.” Interestingly, Kayama labelled the novella that corresponds to the first movie with the words “Godzilla in Tokyo” (Gojira Tōkyō hen). The novella that corresponds to Godzilla Raids Again is given the subtitle “Godzilla in Osaka” (Gojira Ōsaka hen). The parallelism shows that, in Kayama’s mind at least, the novellas represented two parts of some bigger whole. I’m of the strong opinion that Godzilla is the better of the two novellas, but it didn’t make sense to me to separate them since they were published together from the outset.
By the way, I do have an old, charmingly illustrated edition published in 1997 by Four Bunko, which only includes the first novella. That book is given an entirely different title, Godzilla Appears in Tokyo, even though the contents are the same. I am rather fond of the line-drawn illustrations in this version, but I suspect that Godzilla lovers who are used to much more sophisticated art like the awesome drawings of Yūji Kaida or Matt Frank, might find these drawings too simple for their tastes, perhaps even juvenile. Still, this version has all of the charm of a children’s picture book.
With Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again finished, are there any holy grails you’d like to translate?
You know, there is one more iteration of the Godzilla story that I think it would be great to do. I write about this in the afterword to my translation, but from July 17 to September 25, 1954, the broadcasting service Nippon Hōsō aired a radio drama of the Godzilla story in eleven installments. It was meant as a way of capturing the interest of listeners and to promote the film, which would hit theaters nationwide in November of that same year. I think that probably the people behind this radio drama had in mind Orson Welles’ famous radio drama War of the Worlds, which generated so much excitement and panic when it aired in America in 1938. In any case, the Godzilla radio drama was on the air even as the director Ishirō Honda was hard at work on the film, and so the film hadn’t taken its final form yet. There are many significant differences between the radio drama and the finalized film, and in many ways, it seems closer to the vision that Kayama originally had for the film.
This radio drama was published in a book called Godzilla, the Monster (Kaijū Gojira in the original Japanese) in late 1954, and the author was listed as Kayama, even though in reality, it was the people in the Toho Literary Arts Division who did much of the work ghostwriting it. Many internet websites, including the Wikipedia page and the Wikizilla page right now, mix up the text of the 1954 radio drama version published by Iwaya Shoten under the title Godzilla, the Monster with the 1955 novelizations that Kayama published just a couple of months later with Shimamura Shuppan. In fact, the 1954 book Godzilla, the Monster is the text of the radio drama, presented in the form of a play, and not a novelization. The novelization came in 1955— and those are novellas that I’ve just translated. (Trying to get misinformation circulating on the net corrected isn’t easy!)
In any case, my main point is that there is a radio drama version of Godzilla that was aired even before the film hit theaters. I think it would be super fun to do a translation of this, especially since I could envision people turning it into a really first-rate audiobook! Plus, I think that hardcore Godzilla fans would dig seeing—or hearing—this other, even earlier version of Godzilla.
Which book did you enjoy translating more?
As I mentioned above, I think Godzilla is a better than Godzilla Raids Again in that it has a clearer, more profound message: the development of science needs to proceed with ethical guardrails in place; otherwise, it could lead to potentially cataclysmic developments. Remember—the character Dr. Serizawa has a long internal debate about whether it is ethical or not to show his weapon of mass destruction to the public. He fears that if people know about his work, some unscrupulous power might use it. It seems clear that Kayama was thinking of Oppenheimer and his development of the atomic bomb, which Kayama argues in the preface of the book to be a nightmarish perversion of science.
Godzilla Raids Again is definitely good fun, but even Kayama himself decided that after the second movie that he would not work on any more Godzilla sequels, no matter how much Toho begged him. In an essay that he wrote in mid-1955, Kayama commented that with Godzilla Raids Again, his original purpose of using Godzilla as a symbol to represent the horrors of radiation and nuclear weapons had gotten lost. He recognized that young audiences loved the clash in Godzilla Raids Again between Godzilla and Anguirus, and many viewers had started to feel affection for the monsters. Even he notes, he had begun to love his own creation! In short, Kayama felt that Godzilla was morphing into something different than what he had originally envisioned, and he didn’t want to continue any further. Plus, I think he was busy and had other things he wanted to do.
It is interesting to note that after Kayama signaled the end of his involvement with Godzilla in 1955, it would be another eight years before we get the third Godzilla film, King Kong vs. Godzilla in 1962, and that film feels entirely different than the films Kayama had drafted.
Was one of the novellas easier to translate than the other?
There were a few tricky spots in each of the novellas, but since both were fairly concrete stories, that made things fairly smooth going. They are full of descriptions of what is happening, what people are saying, and what people are hearing. There is relatively little of the text that is abstract and difficult to visualize.
However, there were challenges. How does one represent all the many sound-related words and onomatopoeias that Kayama uses? Japanese has more sound-related words than English, so I to find myself coming up with lots of different sound words—not repeating just “crash” and “boom” over and over.
Were there any strange problems you encountered while translating these books?
The biggest challenge I faced had to do with Godzilla’s gender. Nowhere is there any indication of Godzilla’s gender—absolutely nowhere. In Japanese, it is super easy to avoid pronouns. In Japanese, people simply drop a subject if it is clear from context, but in English, we use pronouns all the time. I write about this in the afterword to the book, but I debated long and hard about what to do about this problem. I know that at various points in history, advertising copy for the English movies described Godzilla as male, but later, Toho argued that Godzilla didn’t have a clear gender and recommended using “it” in English copy.
I wanted to leave all those debates aside and make my decisions based solely on what we find in Kayama’s text, especially since it’s clear that Kayama uses the novellas as chance to “correct” some of the things that Toho had changed from his G-Project scenario. These novellas are his vision of the story—not Toho’s—and since Kayama was the main architect of the Godzilla story, I wanted to honor his vision.
Still, Kayama wasn’t much help to me since there were no pronouns in there whatsoever. I was left wondering, which pronoun should I use? I tried various things, including the relatively cold and impersonal sounding “it” and the singular non-gender-conforming “they,” but editors and early readers weren’t fond of those experiments.
So, in the end, I settled on calling Godzilla “he.” My logic was that if Kayama was using Godzilla was a symbol to talk about the radiation that atomic and hydrogen bombs might unleash upon Japanese cities, and those bombs were made by men like Oppenheimer and the other folks in the U.S. military—an institution that is infamously patriarchal—then perhaps it made sense to use a male pronoun for Godzilla.
Have you ever gotten your hands on a first edition of Godzilla or Godzilla Raids Again?
Alas, I have tried to get one, but they are so rare that they are nearly impossible to get. The only time I’ve held one in my hands is in the National Diet Library, which is like the Japanese equivalent of the Library of Congress. However, I have bought a number of reprints of the book and other Godzilla publications released in Japan over the years.
Fortunately, the people who compiled Kayama’s complete works for the publisher San’ichi Shobō were very diligent. In Volume 7, they include a lot of Godzilla-related material, including the text of the novellas I’ve translated, the text of the 1954 radio drama Godzilla, the Monster, which I mentioned a few moments ago, as well as the text of Half-Human, another project he worked on for Toho. Whoever those editors were, I am grateful to them for making these texts so easily available in Japan!
Was the use the word “kaiju” over “giant monster” in your translation a stylistic choice, given the growing popularity of the term in English?
Yes, the word kaiju has crept into English, and it’s really common in the world of fandom, so why not use it?
Just now, I took a look in the Oxford English Dictionary, which tries to track the history of every word, showing when and how they were first used in English. After defining the word, the OED adds a note: “The first and best known of such creatures is Gojira, the very large dinosaur-like monster in Inoshiro [sic] Honda’s 1954 Japanese film Gojira, from which the 1956 U.S. film Godzilla, King of the Monsters was adapted.” Then it gives a 1972 quote from the newspaper Pacific Stars & Stripes as its first-known example of the word in a published English text. I suspect that like many words, the word kaiju was being bandied around as a loan word even before that. Still, this shows that the word kaiju started creeping into English as early as the 1970s.
One small thing. When you pronounce the word in Japanese, you hold the final U-sound a little longer, sort of like you are slowly pronouncing the English word “too.” If we were to do a more precise romanization of the Japanese pronunciation, it would be kaijū, with the little line over the final U signaling that you extend the vowel. In English, we usually drop the little marks since most people don’t know what they mean. (For instance, if we were to do a linguistically accurate transliteration of the company name Toho, it would be Tōhō, since both of those vowels are long in the Japanese.) Gosh, you can hear the Japanese teacher in me right now, can’t you? [Laugh]
Was there any differences between the books and the films that you found especially interesting or surprising?
Yes, there were. One has to do with a subplot that appears in the novella Godzilla. After Godzilla starts rampaging, posters start appearing around Tokyo from what appears to be an apocalyptic cult calling itself “The Tokyo Godzilla Society.” These posters warn the people that Godzilla will be back to create more destruction. The main characters start getting threatening letters from the organization, and the public grows alarmed. Later, it turns out that this was the work of a former convict who was just stirring up trouble.
When I encountered this, I was surprised. That isn’t in the film anywhere. What point was Kayama trying to make with this subplot? I’m not entirely sure, other than to say, that Kayama, like just about everyone else who lived through World War II, was well aware that there are always unscrupulous people who use disasters to stir up trouble and serve their own goals. Perhaps Kayama was remembering that in King Kong, arguably the granddaddy of all kaiju films, there was a cult that worshipped the great ape. Also, this subplot reminded me of the cult that appears in the much later anime Akira, worshipping the out-of-control, monstrous Tetsuo. Could the creator Katsuhiro Ōtomo have known about this subplot in Kayama’s Godzilla?
Do you have a favorite Godzilla book, old or new?
I’ve definitely enjoyed some of Godzilla’s latter incarnations in the Monsterverse, but my greatest love is for the vintage Shōwa films, so I’ve really found the books about the early Godzilla to be of special interest. Steve Ryfle and Ed Godziszewski’s biography of director Ishirō Honda was well researched and extremely helpful as I worked on this book. Also, I have thought a lot about the arguments that the historian Yoshikuni Igarashi has presented about Godzilla in his academic study Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945-1970. In particular, I found Igarashi’s discussions of what Godzilla does not trample in Tokyo to be especially helpful in thinking about the deeper, hidden messages of the film. William Tsutsui’s Godzilla on My Mind was one of the first academic books that I read about Godzilla, and it made me start thinking critically about Godzilla as a window into cultural history.
Tell us about how you became a translator. What did the process of learning your craft entail?
Well, reading a lot in the original language is the most important thing to becoming a translator. Unless you can really feel what a text is like to a reader, then you will not be able to to reproduce that feeling for your target audience. Translation is different than “decoding,” where you are trying to just make sense out of another language. A good translator has to develop great enough fluency that the text flows into them and they can see exactly what makes the original author’s voice unique. Next, the translator has to be well versed in the conventions and stylistics of the target language to be able to find creative ways to reproduce the author’s voice in the target language.
I was lucky in that in graduate school, I had a first-rate translator of Japanese literature, William J. Tyler, as my advisor. He had lived in Japan for decades in the 1960s and 1970s and had a level of fluency that was breathtaking. He also read widely, both in Japanese and English, and he inspired me to read off the beaten path—that is there you’ll find the undiscovered gems, he said. He translated some staggeringly hard-to-read experimental novels and stories from the 1930s, and he showed me the joy of paying lots of details to the fine grains of a text. He showed me that working on a translation is like doing fine carpentry, you polish a text over and over, countless times, trying to get it just right until finally, it shines.
What was the origins of this publication? Fans have been clamoring for English translations of Japanese Godzilla or Toho literature and non-fiction titles for years, what specifically brought around this release and why now?
Well, as I mentioned before, this project was completely of my own doing. I found the Kayama’s novellas and thought, “Gosh, we ought to have these in English.” After all, they were made by the same fellow that came up with the general outline of the movie plots. I think you can make an argument that Kayama is the real father of Godzilla, at least as important as the director Honda or the special effects director Tsuburaya. I hope my book, especially the afterword, helps us see what Kayama envisioned for the story and what themes and messages he wanted to convey.
When I started, I wasn’t even thinking about the fact that 2024 will be the 70th anniversary of the birth of Godzilla. I also didn’t have any clue how many other Godzilla projects were on the horizon: the series Monarch in 2023, and the movies Godzilla Minus One and Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire in 2024. What big years 2023 and 2024 have turned out to be for the Big G!
When working on the project, what kind of Japanese language works did you have access to? The original publications?
Thanks to interlibrary loan, I was able to get all the contemporary Japanese sources that I needed, but the main book I used as the basis for my translation was the carefully edited reprint 2004 edition Gojira published by Chikuma Shobō, which is one of Japan’s biggest literary publishers.
This volume contains several important resources. It contains the novellas that I’ve translated, followed by a series of Kayama’s essays and conversations about the history of Godzilla. These essays and conversations show exactly what Kayama’s contributions were to the creation of Godzilla, and how really, Godzilla as we know him would not exist without Kayama.
After that, the volume contains the G-Project Scenario. In a sense, this is the very first concrete version of the Godzilla story—the version of the scenario that Kayama delivered to Toho in mid-1954. Honda and Murata took this version of the story and started rearranging and rewriting things so that it would work better on the silver screen, so if we read the G-Project Scenario, we can get a good idea of what Kayama wanted before Honda and Murata started to shape it into the version that we all know.
Finally, the volume contains Kayama’s story Half-Human. In late 1954, when Godzilla was still in production, Kayama was asked to write the outlines of a story about a snowman-monster for Toho, which then would be released in 1955, the same year as Godzilla Raids Again. The version of Half-Human that appears in the 2004 book from Chikuma Shobō is Kayama’s novelistic treatment of the same story, which he serialized in a popular magazine from August to October of 1955. The reason this story appears in the same volume alongside Godzilla is that Kayama and Toho were working on it at the same time they were working on the first Godzilla movies, so it presents us with a vision of how important Kayama was to Toho in the mid-1950s.
To what capacity was Toho involved in this project and what was it like working with them?
Toho wasn’t directly involved with this project. I had wanted to use some stills from the film to help attract attention for the book, but unfortunately, that would have been prohibitively expensive. Plus, one of my purposes in producing this book was to showcase Kayama’s version. As I mentioned above, he restores some elements of the story that Honda and Murata took out of his original G-Project scenario or that Honda and Murata toned down in the rewritings. In a way, the novellas don’t present Toho’s vision of Godzilla, it presents Kayama’s, so I suppose it is appropriate that in the end, we didn’t use stills from the Toho movies.
How would you describe your process? Were you attempting a word for word, literal translation? Or what is often referred to as localization, which is a far less formal or literal translation?
This wasn’t a localization. My goal was to take readers into the world of the Japanese text, not to try to cram the Japanese text into the confines of the American worldview. I didn’t replace any place names or people’s names in the Japanese, say, with Western names, although sometimes I translated the names of the boats. For instance, there was a boat called the Kagome in the story, and I translated this literally as Seagull, since that is what the word “kagome” means.
One place where I tried to transport readers into the world of the text was with the names of the government agencies. Lots of branches of the government get involved over the course of the novellas. For instance, there is an organization called the Kaijō Hoan Chō (海上保安庁) in Japanese. At first, I translated this “Japan Coast Guard,” using the official English translation that’s in use now, but an early reader who knew a lot of about Japanese history pointed out to me that in the 1950s, the official English translation of that same agency was “Maritime Safety Agency.” (The official translation “Japan Coast Guard” came much later.) I realized that the names of government agencies had changed a lot. I wanted my readers to be transported to Japan of the 1950s, so I went back and looked up the official English translations of all the agencies, not as they are now, but as they were then, and those are what appear in the book. However, at the back of the book, I also included a glossary of places, names, and ideas where I could include a few helpful notes about the those agencies for interested readers.
There is one significant concession that I made to existing English-language writing about Godzilla when translating. In the subtitles to the Criterion Collection edition of Godzilla, as well as all English-language scholarship about Godzilla that I’ve ever seen, the name of the island where Godzilla makes his first appearance is written as “Odo” or “Ōdo” (if one is to include the mark that indicates a long vowel). However, when I read Kayama’s original, I was shocked to see the island was called “Ōto,” with a T-sound, rather than a D-sound. In Japanese, the characters 大戸島, which literally means “big door island,” could be read either way, but next to these kanji, Kayama’s text specifically gives the reading, showing us how the name should be pronounced. Because my goal was to be as faithful as possible to Kayama’s text, I wanted to call the island “Ōto” instead of “Ōdo,” but I thought I might get a bunch of angry reviews and e-mails from Godzilla fans who thought that I had gotten this important detail wrong. So, I bowed to convention and called the island “Ōto” instead of “Ōdo,” even though “Ōto” is specifically what appears in Kayama’s book. This might not seem like a big deal, but I lost some sleep over this one!
Are there any plans to produce an audiobook recording of this release?
That’s a good question. I would personally LOVE to have one, and I think it would sell. I will have to take this idea to the editors at Minnesota and see what they say! I hope the editors at Minnesota are reading this! [Laugh]
To say this title is a dream come true for Godzilla fans would be an understatement! Now that this work has been released, there is no doubt that fans are hoping to see additional translation projects such as the original Mothra novel for example. What are the chances of further translations being written and how can the audience best advocate for them?
All of the excitement among Godzilla fans really means the world to me. I am deeply grateful. I know that the publicity people at Minnesota are considering the possibility of The Luminous Fairies and Mothra, and I hope we can get that going.
If that materializes, one question would be what other work we should pair with it to make a full volume. The Luminous Fairies and Mothra is extremely short. I’ve suggested to them 1954 radio drama of Godzilla, so that the book could be a “double creature feature” of sorts, but I haven’t heard back yet about that idea. Of course, the next step would then be to clear the idea with the appropriate estate holders regarding the translation rights.
One way to advocate for future releases might be to post your hopes for another book on Twitter. Be sure to tag University of Minnesota Press @UMinnPress. I know the publicity department pays attention to what people are saying.
For those interested in learning how to read or speak Japanese, what advice would you give them?
Learning Japanese isn’t easy for English speakers since the languages are so different, and of course, mastering Japan’s extraordinarily complex writing system is a big part of the challenge. Yet the challenge is also what makes it so darn fun, especially for a geeky language-loving guy like myself.
It typically takes a long period of study, somewhere between six to ten years maybe, to start reading comfortably, but I want people to know that the long slog is absolutely worth it. Once you know Japanese, you see that only a tiny percentage of Japan’s cultural production ever makes its way into English. There are so many untranslated books, manga, films, and so on that it can be overwhelming at times.
In short, just remember: there are great treasures just waiting out there. The longer you stay with it, and the farther you go, the bigger your world will become.
Jeffrey ANGLES is a poet, translator, and professor of Japanese literature at Western Michigan University. His collection of original Japanese-language poetry won the Yomiuri Prize for Literature, a rare honor accorded only a few non-native speakers since the award began in 1949. He has translated dozens of translations of Japan’s most important modern authors and poets into English. Among his recent translations are Shinobu Orikuchi’s modernist classic, The Book of the Dead; the feminist writer Hiromi Itō’s novel about migrancy The Thorn-Puller, the gay poet Mutsuo Takahashi’s collection Only Yesterday, and the science-fiction author Shigeru Kayama’s 1955 novels Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again.
