Exciting news for Japanese monster and music fans broke earlier this year when it was announced that the English-speaking world would receive its first book on the great composer Akira Ifukube. Written by Ifukube biographer Erik Homenick, Scoring Godzilla: An Analysis of Akira Ifukube’s Musical Narratives is tentatively to be published by McFarland & Company in late 2026. I previously wrote about my involvement with this project (as a beta-reader and editing assistant) and how the book’s vast breadth of topics—biography, history, ethnology, etc.—painted Ifukube as an artist as serious and worthy of serious study as the directors he worked with.

But of course, the best person to talk about the book is the man who wrote it, and I am excited to share my interview with author Erik Homenick.

Galvan: In starting off, could you talk about your background as an academic and Ifukube scholar—and how the two came together and led to this project?

Homenick: I began to closely study Akira Ifukube and his music in 2006. Prior to that, I had been a Godzilla fan since childhood and grew up loving Ifukube’s music in Godzilla and other tokusatsu films, even if I had no concept of who the composer was or why the music stuck out to me as exciting, impressive, and so forth. When I was a teenager, the concept of “Akira Ifukube the composer” became clearer to me when I read Ed Godziszewski’s incredible interview with the man in G-FAN Magazine, published in November 1995. Ed’s interview blew me away. I am sure I began reading it out of idle curiosity, but as I progressed through it, there was something about Ifukube’s personal history and the way he presented anecdotes about his life and career that deeply fascinated me. This was a real artist, it seemed, not just the composer of “monster music!”

I was especially drawn to Ifukube’s descriptions of his concert works, such as Japanese Rhapsody (1935) and Arctic Forest (1944), which, of course, I had no concept of because I had never heard them. Well, I didn’t even know they existed! But I knew I had to hear them.

Ed’s interview absolutely made me want to know more about Ifukube beyond the Godzilla soundtracks I knew and loved. So, I began ordering from Japan CDs of his famous classical concert works such as Japanese Rhapsody, Ballata Sinfonica (1943), and Sinfonia Tapkaara (1954). These discs were not easy to find in the latter half of the 1990s, and they were expensive, but I was able to get my hands on them, and I was completely enthralled. They sounded in many ways like his Godzilla music—the same energy and grandeur were there—but there were differences. They sounded more “sophisticated,” if that is the right word. More ambitious. This was the start of a musical love affair.

When Ifukube died in February 2006, I felt a tremendous sense of loss. A man whom I had never met had passed away at the ripe old age of 91, and it really hit me. I thought, “Something needs to be done to preserve the composer’s legacy,” and I thought that person might as well be me. Why not? I cared, after all. So, as a result, I started the website AKIRAIFUKUBE.ORG. Of course, I had no experience at all running any type of site, but I figured it out as well as I could and established the site as a sort of “virtual museum” to display photos of the composer and compile biographical information.

Erik Homenick with Akira Ifukube’s son, Kiwami Ifukube. Taken at Tokyo’s Muza Kawasaki Symphony Hall in July 2016 at the time of a concert commemorating the 10th anniversary of the composer’s passing.

The site has been pared down in recent years since my work on the book has taken priority, but at one time it had by far the most comprehensive biographical text about Ifukube in English. That text was assembled with the help of some remarkable people, such as Ifukube’s son, the late Kiwami Ifukube, whom I met through my work on his father and who was quite supportive of it. Other people, like the Japanese concert pianist Reiko Yamada, helped me a lot, too; she was a student of Ifukube’s in the 1980s at the Tokyo College of Music.

I began a PhD program in literature at UC San Diego in the fall of 2017. Originally, I was going to do something with French literature and the Marquis de Sade, but the professor who was then serving as the head of doctoral studies in the Department of Literature, Daisuke Miyao, urged me to redirect my studies toward kaiju films. He knew I was interested in them and that I had a unique connection via my work on Ifukube and his music. When he offered to head my doctoral committee if I switched from French literature to kaiju films—quite a leap, to be sure—I could not refuse. So, with his support, I agreed to reorient the direction of my dissertation project.

Galvan: Approximately how long did you work on your dissertation, and when did you decide to transform it into a book for commercial release?

Homenick: I was in the PhD program for seven years. But not all of that time involves researching and writing the dissertation, per se. The first three years involve taking seminars on theory, genres, etc. It also involves a lot of teaching. I was researching the dissertation and sketching ideas during that time, but the bulk of the actual writing happened within the final year. That was a stressful, busy time! Anyhow, I completed the program in June 2024 when I defended my dissertation, titled Sinfonia Gojira: Ifukube Akira’s Musical Narratives of Nationalism and Anti-Modernity in Godzilla Films. (Rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it?)

I can’t recall an exact moment when I thought, “This dissertation might at some point become a book,” but that idea had certainly occurred to me when I was in the thick of writing it. I really do think I was writing it as if it were going to be a book at some point. Of course, I was extremely gratified when, during and after my dissertation defense, my four-person committee encouraged me to turn the text into a book. I don’t think any of them knew I had already been considering it, but the notion that they gave me this type of encouragement was definitely the moment I knew that I could be on to something.

As I mentioned, Daisuke Miyao was my chair. His expertise in the field of Japanese cinema is incredible, and it speaks for itself. The other members of my committee were Professors Alain Cohen, Lisa Lampert-Weissig, and Lei Liang. Professor Cohen, who very sadly passed away earlier this year (2026), was a noted expert in film studies. Professor Lampert-Weissig researches, among many topics, filmic and literary depictions of monstrosity, which fit well for my Godzilla-centric project. Professor Lei Liang is a Chinese American composer who was a Pulitzer Prize nominee and the winner of the Grawemeyer Award—this is often referred to as the “Pulitzer Prize” of music—in 2021. Lei shares many of the artistic concerns of Akira Ifukube, certainly. Both composers seek to express elements of Asian identity in their works. Suffice it to say, this was a remarkably diverse committee to work with, and the opportunity to have collaborated with each of them is something I will be eternally grateful for.

Indeed, it was during the dissertation defense when I knew the book was now something of a fait accompli. But I did not start work on the conversion to a book immediately. I needed some time off! So, I wrote nothing for about five months, but kept notes outlining some of the revisions, deletions, and expansions that I wanted to make to the text once I got into “book mode.” I started work on the book in December 2024, and this continued, more or less non-stop, until January 2026, when I submitted my final draft—which had earlier undergone peer review—to the publisher, McFarland & Company.

Galvan: You’ve been studying Akira Ifukube for some time now. There must’ve been dozens of topics related to him and his artistry that you could’ve taken for your dissertation and the book that followed it. How and why did you settle on the topic of your choosing?

Homenick: As I mentioned earlier, when I began researching him for my website, the text I assembled was mostly biographical. That is, it was a linear description of the major events of his life and career. There was virtually no analysis or critique of his musical works, at least not beyond rather surface-level descriptions. There were two reasons for that. My idea at the time was: “If someone is interested in this music, they should go listen to it, not read a description by me.” I often equate it to describing the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or any other famous painting: yes, through words, you can give a good idea of what is visually presented, but no description with even the most vivid, perfectly chosen words could ever replace the experience of actually looking at it.

Music is even harder to write about than the visual arts. This is because music is so frequently thought of as being quite “abstract.” (This was actually a very engaging discussion I remember having with Lei Liang.) So, my second reason for not attempting a critique of the music in my website biography was that I thought it would be too hard to do. I felt at the time that I would not have been able to do the music the proper justice it deserved. Consequently, I stuck to more purely biographical concerns.

When you write a dissertation, however, you can’t simply write a biography about your subject or a production history. This type of project has to be research-driven, yes, but it also needs to take intellectual risks by making novel arguments about your subject. Accordingly, I had to think of how I could apply “literary” critique to Akira Ifukube’s music in Godzilla films in order to extract from it new ideas of how to read and interpret these films.

Knowing very well that Ifukube was a “nationalist” composer who employed the medium of music to express his proud ethnic identity and his unique philosophies on the same, I thought it would be interesting to see how his film scores might function to narrate Godzilla films in a “nationalist way.” If there are distinctive elements of ethno-national identity embedded in all of Ifukube’s musical output, as I contend, then the presence of these elements in his various Godzilla soundtracks must “mean” something on a higher level. How might we experience Godzilla films if we find these elements in Ifukube’s music and identify them? How do our perceptions of what these movies “have to say” change when we take into close consideration the information that I assert is encoded in the music? These are two key questions that Scoring Godzilla is asking.

I should add that there is much in the book that is not argument-driven. Although Scoring Godzilla is not a biography of Akira Ifukube per se, there is a substantial amount of biographical detail woven throughout the text, and I think readers will come away with a pretty solid understanding of who the composer was and how he formed his particular worldviews and philosophies. There is also some “behind the scenes” detail about how he scored certain Godzilla films, and there is plenty of description of the musical cues themselves, including in terms of orchestration.

I should also add that my analyses of the music discussed in the book are mostly based on direct consultation with the composer’s handwritten manuscript materials, which are rarely seen and which were provided to me by the composer’s son Kiwami. I knew Kiwami for nearly 20 years when he unexpectedly passed away in December 2024, and it goes without saying I could not have completed this study of his father, either in dissertation or book form, had it not been for his trust in me and his related generosity. Being able to work with these documents certainly helped me when thinking about how to analyze their contents and where to take my arguments.

Author Erik Homenick speaking at the Akira Ifukube 110 concert at the Music Institute of Chicago in September 2024.

Galvan: Your book approaches Ifukube as an auteur and not merely a technician who wrote some catchy themes and melodies. What were the key discoveries in your research that prompted you to view him as a serious artist?

Homenick: Well, I have always viewed him as a serious artist, certainly. That comes through when you hear his music. But as I researched my project and delved deeper into his writings, it definitely became clearer to me what a true intellectual and philosopher he was. He was so knowledgeable about so many different fields of study—music, of course, but also history, ethnology, film studies, acoustics, and so forth. He was quite a brilliant man. I think the quality of his music reflects that brilliance. His music is definitely the product of a very diverse and active intellect.

As I was learning more about his personal philosophies and worldviews, this could only confirm to me that Ifukube really is the perfect kind of case study for an auteurist examination. Since he was often fairly public about his ideas on culture, politics, art, society, and so forth, he gives someone like me a lot to work with. Again, he was a nationalist who believed in the traditions and empowerment of the Japanese as well as other Asian peoples.

He was also an “anti-modernist.” This is a little trickier to describe, but he believed in the postwar period that society was drifting away from more traditional, wholesome ways of life. He believed that Japan was too eager to forget its true ethnic identity and sense of tradition to become more “modern” or “Westernized.” He saw this as something of an existential problem. And, he saw the figures of Godzilla and the other kaiju, with their habits of wrecking major, modern cities, as a challenge to the modern condition—a condition he was indeed highly skeptical of. With this in mind, in the book, I am exploring how we can find these nationalist and anti-modern ideologies at play in Godzilla films via Ifukube’s music.

Again, since Ifukube had such an easily definable and consistent ideology, he’s the ideal case study for the analysis of his scores that I am attempting. He gives us a lot to work with. It’s actually quite a bit like Ishiro Honda: he was a rather outspoken artist in his own way. If we can find those moments that express Honda’s well-known pacifism and humanism in the films he directed by undertaking an auteurist analysis, why can’t we do the same for Ifukube’s music in those films? My book is an attempt at this sort of analysis of Godzilla films, and it presents the fruits of that attempt.

Galvan: Were there any particular books, essays, etc. that influenced your approach?

Homenick: Certainly! I already mentioned Ed Godziszewski’s 1995 G-FAN interview, which really was the catalyst for all of this. However, there is a chapter by the Japanese musicologist Shuhei Hosokawa that appeared in a book called Off the Planet: Music, Sound, and Science Fiction Cinema, which was published in 2004. As the book’s title implies, this is a collection of chapters/essays about music in various well-known sci-fi films. Hosokawa’s chapter is called “Atomic Overtones and Primitive Undertones: Akira Ifukube’s Sound Design for Godzilla.” In this chapter, he discusses Ifukube as an “auteur” and looks at his score in 1954’s Godzilla as a sort of auteurist musical work. He briefly looks at Ifukube’s preoccupation with “primitivism” and provides some pithy analyses of some of the famous musical cues in Godzilla. When I first discovered this chapter many years ago, I was really intrigued by it. I admired Hosokawa’s serious musicological approach to the score, his treating it as a true artistic object worthy of scholarly consideration.

Really, when I saw “Atomic Overtones and Primitive Undertones” for the first time, I saw Hosokawa doing something that, as it turns out, I wanted to do but didn’t think I could. After the passage of time, however, and when the dissertation project presented itself to me, I knew I had to work up the courage, and here we are.

Of course, one of the challenges of writing Scoring Godzilla is sustaining a rather complex argument over an entire book, whereas Hosokawa only has to do it over one fairly brief chapter. Also, whereas Hosokawa only examines about four cues from Godzilla ’54 in his “Atomic Overtones,” my book examines each of that film’s musical cues. I even take a close look at the Hawaiian music heard during the pleasure boat scene as well as the classical music heard on Dr. Serizawa’s radio when Emiko and Hagiwara pay him a visit.

The Godzilla score gets its own chapter in my book. So does King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962). So, I am expanding on what Hosokawa started in more ways than one. I cite him throughout the book, I might add. His work really laid the foundation for mine.

Galvan: The book version contains some newly written material that was not in the dissertation version. Could you talk about what you have added?

Homenick: Suffice it to say, in general, the book, while based on the dissertation, has been rather substantially revised and expanded upon everywhere. There isn’t a single chapter where significant revisions were not made. This, by the way, is typical when dissertations transform into books.

With that said, I did add a completely new chapter, Chapter 8, which provides analysis—albeit in shorter form—for various other Godzilla films, most notably Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964), Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975), Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II (1993), and Godzilla vs. Destoroyah (1995). I think readers will enjoy this chapter very much since it provides insight into the music in these fan-favorite films. I do not cover every cue in these films, however; I look at the cues that I feel have the most to “say” when I apply my analytical lens to them.

And this is where some readers might be disappointed: I do not examine every cue in every single Godzilla film in my book. The book would become more of an encyclopedia at that point—overly massive and unending. I had a word limit imposed by the publisher when I wrote Scoring Godzilla and, well, I have to respect that. You simply can’t do everything you want to do or say everything you want to say when you have this type of common restriction. So, readers expecting a comprehensive breakdown of hundreds and hundreds of individual Godzilla music cues will not find that here. I hope, though, that the analyses that I do present based on the cues that I did select will offer much interest and be accepted in the spirit of “quality over quantity.”

I also include an epilogue—what I call a “Coda”—at the very end of the book that is itself built of essentially new material. It is a significantly reworked and expanded version of the dissertation’s original, rather brief conclusion. In the Coda, among other topics, I discuss the reuse of Ifukube’s prior genre music in films like Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (2001), Shin Godzilla (2016), and Godzilla Minus One (2023).

Again, I hope readers will appreciate what I do cover more than they might be disappointed by what I don’t.

Galvan: Did working on this book—doing the research, analyzing the scores, making the arguments—change your views of Ifukube and his work in any way?

Homenick: I should say so! Yes, absolutely. Of course, I had been very well aware of Ifukube’s philosophies and worldviews before beginning this broader project. My past conversations with Kiwami Ifukube about his father gave me a lot of insight into who the composer was and how he thought. My conversations with Reiko Yamada and other former colleagues of the composer provided similar insights. And, of course, having listened to his kaiju and classical works for so many years, I was already familiar with his “sound-world” fairly well.

But when I had to “go deeper” for my formal research, I absolutely discovered just how profoundly interesting Ifukube was not just as a composer but as a thinker. By taking closer looks at his rather wide range of past public writings, you can really pick up on the nuances of how he saw the world around him. You also see his change of attitude about topics such as science and technology in the wartime years versus the postwar years. He was a rather complex thinker. My book makes an attempt at giving the reader a glimpse into this. I hope that, in Scoring Godzilla, Ifukube will emerge as a more three-dimensional artist the way that Ishiro Honda emerges as such in Steve Ryfle and Ed Godziszewski’s 2017 book about the director.

And, of course, when you are able to look at the actual manuscript scores for some of these films, the amount of nuance and detail you are apt to discover is truly tremendous. This is especially true as it relates to Godzilla. That score was recorded in 1954 on magnetic tape and, well, nobody would disagree with me that the sound quality of that soundtrack recording is quite primitive and leaves much to be desired. Consequently, if one tries to listen to that score in isolation to pick out tiny, subtle details, it’s going to be quite hard to do with that particular soundtrack due to the lackluster sound quality. Looking at the actual manuscript materials, however, things that you might never have noticed before suddenly come to the fore. There is a certain, quite interesting little detail of this sort that I came across when studying the “Godzilla’s Rampage” cue in the manuscript, and I highlight it in my chapter about the 1954 film. It’s a detail you’d never pick up on just from listening. I hope readers will enjoy learning about these sorts of things.

Galvan: Lastly, what do you hope readers will take away from this book?

Homenick: I hope readers will better understand who Ifukube was not only as an artist but also as a “nationalist.” I think it is widely known that he was a “nationalist” of some sort, but I think there are major misconceptions, especially in the West, of what his particular brand of nationalism really looked like. I look forward to clearing that up.

Also, I hope that readers will be convinced—even if only partially—that as a composer, Ifukube does imbue his philosophies of nationalism and anti-modernity into his Godzilla scores and that, when we are aware of this, we can reasonably and rationally analyze these films in a music-based, “Ifukubian,” auteurist way. This allows us to discover and extract new levels of socio-cultural and historical meaning from these films that build upon and complicate the more widely recycled “nuclear horror” interpretations of Godzilla that are so popular. It’s not that these types of interpretations are wrong—they’re not—it’s just that there is much more to what Godzilla as a character means and, as it turns out, we can learn so much more about Godzilla’s potential for meaning in Ifukube’s genre music. That is what my book argues. Readers are welcome to agree or disagree with me as they see fit, certainly. I just want to start new discussions on how we can interpret the deeper meanings of Godzilla. Scoring Godzilla is my contribution to that discussion. It’s my hope that casual readers and scholars alike will find the discussion interesting and worthwhile. That’s what I would like them to take away from my book. We’ll see what comes of it!

Scoring Godzilla: An Analysis of Akira Ifukube’s Musical Narratives can be pre-ordered from McFarland & Company.