Over 70 years ago Godzilla roared out of Japan, an unexpected ambassador to the rest of the world. Today the king of the monsters is an international icon. What is not widely known outside of Japan is Toho, the film company behind Godzilla, promoted Godzila (1954), sequel Godzilla Raids Again (1955) and subsequent kaiju films with a series of novellas and short stories. Professor Jeffrey Angles, of Western Michigan University, has translated several of these stories into English for the first time in Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again (2023, University of Minnesota Press) and The Luminous Fairies and Mother (2025, University of Minnesota Press). The professor was good enough to talk with me about kanji, culture, colleges and more. This interview was conducted via email.
Michael Lauck: You are, as a quick Internet search will reveal to anyone, a respected academic and poet. Your two collections of kaiju film related stories stand out quite a bit from your other works. How are they received by your peers? Is there a difference in attitudes among American and Japanese academics regarding your kaiju related translations?
Professor Angles: Thanks for looking into my past! I appreciate it. Indeed, you are right that my translations of the 1955 novellas Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again, which I published with University of Minnesota Press in 2023, then The Luminous Fairies and Mothra, published recently in 2025, are quite different from the other work that I had done, especially my work on modern Japanese poetry. I think a number of my colleagues in the world of Japanese studies were probably surprised when I went out on a limb and did these fun and quirky projects.
However, there is a connection between that work and other things I’ve done along the way. Throughout my whole career, I’ve really been interested in looking at literature that gives us a clear view into the culture, history, and values of the time in which the work was written. For instance, I wrote a book in which I look at the poetry written after the 2011 disasters in northeastern Japan. In a sense, the Godzilla novellas and The Luminous Fairies and Mothra are extensions of my interest in looking at literature as cultural history.
In fact, I got the idea to work on Godzilla while conducting my research about the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, and when I discovered that Shigeru Kayama, the same guy who drafted the screenplay wrote the novellas, I immediately wanted to work on it. I realized that just like the disaster-related poetry I’d been studying, this was a fantastic window into the problems and social anxieties of the time. In Godzilla, we can see a clear reflection of the nation’s concern about radioactivity, the arms race of the 1950s, and the ethics of scientific research.
Something similar could be said about the 1961 novella The Luminous Fairies and Mothra, which became the basis for the film released later that same year. The novella and film again touch upon the horror of nuclear weapons—something of great concern to Japanese citizens in the early Cold War when it looked like war might break out at any moment. Interestingly, the novella, however, contains an extended allegory that explores the question of how Japan should position itself on the world stage. The Luminous Fairies and Mothra was so provocative and interesting that I went down a series of deep rabbit hole while working on it! I put a lot of my discoveries about this novella relates to its moment in time into the 70-page scholarly afterword that readers will find at the back of the book.
Japanese pop culture has been imported to the United States for decades, with films being an early foothold. In the mid to late 1980s there was a “Japanimation” boom and we started getting the first comic book translations. Today, “anime” and “manga” are commonplace terms in the US, even among people with no interest in comics or fantasy/science fiction pop culture. Why is it, in your opinion, comic books have been widely translated while pop culture books have not? Even manga related books are rarely translated (a couple “Dirty Pair” and a pair of Futaro Yamaha books are all I can think of) despite there being many “light novels” associated with franchises which are popular outside of Japan.
Anime and manga have definitely taken a place in the international imagination. One of the main reasons simply has to do with the appeal of visual media. Most people today spend far more time with visual media on their phones, in movies, on streaming services, and on TV than they do with the written word. There is an immediacy about visual media that is appealing and immediately satisfying. I love graphic novels and manga, so I don’t want you to think I am biased against them, but I do think that there is something enormously important when folks spend all their time with visual media and abandon prose altogether. Reading almost always provides information far more complex and nuanced than when one has to rely on pictures to advance the plot.
In a related question, what are some of the “hidden factors” which keep popular Asian literature from being translated into English? Godzilla is, I think it is safe to say, an international icon.
Super good question! The publishing world is complex and hard to navigate. It can cost a lot of money to pay for the rights to a book, but even more expensive are the costs of having a book copyedited, printed, distributed, and publicized. Since mainstream publisher generally sink several tens of thousands of dollars into every book, they only tend to take on projects that they feel are likely to make that money back. These financial considerations are a huge hurdle. I often spend enormous amounts of time writing to and talking to publishers, trying to convince them of the value of a project, especially when it looks like rights or the size of the book might make it expensive to produce.
Why did it take decades for the stories in Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again to appear in English?
This has to do with another problem in the world of publishing. In the United States, many editors are monolingual so they don’t necessarily know a lot about what is available in other language regions. Even when editors can read other languages, they will not know everything, especially if a book market is big like in Japan, where something like 70,000 publications are released each year.
When Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again first came out in the 1950s, the number of editors in big American publishing houses who could read Japanese in American was probably close to, if not zero. I am a little surprised, however, that as time went on and Godzilla became more and more famous, someone didn’t discover the Godzilla novellas and pitch them to a publisher here. After all, they have been reprinted numerous times in Japan and are now available in an inexpensive paperback edition that you can find in just about any big bookstore.
However, another factor has to do with the fact that the Godzilla novellas I translated are sometimes seen as having secondary position vis-à-vis the movies. Of course, the silver screen is what really made Godzilla famous, and of course, those films were designed to be consumed as overpowering, exciting visual spectacles. The novellas were published in 1955, around the time of the release of the second film. As a result, some people see them as having less cultural value than if the book had come first. The very first publisher I took my translations to was a publisher that specialized in nice editions of classic literature, but the editor there rejected them saying, “Well, these are just novelizations that came after the fact.” Fortunately, the second press I spoke to, University of Minnesota Press, did a beautiful job with the book, recognizing its value, allowing me to write the extended afterword, and producing an absolutely gorgeous, eye-catching cover. As an aside, I might add that later, when the editor from the first press that turned me down saw the sales numbers of Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again, he said to me, “Oh my God, turning down your translations might have been the biggest mistake of my career.”
I’m not saying this to gloat, but simply to point out that readers have different criteria to judge the value of a text. The novellas are well written and, I think, very satisfying as a piece of literature. Plus, as I argue in the afterword to the book, the novellas have a great deal of value since they were written by the same fellow who drafted the screenplay for the 1954 film Godilla. In my opinion, although English-language scholarship has ignored his role until very recently, Shigeru Kayama deserves to be recognized alongside director Ishirō Honda and special effects director Eiji Tsuburaya as one of the main “fathers of Godzilla.” The novellas I translated do have a tremendous cultural value because they allow us to see his personal vision for the monster and make it clear what he hoped to accomplish in developing the story we all know today.
Are there more kaiju film stories to translate? It reminds me of the global success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon several years ago. Despite the fact the producers talked extensively about wuxia literature and even specifically about the book which inspired the film, the source material has never received an official English release. Instead an English language novelization of the film was commissioned!
Wow, I didn’t know that about the novelization of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon! Very interesting!
To answer your question, yes, there are other kaiju film stories out there. For instance, a handful of the Toho Studios films were based on short stories written by Ken Kuronuma, a popular, pulpy but quite insightful writer who worked in mid-century Japan. I think that putting those stories together in a single volume might make a nice book.
However, one thing that Americans probably don’t know, however, is that there are tons of really great kaiju stories that have never been made into movies, and these include some first-rate, thick, immersive novels written by bestselling authors. Those are a little harder to sell to American publishers since they do not the name recognition that comes from having a film star like Godzilla or Mothra, which are already known entities in this country. However, some of the novels I’m thinking of are so spectacularly exciting, detailed, and well written that I am 100% positive that they would find a dedicated fan base. I’d love to work on some of these!
I personally love a good kaiju film but in the last few years have found I am more likely to watch something from the Ultraman franchise over a Godzilla or Gamera film I have seen many times. Are there hidden tokusatsu gems, particularly kaiju related, out there that you recommend? Are there things we haven’t seen in America which we should be demanding?
One film that I think is particularly wonderful is the three-hour-long film Nihon tanjō. In Japanese, this literally means The Birth of Japan, but this film is better known to Toho fans as The Three Treasures. It was the 1000th film that Toho Studios released, and it brings the Japanese creation myth, first written down in the year 712, to the screen in glorious, full, exciting color, more than twelve centuries later in 1959. Since it was such an important release for Toho and dealt with such important subject matter—Japan’s most ancient legends about the creation of the world, the descent of the gods to earth, and the rise of the Japanese nation—Toho went all out on, creating a lavish spectacle that did quite well among critics and at the Japanese box office. Eiji Tsuburaya contributed some truly memorable scenes, including one in which he brings to life an eight-headed serpent called Yamata no Orochi. Many people believe that it was in bringing this character to life that Tsuburaya developed the the technical know-how to produce the multi-headed dragon King Ghidorah in 1964. To the best of my knowledge, The Birth of Japan (The Three Treasures) doesn’t have a proper DVD or streaming release in this country. I have only seen it in pirated versions online, but given how impressive the production was, it seems like a huge shame not to have a first-rate, restored version easily available. I know I’d buy it!
I will not ask you to tell me your next translation (unless you are ready to announce something) but I am interested to know if you have a “dream project” you hope to someday bring the English readers?
I’ll share two ideas that just at the early stages of conception. I would love to do an anthology of shorter kaiju pieces that would include the shorter stories by Ken Kuronuma that I mentioned earlier, as well as some other stories that I have my eye on. There was a new wave of kaiju writing after the 2011 Fukushima meltdown, since writing about kaiju seemed like a fantastic way to deal with the fear, destruction, and radiation released by the disasters. I’d definitely want to include some of those powerful, recent stories in any anthology that I put together.
My other pipe dream is to translate the novel Kōjin (The Rampaging God) by the Miyuki Miyabe, an author known for her rivetingly well-written historical and mystery fiction. This is a stupendous, 300-plus-page novel that is set in the northeastern Tōhoku region of Japan—the same region where the earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima meltdown took place in 2011. Miyabe’s goal in writing the book was to bring more attention to the history and long-standing plight of the region, but it is one hell of an exciting book. It talks about the sudden appearance of a kaiju several centuries ago, but since it uses this exciting story to evoke the history and details of Tōhoku life, it is easily as exciting, powerful, and historically rich as, say, the film Godzilla Minus One. It’s an amazing book. I’d love to find a publisher.
Finally, one last question but it is more of the “housekeeping” variety than part of the interview. What website/social media information would you like me to include? Do you have a preferred vendor for your books?
The main bit of social media that I use is Facebook, and people are welcome to friend me there, even though my feed contains a bunch of personal stuff too. In general, I don’t use a lot of social media because I find that when I do, I get hooked and end up diverting too much time away from the reading, translating, and creative writing that gives my life so much meaning!
If people are looking for an online bookstore, I recommend buying directly from University of Minnesota Press because that way they get a better cut of the cover price, and then they sink those proceeds into toward other, valuable projects—thus bringing more projects like mine to life.
Another wonderful site is Bookshop.org, which gives part of their proceeds to support independent bookstores. As many of your readers probably know, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and the other large online retailers are slowly putting independent bookstores out of business across America, but independent bookstores deserve our support. Unlike Amazon and others, independent bookstores do not merely promote the books that publishers pay them to promote. They do their own work, discovering things for us, finding gems in the rough, and organizing readings and events, all while bringing forward voices that will speak to their specific communities. I hope we can all get behind such valuable and wonderful work! The more diverse, exciting books in the world, the better!
Thank you for taking the time to speak with me and the Swords and Rayguns readers, Prof. Angles.
history, kaiju, science fiction and fantasy history, tokusatsu