By Mina Kaneko

Godzilla is about adaptation. For one (as the origin story goes): Godzilla is a prehistoric reptilian creature roused from the depths of the Pacific Ocean by hydrogen bomb testing, a creature monstrously adapted to possess radioactive power more destructive than the weapons that gave rise to him. But Godzilla is also about narrative adaptation: since Ishiro Honda’s original film was released in 1954, the story has mutated into various iterations throughout its long-standing franchise. Last fall saw the release of the highly successful Godzilla Minus One (directed by Takashi Yamazaki), which won the 2024 Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. And in March, Hollywood released another of its own Godzilla blockbusters, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (directed by Adam Wingard). Which is to say, the Godzilla franchise—and the place Godzilla occupies in a global pop cultural imaginary—is not only alive, but thriving, seventy years after its emergence.

Contributing to this ever-expanding universe of Godzilla stories is Jeffrey Angles’ English translation of two novellas by Japanese science-fiction writer Shigeru Kayama, titled Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again, first published in 1955. As a historical artifact, the novellas are striking evidence of the ways Godzilla was conceived and marketed across multiple mediums from its earliest years. A novelization of the 1954 film Godzilla and its 1955 sequel Godzilla Raids Again (directed by Motoyoshi Oda), the novellas were published in Japan as a single volume in a series aimed at young adults, just a few months after the release of the second film (itself released six months after the original). Crucially, Kayama not only adapted the films into novellas but had been directly involved in the creation of the film story. Hired by Toho Studios in 1954, he produced the first written version of Godzilla, a film scenario commonly referred to in English as the “G-Project,” which outlined key plot elements, characters, and themes. The novella versions of Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again capture the highly entertaining yet devastating quality essential to the original film, counterintuitively blending playfulness with a serious engagement with nuclear trauma. Brought to the English language for the first time, the translation animates these qualities through striking evocations of image and sound, showcasing the multimedia conception of Godzilla’s nuclear origins.

Written, overall, in unadorned language, one of the most prominent features of Angles’ translation is in its renditions of sounds. Plane engines hum with rhythm, avalanches roar, buildings groan. When Godzilla attacks Tokyo and sends trains flying with his toes, the narrator writes, “It was as easy as smashing eggshells. Crash, crunch…” (73). Such onomatopoeia are found all over the pages of the text. Sirens go Whoooo, whoooo!, seawater whooshes, machine guns go rat-tat-tat, rat-ta-tat. Crashes and explosions are frequently punctuated by effects like “Kaboom!!” or by Godzilla’s roars: “GRAAAAWRRR!!!” Capitalized, italicized, and at times followed by multiple explanation points, these onomatopoeia are images of sounds set apart from the rest of the text. They reveal the influence the films had on the novellas; they also lend the stories a cartoonish flair that increases in scenes of dramatized action. Angles acknowledges this in his afterword, writing:

When I shared an early draft of this translation with a class of mine studying the Godzilla films, many students commented that the plethora of sounds reminded them of comic books and manga, which give visual representation of sound in stylized letters. While I recognize that all the onomatopoeias make this an unusually “noisy” translation, especially for English readers who might be unused to so much auditory description, the onomatopoeias helped Kayama appeal to the young readers who were his main audience, and by retaining them in this translation, I hope the book comes alive in all its clanging, crashing, booming, roaring excessiveness. (217)

This cartoonish flair becomes apparent precisely through the act of adaptation across mediums. In film, sound and image are given as they are; in literature, they become visual representations, calling attention to their mediation. Moreover, the cartooniness becomes pronounced in translation from Japanese to English. While the Japanese language contains a multitude of onomatopoeia for a variety of phenomena, the English language has relatively few, and therefore their abundance throws the animated quality into greater proportion. Angles’ decision to find similar sounds in English—even when those words are made up or uncommon—brings out the playful, comic book tone that would be taken up in later Godzilla films.  

Elsewhere, sound and image work to emphasize an atmospheric feeling of desolation. Early in Godzilla, before Godzilla appears, a cargo vessel called the Eiko maru mysteriously vanishes. The narrator says, “Just moments before, the sailors on the Eiko maru had been talking excitedly, thinking of their mothers and yearning to go home, but now the ship had disappeared completely from the world. A silent curtain of darkness descended over the spot, and gentle moonlight illuminated the glittering ocean surface as if nothing at all had happened” (12). The eeriness of the ship’s disappearance is amplified through the simultaneous absence of sound, and of life, with darkness, followed by the nonchalance of nature’s serene light. In the “silent curtain of darkness,” sound (and silence) is visual, creating literary synesthesia. Angles is a poet as well as scholar, and his poetic rendering of the audiovisual stands out in sharp contrast to the comic onomatopoeias, emphasizing the devastating insignificance of human life within the broader scale and time of Earth, able to swallow humanity whole.

The devastation of this work, however, is also brought out by references to Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and WWII, a context both writer and translator foreground. In one scene, two students of middle-school age discuss the rumors of Godzilla’s appearance in Tokyo. One says to the other: “First we had radioactive tuna and radioactive rain, now Godzilla…What on Earth do you think will happen if he makes his way up to Tokyo Bay?” before saying, “I finally managed to recover from the atomic blast in Nagasaki” (51). The blending of specific events from WWII into the fictional world renders Godzilla a nuclear threat and potential for repeated trauma. Angles contextualizes scenes such as this one through a glossary that appears at the end of the book. Radioactive tuna, for example, refers to tuna contaminated by radiation from U.S. hydrogen bomb tests in the South Pacific, and specifically recalls the Lucky Dragon No. 5 (Daigo Fukuryu Maru), a Japanese tuna-fishing boat that was hit with radioactive fallout from Castle Bravo in March 1954 (232). All crewmembers developed radiation sickness while one died, and the event inspired the first film. The glossary—which contains a range of terms that span specific neighborhoods in Tokyo and Osaka to regionally specific foods to Japanese military emblems—is a useful resource that provides the English-speaking reader with terms necessary for understanding Godzilla’s emergence within its postwar Japanese context: after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and during the height of nuclear weapons testing in the South Pacific, providing a sense that Godzilla facilitated engagement with haunting memories through entertainment.

In fact, the translation situates the story firmly within post-WWII Japan overall, supporting Kayama’s aims to reiterate his antinuclear message. Though Kayama had been moved by the original film, and had written the scenario for the sequel, he became concerned with the direction Toho seemed to be taking after Godzilla Raids Again, fearing Godzilla was becoming a generic beloved dinosaur (the sequel focuses more on monster vs. monster action by introducing another mutated reptile, Anguirus). Actively seeking to reintroduce his political intent, Kayama includes an introductory message that states the novellas are his contribution to the emergent antinuclear weapons resistance movement. In it, Angles leaves in the date of Kayama’s writing (July 1955), inviting the reader to approach the text from the past while reflecting on the story’s relevance in our present—to understand that while much time has passed, the threat of nuclear warfare has hardly disappeared. Since the film and novella versions of Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again were first released, Godzilla would morph into many forms. In various films, he would become an action-figure monster of sorts, fighting other terrestrial and extraterrestrial monsters. In the late 1960s, no longer a nuclear threat, he would have an adoptive son, named Minilla; in the early 90s, he would lose a game of basketball to Charles Barkley. In other works, like Hideaki Anno’s Shin Godzilla (2016) or Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One, Godzilla is brought back to its haunting nuclear origins, this time situated in our contemporary context. Angles’ translation brings out both the cartoony quality of Godzilla’s actions that would be explored and adored in following decades but also the devastating threat of nuclear violence lurking within its narrative. In so doing, it reveals something essential about the adaptive quality at the heart of Godzilla, across film and literature, from original to sequel, between English and Japanese.

Kayama, Shigeru. Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again. Translated by Jeffrey Angles. University of Minnesota Press, 2023.

Ichigo Mina Kaneko is Visiting Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Oberlin College. Formerly, she was Covers Associate of The New Yorker magazine and Editorial Associate and Foreign Rights Manager at TOON Books. Funded by a Fulbright fellowship, her current research project examines mushrooms and mushroom clouds in postwar Japanese visual culture, from images of the atomic bomb to slime molds.