Review: 'Godzilla, and Godzilla Raids Again' by Shigeru Kayama, trans. by Jeffrey Angles

I love monsters and the things they represent and Godzilla has been the kind of monster I have enjoyed thinking about. But where did he come from? How did Godzilla begin and how did he become a phenomenon. This book provides the first English translations of the novellas behind the monster, alongside a detailed discussion. Thanks to University of Minnesota Press and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. My sincere apologies for the delay in reviewing!

Pub. Date: 03/10/2023
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press

The first English translations of the original novellas about the iconic kaijū Godzilla

Godzilla emerged from the sea to devastate Tokyo in the now-classic 1954 film, produced by Tōhō Studios and directed by Ishirō Honda, creating a global sensation and launching one of the world’s most successful movie and media franchises. Awakened and transformed by nuclear weapons testing, Godzilla serves as a terrifying metaphor for humanity’s shortsighted destructiveness: this was the intent of Shigeru Kayama, the science fiction writer who drafted the 1954 original film and its first sequel and, in 1955, published these novellas. 

Although the Godzilla films have been analyzed in detail by cultural historians, film scholars, and generations of fans, Kayama’s two Godzilla novellas—both classics of Japanese young-adult science fiction—have never been available in English. This book finally provides English-speaking fans and critics the original texts with these first-ever English-language translations of Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again. The novellas reveal valuable insights into Kayama’s vision for the Godzilla story, feature plots that differ from the films, and clearly display the author’s strong antinuclear, proenvironmental convictions.

Kayama’s fiction depicts Godzilla as engaging in guerrilla-style warfare against humanity, which has allowed the destruction of the natural world through its irresponsible, immoral perversion of science. As human activity continues to cause mass extinctions and rapid climatic change, Godzilla provides a fable for the Anthropocene, powerfully reminding us that nature will fight back against humanity’s onslaught in unpredictable and devastating ways.

The monster that a culture and society produces tells us a lot about that culture. Scholar Jeffrey Jerome Cohen established seven theses through which a monster can be read. These are that the monster's body is a cultural body, that the monster always escapes, that it is the harbinger of category crisis, that it is difference made flesh, that it polices the borders of what is possible, that there is desire at play in the fear of the monster, and, finally, that they are crucial in how we become ourselves.  (For more on this, see Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 'Monster Culture (Seven Theses)', in Monster Theory: Reading Culture (1996), pp.3-25) With these theses, Cohen gave us a language to explore why monsters are so intriguing to us, why they feature in all forms of literature and art, why we need them to make sense of ourselves, and why we keep coming back to them. Many of the monsters he discusses are very old, but Godzilla makes an appearance in his chapter as well as an example of how the monster demonstrates the arbitrariness of difference, smashing not just Tokyo but also all the arbitrary rules we establish (p. 12). A monster like Godzilla is not just a source of entertainment, although that is also a part of it. Godzilla also stands for the destruction we humans are capable of, our smallness in the face of nature and some of our own achievements, the forbidden desire to push knowledge as far as we can, and more. In reading these novellas behind the creation of Godzilla, accompanied by an excellent commentary essay at the end, you can really get to grips with the various elements that came into play to create Godzilla. 

The book contains two novellas, written by Shigeru Kayama, namely Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again. In Godzilla, we first discover the existence of Godzilla and his connection to the atomic bombs and hydrogen bomb tests. As he emerges and ravages Tokyo, the novella focuses on a set of scientists who are torn between studying Godzilla and destroying him. In Godzilla Raids Again, we focus on a trio of characters who work at a fishing and cannery company in Osaka. When Godzilla reemerges at their coast, alongside a potential kaiju enemy, their lives are thrown into disarray. Using their piloting skills, two become involved in tracking and hopefully defeating Godzilla, while the third (female) character has a more limited role. As Angles explains in his detailed commentary at the end, Shigeru Kayama was asked to provide a script treatment for the 1954 film and as well as for the 1955 sequel. He expanded these later into novellas, but they are still very action focused. The characterisations are very to the point without a whole lot of embellishment, which worked for me but might be off-putting to some readers. I really appreciated the focus, especially in the first novella, on how Godzilla in and of himself represents the atomic and hydrogen bomb. He was not necessarily nature's answer to human meddling in the beginning, although he is mostly considered in that light now. Both ways of reading him are valid, but the tension between the presence of such awesome (in its traditional sense) power in the face of the enormous costs associated with it are probably the most fascinating aspect of his whole construction for me.

Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again will naturally be a good fit for readers who are already intrigued by the monster, who watched Godzilla Minus One and now want to know more. For those more generally interested, along the lines of Cohen, about what monsters say about us, this is also a valuable read. I think Godzilla is one of the last truly new monsters we created and seeing how he emerged and what is at play here is very interesting. There is enormous benefit, I think, in these novellas finally being translated into English, but they are also helped very much by Jeffrey Angles' commentary and essay. It helps situate the creation of Godzilla in time, explaining some of the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the contemporary issues at play, and the cinematic aspects that shaped the stories presented here into the films that hit the cinemas. I had a really good time reading this book and dove straight into Angles' translation of the Mothra stories afterwards.

I give this book...

4 Universes!

The novellas here are not necessarily the most gripping stories on their own merit, but they are very interesting nonetheless and it is great that they are now accessible to a wider audience.