Book Review: Godzilla

Title: Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again

Author: Shigeru Kayama (or Kayama Shigeru)

Translator: Jeffrey Angles

Date: 1955 (Japanese), 2023 (English)

Publisher: University of Minnesota

ISBN: TBA

Quote: "Right before their astonished eyes, the whirlpool seemed to rise up when suddenly, flash! An intense burst of white-hot light illuminated the surface of the water."

Godzilla was one of the classic horror movies; the first really successful one made in Japan. Its "horror" figure has proved as memorable as Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster, or the Pod People. It was based on a book that was written before the movie. So why was that book never available in English?

One reason is that it's hard for English-speaking people to learn to read Japanese well enough to translate Japanese books, and Godzilla, though popular, wasn't Great Literature in the sense that the works of Basho and Murasaki are. Funding was not available to translate genre fiction until that genre fiction had proved itself to be a classic in the genre.

But another reason was that, although pacifist in intention, Godzilla inevitably touched on feelings that still ran high in 1955. 

The monster's origin and name were straightforward enough. Japanese folklore has always regarded the appearance of "monster" fish as ominous. Gojira, from gorira, "gorilla," plus kajira, "whale," described the monster aptly as a whale-sized gorilla. While most of the "monsters" fished up around Japan are dead and merely frighten people who wonder what they're sent as warnings of, Gojira was specifically created by radioactive fallout from the bombing of Hiroshima; his name was translated the way it was because he was seen, by people who don't necessarily believe in One God, as something like the Wrath of God. Played by a man in a costume, spliced into scenes where he seemed so enormous that he couldn't actually exist, the gorilla-whale stomped out of the sea forming whirlpools that engulfed boats and smashed buildings with his massive paws, but his real weapon was that white-hot light of radioactivity. 

The Japanese people were well aware that in joining the Axis of Fascism in the 1940s they'd bitten off a great deal more than they could chew. Their army was tough. The little island kingdom really had overpowered the drug-addicted men and foot-bound women in China, seemed able to conquer Korea, and might have looked to itself as if it were ready to take over the world. The people had found out otherwise fairly early in the war. Now what were they going to do? Kayama has a character admit in the story that "We Japanese made a lot of trouble." He also admits that people still admired their war veterans as brave men, however misguided; in one scene a twentyish heroine, while focussed on a young man who has not admitted he's in love with her, is even more excited by seeing him in a group of war veterans. Possibly Godzilla symbolizes the desire for revenge that would indeed have destroyed Japan.

Godzilla has only one thing in common with the giant ape of American folklore, the Sasquatch: Both are spoken of as if they were imagined to be singular characters, but are also described as an entire species. There were two movies. Godzilla was killed at the end of the first one but a new Godzilla, this one pursued by another sea monster, threatened Tokyo all over again in the second movie.

Neither novella seems to have aspired to a reputation for literary greatness. They're written in simple, accessible language with minimal description, lots of action, no subplots or comments on life. Angles translates several onomatopoeic words ("grawr!" and "rattat" and so on) and observes in an afterword that Kayama used more of them; when it seemed more natural in the English version to have a character look surprised, Kayama had the character say "ha!". The plot of each novella is a standard horror plot: the horrible monster appears, and the hero has to destroy it, at considerable risk to himself, before it kills any more humans. The heroes are characterized just enough to indicate that they'll be missed if they don't survive; older ones have families, younger ones have sweethearts; those relationships are presented almost entirely through mentioning that the heroes' friends and relatives are concerned-but-supportive.

In 1955 there was no hint, in the books or the movies, that the author even guessed what kind of audience would make up the "cult" for the "cult classics" his movies were going to become. Horror movies appealed primarily to teenagers who wanted to show that they were, or to become, brave enough to think about frightening things. Movies generally, however, become the obsession of homosexual men. To this audience Angles observes that he felt some temptation to "queer" Godzilla, just for them; in Japanese the pronoun used for the monster wasn't gender-specific, yet no word used to describe the monster hinted that it could be seen as female or non-binary. While our Sasquatch is usually imagined as mellow enough that the male ape people always imagine first can be imagined as having a mate and young, Godzilla seems altogether destructive with no softer side. Godzilla might embody thanatos so completely that he doesn't even reproduce, fish-fashion, but only mutates from some natural animal into a bloodthirsty monster. That's a "he" thing, whether the homosexual men like it or not.

Can the human urge to use nuclear weapons be defeated by force? Kayama seems to suggest that it can, and it must. So, build something even deadlier to destroy the bomb, or bury the bomb deep in the Earth, or...? Reading Godzilla today may raise fresh questions...well,. that's how fresh science fiction is produced, anyway. And, once in a while, real science problems are solved by speculating about solutions in fiction.