[ad_1]
“Every year, more people die from bee stings than they die from being bitten by a snake. It’s just an insect, but don’t write it off.” This insight, voiced by a child in the dubbed Japanese monster movie Rebirth of Mothra (1996), captures the essence of a Godzilla film series favorite monster. Mothra, the benevolent, larger-than-life lepidopteran kaiju (strange beast), boasts strength not in claws, rampaging feet, or serpentine fangs, but in nigh-supernatural powers and a graceful resilience.
Mothra has soared in the collective kaiju-loving imagination since 1961, when the film company behind the now-seven-decades-strong Godzilla saga released Mothra’s self-titled screen debut. Unbeknownst to many, Mothra the monster did not hatch from a cinema script alone. Its origins, like Godzilla’s, lie in literary fiction.
The year 2023 was special for Godzilla fans. Jeffrey Angles, professor of Japanese at Western Michigan University, translated the original Japanese novellas behind Godzilla (1954) and its 1955 sequel into English—the first time this had ever officially happened. Japanese science fiction author Shigeru Kayama penned these stories that laid the foundation for a genre-shaping sci-fi series grounded in historical and nuclear traumas. Angles has since gifted kaiju enthusiasts with another translated work: The Luminous Fairies and Mothra (1961), Mothra’s tri-authored origin tale.
In this interview, Angles discusses his translation process, the book’s intriguing political nucleus, and how Mothra’s genesis compares with and diverges from Godzilla’s.
What have been the most striking cultural differences you’ve observed between the West and Japan while translating The Luminous Fairies and Mothra?
One of the things I really became aware of while working on Mothra is that this book falls, in some ways, into a long tradition of Japanese science fiction and adventure stories. A great deal of this story takes place in the South Pacific, on Infant Island, and there’s a long tradition of writing about the Nan’yō (South Seas) in Japan. From the 19th century onward, a number of stories in Japan have explored its relationship to this outer world. That’s not something we’re tremendously aware of in the West.
The US had its own push outward into the Pacific with the annexation of Hawaii and its statehood; to Japan in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Pacific meant the expansion of the Japanese empire. After the empire vanished, the meaning of the South Pacific began to shift for the Japanese people, and the country had to rethink its connection to the outside world.
That realigning of geopolitical concerns was foremost in the minds of Mothra‘s authors—especially Yoshie Hotta. He was a very politically involved writer who strongly believed that Japan needed to forge strong relationships with the developing, newly decolonizing world. The Pacific, then, represented a new opportunity that looked quite different from what it had in the past.
What major thematic similarities have you noticed between Shigeru Kayama’s Godzilla novellas and Mothra now that you’ve translated all three?
There’s definitely a shared interest in radiation, the horrors of radiation, and the evils of the hydrogen bomb. That’s loud and clear in all of the work. At the beginning of Mothra (the novella and the movie), we learn that Infant Island has been bombed repeatedly—so repeatedly that certain parts of it are uninhabitable. That anti-nuclear weapon and environmental concern is present in Kayama’s Godzilla, too.
Beyond that, it diverges pretty wildly. Kayama doesn’t seem nearly as interested in how Japan should realign itself on the world stage. The farthest he goes is to talk about the military’s response to Godzilla, but he doesn’t mention that if something like that were to happen in 1954, American military forces would almost inevitably be involved. There’s no mention of international cooperation either in the film or Kayama’s novellas.
Kayama does have a strong ethical message, though. He makes a clear point about science and the responsibilities of scientists, especially with the death of Dr. Daisuke Serizawa, the fellow who creates the Oxygen Destroyer (the weapon used to kill Godzilla). He makes his point that scientists need to be responsible for the possible uses of their scientific discoveries. If something is going to be used as a weapon of mass destruction, then perhaps scientists should be thinking about that from the very beginning.
Kayama seems to be leveling an indirect criticism at Robert Oppenheimer and portions of the US military, who were unlocking nuclear secrets and potentially destroying the world in the process. Both sets of writers have strong ethical messages. They seemed to think a lot about, What should we be doing in the future as Japanese people? Which direction should we go? For Kayama, that question concerns science, but in The Luminous Fairies and Mothra, it concerns politics.
How do you choose English phrases that convey the Japanese text’s intentions and resonate with English speakers? Two in-text examples include “a bad taste in their mouths” (Nakamura 2026, 6) and “Fukuda’s expression was as cool as a cucumber” (Fukunaga 2026, 18)—British English phrases.
When I’m translating, one of the things that I always think about is how something feels in Japanese. For instance, if a phrase feels casual, then I’m going to try and choose a casual colloquial equivalent. With “cool as a cucumber”, I suspect there was probably an idiom or simile in Japanese that conveyed that sort of feeling, and since there was a phrase in English that captured that, I grabbed ahold of it.
For the most part, I don’t like to change the content at all. In a project like this, my entire goal was to show fans what the novella looked like before it was adapted into the movie. I didn’t want to make changes in the text that would bring it closer to the movie; if anything, I wanted to emphasize the differences between the novella and the film.
When I do a translation, I typically draft it to be as close to the Japanese as I can and don’t worry about how it sounds in English yet. Later on, I start polishing and massaging the English, working it into slightly richer prose, and then I go back in the third stage and re-check my English against the Japanese to make sure I haven’t gone too far.
There are many, many places where a translator has to make small decisions. I think of doing translation as like doing a gigantic Sudoku puzzle—you’ve got all these little parts, and then you have to fill in the little missing bits.
Characters Chujo and Fukuda learn to communicate with the Shobijin (Mothra’s tiny priestesses) through their language of singing and telepathic impressions. The Shobijin’s kidnapper, Nelson, does not understand them and uses this to justify “owning” them and forcing them to perform songs. Do you see a commentary here on how open-mindedness can cross cultural barriers?
Absolutely. One hundred percent. The authors were sending a pretty clear message that it’s important to listen to the voices of other people, to really try to understand what they’re saying on their own terms—rather than expecting them somehow, magically, to learn your language and speak to you.
I think that the authors, especially Yoshie Hotta, were very cognizant about this. Hotta was cognizant that Japan was a relatively wealthy nation and that to many newly decolonizing, independent countries in the Pacific, Japan represented a kind of big brother of sorts.
Hotta thought it was incumbent on the Japanese to be the ones who listened and understood others, because they were the ones in power. Listening to people on their own terms today is becoming an increasingly rare thing.
I see this in all sorts of places, like in politics and my own students. There are fewer students that are studying language now than at any point in my memory [Angles has been teaching at Western Michigan University since 2004], so I do wish that we could take the message in this book and remember that it’s important to listen to the voices of other people—especially those who are disadvantaged and have critically important things to say.
Interviewer’s note: I shared phrases I had highlighted in The Luminous Fairies and Mothra with Angles that illustrate antagonist Nelson’s calloused disregard for the Shobijin’s humanity. “‘When I talk about the ‘materials’ I brought back, what I’m really referring to are the four little fairies I’m about to show you. I don’t dare call them women’” (Fukunaga 2026, 25). Angles explained that the word “materials” was originally shiryō (資料), which means “documents” or “papers”. This word choice emphasizes Nelson’s dehumanizing perspective, denying Mothra’s servants even their sentience.
This story has a curiously inconsistent tone across its three acts, which you note in your afterword. What do you think influenced these tonal disparities?
I wish I had a little more information about the circumstances in which these three parts were written. I’m not sure if the authors were in the same room, spending a weekend together in a hotel, or something, or if they were kind of passing the text back and forth. I imagine, though I haven’t been able to confirm it, that they had an overarching plan.
The amount of focus each author puts into certain details varies. The first section (“A Lovely Song from a Little Beauty in the Grassland”), by Shin’ichiro Nakamura, is really detailed. It feels like he is envisioning this whole, written-out novel, but by the third section (“Mothra Reaches Tokyo Bay”), Hotta’s writing is very, very sketchy—the destruction of Tokyo takes place within the space of about one page.
There may have been an agreement among the authors that each would write a certain amount of text. That may be part of the reason for the tonal disparity. The authors each brought their own interests to the text, as well. Takehiko Fukunaga brought his interests in anthropology and mythology to bear (when authoring Mothra’s cosmic origins in “Four Small Fairies on Display”), which I think makes the story a lot more interesting.
Mothra’s origins are as politically influenced as Godzilla’s in many ways. Do you think either monster would exist today, or have such a longstanding cultural legacy, if not for the events that shaped their conception?
Godzilla was reacting to headlines in 1954, especially those about the fishermen (on the Daigo Fukuryū Maru, or Lucky Dragon No. 5) who were caught in the US’ nuclear tests by Bikini Atoll. That’s what brought this issue of H-bomb testing to the foreground for the Japanese population. Without that, we would not have had Godzilla. Tomoyuki Tanaka, the producer of Godzilla, was grabbing something right from the headlines and making it relevant in that film.
The same is true of Mothra. The Anpo Protests in 1960 were fresh in the authors’ minds when they sat down to work on the Mothra text—they were concerned that Japan was going through the largest protest it had ever seen in its entire history. The question of what Japan should be doing and how it should align itself on the international stage was at the forefront of the minds of the entire Japanese population.
These monsters are born out of the headlines of their day. I think it says something about the strength and resilience of these monsters that these narratives, born of traumatic historical events, continue to attract new generations of fans.
In the novella, Mothra forms a cocoon on the National Diet Building; the film swaps this for Tokyo Tower to avoid the authors’ allusion to the Anpo Protests. How does the film’s blurring of lines between politics and sci-fi/fantasy strengthen or dilute the book’s message?
The message, certainly, was strongly diluted. The emotions were probably too raw to evoke the Anpo Protests directly. There’s no way anyone reading the novella in 1961 would not be thinking about the protests as they read it.
The decision to use Tokyo Tower watered down the protest element. Another reason it may have been done was that Toho Studios had used the Japanese Diet Building in other films, like Godzilla, and there may have been a sense that they didn’t want to repeat that. Toho likely wanted each film to create an iconic spectacle. Mothra’s iconic scene is when it climbs out of its cocoon atop the wreckage of Tokyo Tower.
Because Tokyo Tower was a new building at the time, it was far bigger than any other building in Tokyo. It represented Japan’s rebirth from the ashes of World War II. By destroying Tokyo Tower, the filmmakers conveyed a different kind of symbolism than the National Diet Building, one that worked better for the film’s story.
In “Mothra Reaches Tokyo Bay”, Yoshie Hotta writes, “The entire century had been one of politics, and in the contemporary world, even the arts are used for political purposes. That is perhaps unavoidable” (Hotta 2026, 33). Did you find this line telling, given that The Luminous Fairies and Mothra is a politically minded work of fiction?
Absolutely. I think it’s closely tied to Hotta’s ideology. He believed that writers were vanguard figures who could go out and look at people from different backgrounds and shape politics through their work. Hotta thought of everything he did as a political act, so I found it interesting that he included that little section. That really stood out to me, as well.
Do you anticipate that future kaiju films may begin as commissioned or discovered works of written fiction like the original Godzilla and The Luminous Fairies and Mothra?
I certainly hope so! I think that Mothra is an example of how, when a film company turns to some writers—including writers who aren’t necessarily known for writing for the screen—you sometimes get really interesting results. I think Toho Studios approached these three writers because they wanted something different from the monster films they had produced so far.
They were looking for a new direction, realizing that big, rampaging monsters were not enough to keep bringing audiences back over and over again. There needed to be a message, symbolism, and new ideas. I hope film studios out there take inspiration from The Luminous Fairies and Mothra and turn to great writers for ideas, especially new, creative, exciting ones.
Mothra is beloved in fandom as a symbol of feminine strength and transformation—you touch on this in your afterword. How do you see Mothra’s role in the Godzilla universe as one of a limited number of female/female-coded kaiju?
I think that if all we had were seemingly male, toxic figures like Godzilla—and I use the word “toxic” in all of its meanings, haha—then I think these films could gradually descend into being carbon copies of one another. I appreciate that Mothra brings a certain beauty and diversity to the screen, and a kind of softer touch, and I think that’s really nice and welcome. I think it makes the “kaijuverse” more exciting to have that kind of figure there.
[ad_2]
Alyssa
Source link