Godzilla is probably the most famous monster in the world, give or take one King Kong (though the two have famously fought each other). When people summon up imagery of a giant monster terrorizing a city, it’s the man in the rubber suit, Gojira in Tokyo. And yet, unlike most venerated characters and creations, the monster’s creator(s) are hardly well known. If anything, people may connote Godzilla with director Ishirō Honda or the film studio Toho, at least outside Japan. The name Shigeru Kayama is certainly nowhere near the orbit of the monstrous green lizard, and yet he is largely responsible for the creature’s creation.

That’s about to change, thanks to Jeffrey Angles and the University of Minnesota Press.

Angles has translated the two novellas from the original writer behind the film Godzilla and its first sequel, Godzilla Raids Again. It’s the first time they’ve received an English translation, a rather astounding fact considering the popularity of Godzilla and the continuing media surrounding the monster, such as the upcoming films Godzilla Minus One and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, and the Apple TV+ series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. Kayama’s work will finally reach English-reading eyes when the new translation becomes available next month from the University of Minnesota Press.

It’s one of the most culturally significant releases of the year, and MovieWeb spoke to Angles in a wide-ranging interview about the translation, its details, and the legacy of Godzilla today.

Meet Shigeru Kayama, Father of Godzilla
Toho

Shigeru Kayama was a surprisingly prolific writer in post-war Japan, blending a variety of genres through a large output of mostly short stories. Tomoyuki Tanaka, a producer at Toho, had seen the American film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and tapped Kayama to write a movie scenario. The result was an early version of Godzilla, which would be modified and softened by the filmmakers; Kayama would then publish his novelization in 1955 of his original script, and this is what Angles has translated and is bringing to English readers.

People sometimes lament that things get ‘lost in translation,’ meaning that there are culturally and linguistically specific details that sometimes can’t traverse the act of translation from one language to another. For the most part, Angles only had a couple of big issues with this specific text.

Related: Every Godzilla Movie, Ranked by Rotten Tomatoes

“I think that there is a way to translate most things. Sometimes you talk about things that are untranslatable, and yes, I agree that sometimes there are words that don’t translate easily, or concepts that don’t necessarily translate easy. But I think, we as human beings are infinitely rich in our ability to kind of rephrase things. I was able to explain it, I think, and kind of get at the heart of what was going on in most places,” said Angles. He continued:

“Sometimes I did have some trouble, like thinking about, ‘Well, how am I going to represent sound?’ I talked about this a little bit in the afterword. Actually, I think that was my biggest challenge here. I’ve translated a lot of other kinds of work, but I’ve never translated one that has so much kind of roaring and crashing and banging, that sort of thing. And Japanese is a really spectacularly rich vocabulary when it comes to those things. In fact, there are many more words to talk about sounds in Japanese than they are in English.”

Godzilla’s Gender, Explained
Toho

“Another translation problem,” added Angles, in one of the most fascinating moments of our discussion, “this particular kaiju doesn’t have any gender, at least in the book, in neither Godzilla nor Godzilla Raids Again. It’s very, very easy in the Japanese language to avoid gender altogether. This entire book didn’t mention Godzilla’s gender. But in English, it’s hard.”

Sometimes I filled in the name Godzilla, sometimes I use the word ‘monster’ to avoid gender, but using those words over and over again would be strange and repetitive, so we kind of need pronouns somewhere in there. And so I thought long and hard about it, and I eventually decided to use ‘he,’ which I think is maybe a potentially controversial decision.

“Some people feel very viscerally, like the people at Toho studios feel very strongly that Godzilla is an ‘it’ and not a ‘he’ or ‘she’ or ‘they,'” continued Angles. “I kind of give my rationale for that choice in the afterward — we think about Godzilla as the standard for the nuclear bomb, and it was men in America who were developing the hydrogen bombs that frightened Japan so much in 1954. So maybe it’s perhaps not inappropriate to call Godzilla ‘he.'”

What Is a Kaiju?
Toho

Another interesting aspect of the translation and the ways in which Angles refers to Godzilla is the usage of the word ‘kaiju,’ which remains untranslated in some instances in the text.

“There are places in the text where the word ‘kaiju’ appears, and since that’s a word that crept into English, thanks largely to the popularity of the Godzilla movies and the entire franchise, I decided to kind of leave that as a sort of nod to all the kaiju fans that are out there in the world, myself included,” explained Angles, who continued:

The word ‘kaiju’ — I was talking about this recently with somebody else, and it’s a word that did exist in Japanese, but the movies really popularized it. The popularity of the Godzilla movies and some of the other subsequent Tokusatsu movies that came out in Japan really kind of pushed it into common parlance.

“So, I think that the word ‘kaiju’ is especially so associated with Godzilla in people’s imagination that I just didn’t want to replace it only with ‘monster.’ I did use the word ‘monster’ here and there. But yeah, the word ‘kaiju’ is written in Japanese with two characters. The first one means ‘weird’ or ‘scary,’ and the second one means ‘wild beasts.’ So literally, kaiju is a scary wild beast,” said Angles.

Related: 10 Japanese Kaiju Monsters That Are Downright Creepy

“I kind of wanted to leave a little bit of that sort of textual history in there. My understanding is that the word goes back to ancient China. If you look at Chinese dictionaries — I took a look at one just the other day in the library — you can find the word references I think centuries and centuries ago. Although in classical Chinese, it’s a little bit unclear sometimes whether or not it’s an adjective modifying a noun and they just kind of got stuck together with time, or if they were actually kind of separate words centuries ago, to the people who first used that word. So it’s a little bit difficult to kind of pinpoint the exact moment that the word ‘kaiju’ came into existence in China, and then Japan. But yeah, I mean, certainly Godzilla pushed it into common parlance.”

Godzilla Defined
Warner Bros. Pictures

So that’s kaiju, but what about the word ‘Godzilla’ itself? Was that an original creation of Shigeru Kayama? In the original Godzilla film (and in Kayama’s text), the island villagers have a folkloric mythology of Godzilla, and it’s their folk tales which name the beast. So did the word exist before Kayama, then? It’s hard to say, but Angles can define it very specifically.

“My understanding is that there are a couple of different theories about who exactly was the first person to use the word ‘Godzilla,’ but it’s clear that the word is a portmanteau, a word that’s kind of created by combining different words,” explained Angles.

“It’s a portmanteau of the word ‘gorilla,’ [also] ‘gorilla’ in Japanese, and the word ‘kujira,’ which means whale, like a very large kind of monster of the sea. And so these two words were kind of mushed together in an interesting way to create the name of this character, and when you read the book, you’ll see that the word Godzilla was known to the people in these rural islands, way out in the Pacific, kind of away from the Japanese mainland.”

“And so in the text, it’s written in a script called katakana, which is a Japanese script that’s used to record sound, and it’s not written with characters, which would specify a very particular meaning. It’s just kind of like pure sound on the page,” continued Angles. And so there’s something that’s very ancient-sounding about this.”

It sounds like an ancient name. It sounds like it could be the name of an ancient monster. It sounds like it could be the name of something kind of divine or heavenly.

“So yeah, I think it’s a really clever invention on the part of [Godzilla’s] creators,” added Angles. “And the fact that when people translated ‘Godzilla’ into English, you know, you put the word ‘God’ in it, I think it’s kind of a stroke of genius, because it does convey the sense that he was something divine.”

There’s undoubtedly a mythological heft to Godzilla, and to Angles’ new translation of Shigeru Kayama’s text, which releases on Oct. 3. It’s a wonderful new book (with an extremely insightful afterword filled with information that’s been largely unavailable in the West), and you can order it at the University of Minnesota Press. Watch this space for more of our interview with Angles.