Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2024 November 06 • Wednesday

Shigeru Kayama, the author of the first drafts of the first two Godzilla movies, also wrote two novellas based on his screenplays: Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again. Kayama was a prolific and popular writer whose work was especially successful with younger readers. He is much published and reprinted and apparently still very well known in Japan.

Since Godzilla is so internationally famous and popular, as well as being the longest running film franchise in history, it’s odd that an English translation of these two foundational works has taken so long to appear. But here they are at last, just in time for Godzilla’s 70th birthday, courtesy of Jeffrey Angles, a professor of Japanese at Western Michigan University.

The stories themselves weren’t especially thrilling to read, both because of the distance Japanese language has to travel to arrive in English and because they stick closely enough to the movies to make you miss the amazing photography and music while following a trail you’re already familiar with.

There are some interesting deviations, such as the Tokyo Godzilla Society, presumably a Godzilla-worshiping cult that pops up in the first novella. This idea has potential and could have been explored in its own book, but doesn’t actually amount to much here.

True Godzilla fans already own this book. It does have value beyond completism, though. Angles’s Afterword is very informative in its exploration of Godzillas’s origins and both popular and critical reception. I was especially intrigued to learn that the first Godzilla screenplay had a radio adaptation that was broadcast before the film’s premiere.

The first line is “‘I was totally terrified when the sea down there in Okinawa got so rough’”.