Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again by Shigeru Kayama, Translated by Jeffrey Angles

Suzie Eisfelder

This book was loaned to me by a friend. I can’t remember why he wanted me to read this particular book, but it’s been an education. This book is translated from the Japanese and as I’ve never read a translation from Japanese before I found it hard going. Once I figured out the odd writing style was just because of the original language I was able to relax into the reading and struggled to put it down. This book is actually two books in one.

You’ve all heard of Godzilla. If you haven’t you must have been living under a different rock to me. The original Godzilla movies were first screened in 1954 and the second in 1955. I’ve always known of them, but never had the occasion to see them. Back in the olden days we had four channels available to us. In fact, our TV showed black and white only. Later on we got a TV that had a colour setting, but I was used to black and white. Not only that, we had to stand up and walk over the the TV in order to change the channel. I watched a lot of stuff back-to-back because I couldn’t be bothered standing up. And we didn’t have any way of recording anything on TV. If the movie was on at an odd time of night, or we were at school, or work, we missed out on that movie. That probably accounts for why I didn’t see Godzilla until 1988. Grandma was doing one of her irregular tax cheats and giving children and grandchildren money. We bought a VCR with the money. Anyway, Godzilla wasn’t important to me even then. It’s only become important to me because a friend loaned me this book.

The style of writing is very simplistic. I’ve spoken to a friend who spent six years in Japan teaching and she agreed with me that they have a different style of writing to us. It took me a while, but when I relaxed into the writing style I began to enjoy the book.

What I enjoyed at the end of the book was the Afterword written by the translator, Jeffrey Angles. It was a wonderful thing to read because it gave me good insight into the why behind some of the things written in this book. The movie was originally written several years after the close of WWII. Japan was still recovering from the devastation of the two nuclear bombs delivered by the US. The reason for Godzilla’s unusual size is credited to the hydrogen tests the Japanese government is doing at sea. This is actually a link to the two nuclear bombs dropped on both Nagasaki and Hiroshima. I would not have made the connection between the two sets of bombs as I’m sitting in the comfort of 2024 (I read it last year), a long way from WWII. But the movies and then the books were only a few years after the war and those bombs would still have been high on the minds of the Japanese people. And just to clinch the fact, a random girl on the train is discussing Godzilla with some friends. She mentions how she’s only just recovered from Nagasaki.

As an example of the differing wording here’s a sentence. ‘The drums exploded one after the next.’ This is very different to what we’d say. We’d be more inclined to write ‘The drums exploded one after the other.’ I’m absolutely not saying either way is wrong, just that it’s different.

Angles had great difficulty figuring out how to translate some of the Japanese words. Apparently the Japanese use a much larger vocabulary to represent sounds, using a lot more onomatopoeias than Westerners would. One recurring word Kayama used is mermeri which is the sound of buildings or car fenders crumbling. This is something I would not have understood, I’m grateful to Angles for translating this one sound into other non-sound-related words.

Yes, I did enjoy both books. I am now keen to see both movies. And then I have a question I need to ask some of my family and friends. I have a short story I wrote at uni which I’m thinking of submitting for publishing elsewhere. But would the ‘monster’ I’ve noted in the story be considered a Kaiju or not. Wondering what the definition of a Kaiju is will keep me entertained for some time. You’ll note I’ve not given any other details of my story…


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