In the fall of 2023, Japanese monster movie fans in the Occident received a literary blessing in the form of Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again, a two-novella volume by Shigeru Kayama, the prolific science fiction author hired by the film company Toho to write foundational stories for its first two Godzilla movies. While these books had existed in Japanese print since 1955, they’d been unavailable (or at least unreadable) to the majority of western fans for decades. That changed thanks to University of Minnesota Press, translator Jeffrey Angles, and the publication of both texts in English.
And in early 2026, the same publisher-translator team delivered a much-anticipated follow-up: an English printing of the multi-author novella The Luminous Fairies and Mothra. For years, we’ve heard about this piece of collaborative fiction, which Toho likewise commissioned to serve as the basis for a film: Ishiro Honda’s Mothra (1961). But until recently, we couldn’t examine it without fluency in Japanese. Our Culture Magazine spoke to Jeffrey Angles about Kayama’s Godzilla novellas three years ago and recently reconvened with the translator to learn more about this latest release.
Galvan: Good to speak to you again, Jeffrey. In our previous interview in 2023, we closed with mention that kaiju fans had been contacting University of Minnesota Press about the possibility of translating The Luminous Fairies and Mothra. But at what point did this novella enter your life? Did you first read it as a result of the fans’ interest, or were you already familiar with the story and its film adaptation?
Angles: First of all, Patrick, thanks for sitting down with me. I had lots of fun last time, so I’m happy to be talking with you again!
Yes, you’re right. Almost as soon as University of Minnesota Press (UMP) announced my translations of Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again in 2023, fans contacted the press, suggesting UMP consider doing The Luminous Fairies and Mothra. After hearing this a couple of times, my editor asked if that was something I’d like to work on. I’ll be honest and say I hadn’t read the novella at that point. But since I knew the work of the authors behind it, I immediately said I’d be interested. So, I came to this project thanks to fans who suggested it to the press. I am grateful to all of you, whoever you are! And yes, I hope that you’re reading this! (Laugh)
The Japanese original of The Luminous Fairies and Mothra has been reprinted multiple times over the years, but most of the volumes and anthologies containing it are out of print—so it’s not an extremely readily available text, even in Japan. When I ordered a used copy of the deluxe 1994 edition published by Chikuma Shobō, it was pretty darn expensive.
Galvan: Did you have any expectations going into the novella?
Angles: I knew there’d be many differences between the text and the film, which came out about seven months after, but I was surprised at just how extensive those differences were. I was also amazed to realize the novella is not just a fun monster story (of course, I knew that already); it contains an important social message about Japan’s geopolitical situation in the early Cold War period. Since I love to think about literature as a form of cultural history—I should note that I’m a nerdy professor of Japanese literature for my day job—I realized this book would provide a valuable window into a crucial, anxiety-filled moment of postwar Japanese history.
Galvan: You also mentioned in our previous interview that clearing the rights to this story would be “a little more complex than usual” due to it having been written by multiple authors. Do you remember how long it took to secure the rights for an English translation?
Angles: Right, three authors wrote the book. All three were famous in the 1950s and ‘60s, but nowadays, they are, unfortunately, less widely read. Two of their estates responded immediately to our request, but the other—I’ll refrain from saying which—didn’t answer for ages. This happens sometimes…. As years go by following the death of an author, it’s often the children or grandchildren—sometimes even distant relatives with little relation to the author—who end up handling copyrights. Sometimes that person isn’t all that interested in books or simply doesn’t have the time to attend to all the emails and queries that trickle in over the years.
Actually, I was so excited to work on The Luminous Fairies and Mothra that I finished the entire translation while waiting for copyrights to clear. But as the copyright situation dragged on, I got nervous, worrying we might not get the third permission, leaving me unable to publish it. Thank goodness the wonderful agent I worked with in Japan managed to track down the correct person to make this all happen. I think it took over a year to finalize the rights, and part of that time I spent on pins and needles. Once the final permission came through, I started writing the long afterword, into which I poured my thoughts on the background of the authors, the novella, and the film.
Galvan: As you mentioned, you previously translated Shigeru Kayama’s Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again. I understand those texts had been converted into two other languages by the time you started working on an English translation. To your knowledge, were there translations of The Luminous Fairies and Mothra—in any language—before yours?
Angles: I don’t think there are any other translations of The Luminous Fairies and Mothra. In fact, there are very, very few translations of these three authors, period. By that, I mean their own, single-authored works. That’s pretty unfortunate since all three were amazing writers, each in their own way.
Galvan: In your afterwords for both Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again and The Luminous Fairies and Mothra, you provide deep explorations of the respective authors, their backgrounds and careers, and their aims in writing their monster stories. Let’s talk about the men behind Mothra.
Angles: All three authors—Shin’ichirō Nakamura, Takehiko Fukunaga, and Yoshie Hotta—were born in 1918 and were therefore part of a generation that spent their formative, early adulthood years in World War II. I should mention that Japan was embroiled in all-out conflict from the outbreak of war with China in 1937 to the unconditional surrender to the Allied Powers in 1945. The authors were all around nineteen when the war really got underway and around twenty-seven by the time it ended. Fortunately, none of them died in the war, but all three felt their youths were being wasted under the ideologically repressive regime of the time. So, they escaped (mentally) through literature, reading work from the West—at a time when much of Japan was looking away from Western models and turning toward the Asian continent.
Galvan: What kinds of Western literature interested them?
Angles: All three were specialists in French literature, and that was one thing that helped them bond as friends. Both Nakamura and Fukunaga majored in French Literature at Tokyo Imperial University (the forerunner of University of Tokyo, the most prestigious institution of higher learning in Japan), whereas Hotta studied French literature at Keiō, another elite Tokyo university. This exposure to outside ideas made them more worldly and broad-minded than many people at the time. One has to remember that Japanese imperial censorship and propaganda were working hard in the late 1930s and early ‘40s to shape the minds of their contemporaries.
Familiarity with French allowed these authors to step outside their moment in time and step around the extreme, rabid, Japan-first mentality that led their country to assume it had a moral obligation to lead Asia forward. I remember reading one of them felt a strange, secretive sense of freedom during the war since he spent so much time reading and thinking about books that were so unlike what most of Japan was consuming.
After the surrender, Nakamura, Fukunaga, and Hotta all became famous for works describing the ideological struggles of intellectuals and other people of conscience living through the war. In other words, they started their careers thinking through Japan’s recent disastrous experiences and seeking directions for the future.
Galvan: We now have some insight into how these authors were similar. How were they different?
Angles: Each author was somewhat different, and each had his own particular interests. For instance, Yoshie Hotta was the most internationally and politically inclined of the three. During World War II, he worked as a journalist in colonial Shanghai, where he developed fluency in Chinese and a strong sympathy with the oppressed working classes. In fact, Hotta continued to live, work, and report in China for a few years after the war. Later on, he became involved in the literary wing of the non-alignment movement, which started with the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia. This movement urged writers to think politically and consider ways their countries could resist the hegemony of the Cold War superpowers—by forming their own lines of alliance with the newer, developing, decolonizing nations of Asia, the Pacific, Africa, and elsewhere. With this, Hotta’s work took on an increasingly political element, addressing the situations of people around the world.
Galvan: How familiar were you with the authors before you read The Luminous Fairies and Mothra?
Angles: I was most familiar with the work of the second author, Takehiko Fukunaga. In graduate school, many years ago, I read his beautiful 1954 novel Kusa no hana, which has since been translated as Flowers in Grass by the amazing Royall Tyler. It describes a young man dying of tuberculosis and how he reflects upon art, life, and love, even though he knows his time is short. The main character is bisexual and experiences powerful feelings of love for both a young man and his sister. I’ll be honest: I was disappointed when Royall Tyler—one of the world’s most famous translators of Japanese literature—got to this novel first. I’d been secretly hoping to do it all along.
Galvan: The Luminous Fairies and Mothra was written in relay, and there are noticeable changes in writing styles from act to act. Was it difficult to capture the differences in their styles?
Angles: I should explain to the readers who haven’t read the book that even though The Luminous Fairies and Mothra is pretty short, it’s divided into three parts, each by one of the three authors. The things each author focuses on are quite different, and so are their writing styles. I did worry at first how uneven the novella was. For instance, in the first part, written by Nakamura, there is really detailed character development and exposition, all written in long, sophisticated sentences. However, in the third section by Hotta—in which Mothra attacks both Tokyo and the superpower nation of Rosilica—the writing is more of a “this-happened-then-that-happened” straightforward narrative style, done in pithy, short sentences.
There was a nagging part of me that wished the writing was more consistent across the board, but the more I thought about it, the more fun I realized this project would be. Since my goal was to show Toho fans what the novella was like, I decided to fully embrace The Luminous Fairies and Mothra in all its quirkiness. I realized I didn’t need to strive to make it feel uniform; that would just give a false impression of what was in the original text. I wanted to show the original in all its surprising weirdness, and that includes differences between the three parts.
Galvan: In an interview with Matt Burkett and Andres Perez of the YouTube channel Monstrosities: A Vlog of Tokusatsu, you made an interesting comment wherein you labeled The Luminous Fairies and Mothra a “writerly text.” Could you explain this term for readers who might not be familiar with it and talk about why you feel it applies to the novella under discussion?
Angles: I was referring there to a phrase used by the critic Roland Barthes. I’m paraphrasing here, but he said certain books are “readerly texts” in that the authors give the reader everything they might want for an almost seamless reading experience: smooth transitions, clear exposition, logical lines of connection between the various parts of the story, etc. However, other texts use fragmentary storylines, unusual forms of narration, incomplete expositions, and sudden—perhaps even surprising—jumps in chronology and content. Barthes called these “writerly texts” because the reader needs to insert themselves into the world of the story—almost as if they are writers themselves—to form the lines of logical connection that bring the world into focus.
I mentioned this in the interview because, in a way, this novella was more “writerly” than I’d expected. I assumed it would be a very visually oriented, straightforward, story-centric text, sort of like the Kayama novellas Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again. However, I found that one author would present an idea, only to have the others fail to pick it up and carry it through. The story jumps around in time and geography, and a fair amount of what the characters and the authors themselves are doing and thinking isn’t explicitly spelled out. In my opinion, all of this makes The Luminous Fairies and Mothra more interesting. It gives me and other fans lots to talk about!
Galvan: One of the joys of this book is the amount of research in your afterword, which allows us to look back on the story we’ve just read and better understand the authors, their intentions, and specific characters and plot threads in their novella.
Angles: Oh, thank you for saying that, Patrick. You’ve made my day.
Galvan: Of course. Was that also your experience reading and researching for this translation?
Angles: As I was doing my translation, I kept a notebook with a series of questions that kept bothering me. Some of the questions had to do with fundamentals. “Why a gigantic moth for a kaiju, when a moth isn’t especially scary?” Some were much more specific, like “What does the kind of language that the writers use to talk about the Infant Islanders imply about their attitudes regarding Japan’s attitude toward less technologically advanced nations?”
Later, as I read through all the critical material I could find in Japanese and English, I realized relatively few of my questions had been addressed by other people. You know, so much has been written about Godzilla that I assumed nearly all the basic work on Mothra had been done. But that wasn’t the case at all! There was so much more to be said that I kept going down one rabbit hole after another, having tons of fun in the process. I got so excited by all this information that my afterword grew a bit out of control—nearly twice the length of the novella itself! Since publishing the book, I’ve continued to have revelations, so maybe I’ll have to publish another article or talk about those somewhere.
Galvan: I want to talk a bit about language and translation. In your afterword for The Luminous Fairies and Mothra, you describe how the original Japanese text contained words that aren’t considered PC by today’s standards. At one point, you discuss some research indicating the novella’s original printing contained a term that translates to “dirt people”—and that this term was replaced in a later Japanese edition. When translating, how do you make judgments with verbiage that might be considered insensitive to modern readers?
Angles: That’s a really good question—one that has a lot to do with the ethics of translation. My opinion is that a translator should try to think about what the readers in the source language would take away from the text, then try to reproduce that same experience for readers in the target language. If a story is funny, the translation should be funny. If the writing style is quirky and odd, then the style of the translation should be quirky and odd, too. See what I mean?
Galvan: Hundred percent.
Angles: One corollary of that way of thinking, however, is that a translator should not strive to get rid of problematic parts. If there’s a problem or something not very good in the writing, it’s okay—perhaps even desirable—for the translator to reproduce that. If the translator’s goal is to accurately show what’s there, we should refrain from smoothing over or softening parts we don’t personally like.
There is a natural, sometimes even subconscious tendency among translators to try to improve parts of a text that don’t appeal to us because, of course, a translation is a commercial product. We want readers to appreciate and buy the book, not reject it because it uses a bad word, employs quirky prose, or whatever. However, I feel translators should put the brakes on whenever they want to improve or augment the text. If a translator changes the text, then the translator is giving a false impression of what was there originally.
As you pointed out, in the case of The Luminous Fairies and Mothra, there was an instance in the original printing where one author used an unflattering word in reference to the indigenous population of Infant Island. This word, which was still in use at the time, was changed to a more neutral, non-offensive term in the 1994 reprint I mentioned earlier. I almost didn’t catch that until I read an article by a Japanese scholar that briefly mentions the one-word change. I decided to go with the less offensive language in the ‘94 edition and use the afterword to raise this question more explicitly.
I’d already started writing the afterword by the time I realized there’d been a change in the ‘94 edition. One of the subjects I raised is how Japanese characters in the book relate to and think of the oppressed population of Infant Island. This gave me the opportunity to talk about the nuances of particular words used for the islanders. That particular issue has a very important bearing on the theme and messages of the book.
Galvan: Oh, yeah. Definitely.
Angles: As I argue, apart from that one unflattering word, Nakamura, Fukunaga, and Hotta portray the Infant Islanders in an extremely positive light. They wanted the Japanese readership to recognize that even though the islanders were less technologically developed, they were a noble, kind, open-hearted people who had suffered at the hands of the world superpowers. Depicting them in a sympathetic light was important to the authors—Hotta, in particular—who believed that Japan ought to reach out and form positive, constructive alliances and trade agreements with newly decolonizing nations. Not uncritically side with the Cold War superpowers.
As an aside, I think it’s unfortunate that, in the 1961 film adaptation Mothra, the depiction of the Infant Islanders is so cringy, at least from a twenty-first-century perspective. The islanders, played by Japanese actors wearing brown make-up to make them appear dark-skinned, come across as simple, cartoonish, and even silly. I feel this somewhat undermines the authors’ serious intentions.
Galvan: This next question might seem a tad abstract, so please bear with me as I set this up. In our previous interview about Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again, you talked at length about translating Japanese into English. You mentioned that translation is much more complicated than simply matching words—and that sometimes, as the translator, you have to exercise a degree of creativity. For instance, you talked about how Godzilla’s heroine spoke to male characters via 1950s speech that was loaded with honorifics. But since “some modern readers would find [this] almost ridiculously deferential and quaint,” you “had to think about how to capture her linguistic personality on the page” and finally “tried to make her speech a little more formal and refined than, say, some of the male characters.”
All of this to say: from my (inexpert) perspective, translation is, in its own right, an art form. Would you agree, and if not, how would you classify it?
Angles: You are right, Patrick, that there is an art to translation. We want to be as faithful to the original text as possible, but then again, if that begins to make the translation feel different—ridiculous, stilted, or odd—then we’re no longer reproducing the effect the text had in its original language. That’s why I try, as best I can, to keep in mind how the text might sound and feel to a native speaker. Getting to that requires finding a balance between the languages’ conflicting demands of grammar, structure, and pragmatics.
Honestly, it isn’t easy. There’s an art in trying to find that happy place where I’m producing something that, on one hand, works in English while capturing specific nuances that I see as essential to the text itself. There are times when I work and rework a particular passage over and over again, sometimes more than a dozen times, trying to find the right balance and tone. It’s like playing with the knobs on a stereo, trying to find just the right tuner settings to reproduce the beautiful, authentic, rich sound of the musicians in the studio.
Galvan: A few more questions about The Luminous Fairies and Mothra. You begin your afterword with a quote from Hugh Lofting, author of the Doctor Dolittle series. As it turned out, Lofting might’ve had some influence on the Mothra story. Could you please talk about this and how you stumbled upon this possible linkage between a western literary series and a Japanese monster novella?
Angles: Of course! You know, when I was a kid, I think I only read one or two of the Doctor Dolittle books, so I didn’t realize that, late in the series, there are three that mention a gigantic butterfly. Around the time I committed to translating The Luminous Fairies and Mothra, I was talking to my partner when he said, “Since you’re doing Mothra, I want to go back and watch the Doctor Dolittle movie.” He was referring to the 1967 film starring Rex Harrison and directed by Richard Fleischer. I didn’t get the connection until we streamed the film together. I was astounded to realize that the final scene looks like it’s lifted right out of the last scenes of the 1961 Mothra. As I plunged into Lofting’s series, I realized that the final scene of the 1967 Doctor Dolittle had no clear, corresponding scene in the books. I realized that the screenwriters must’ve seen Mothra and borrowed from it. The similarities are so strong that they cannot be ignored.
But anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. Once I saw the 1967 Doctor Dolittle, I rushed to the internet and immediately downloaded all the original books. That’s when I learned there were three books featuring a butterfly “as big as a house.” In Doctor Dolittle in the Moon, originally published in 1928, this butterfly plays an especially big role, carrying the doctor to the moon for an adventure of exploration.
Doctor Dolittle in the Moon has so many thematic similarities to what I found in The Luminous Fairies and Mothra that my jaw dropped. There’s a linguist interested in communicating with everyone he encounters in his travels. There are vampire plants. There are people of unusual sizes. There are creatures that communicate through something more akin to music than language. There are even passages that hint at the author’s hopes for the future of geopolitics. All this textual evidence made me think Nakamura, Fukunaga, and Hotta were borrowing motifs and ideas from Lofting, then rearranging them in their own special way as scaffolding for their own story.
Don’t misunderstand me; I’m not accusing them of plagiarism. The Luminous Fairies and Mothra is a totally different kind of book from Doctor Dolittle in the Moon. However, I do think that as the writers sat down and planned out their novella, they took lots of inspiration from Doctor Dolittle.
Galvan: How might they have encountered Lofting’s books?
Angles: Because all three authors were fluent in French and could read English at a high level, it’s possible they encountered Lofting in the original English or in a French translation. However, when I looked into the history of Japanese Doctor Dolittle translations, I learned they were being translated through the 1950s by a super-prominent author named Masuji Ibuse, and he was releasing his translations through one of Japan’s foremost publishers. The books became popular among children. One of my Japanese author friends, who remembered these books from her childhood, described them as being as important to young Japanese readers of the time as the Harry Potter books were to American kids when they were first published.
By this point, I’d read just about every major piece of criticism on Mothra that I could find, but I hadn’t encountered any fans or scholars who’d explored the Dolittle connection beyond a casual mention. For that reason, I got really excited, realizing I’d stumbled upon something new, and so I wrote about it at great length in my afterword.
Galvan: What was your favorite part of working on The Luminous Fairies and Mothra? What was the most difficult part?
Angles: Discovering the Dolittle-Mothra connection was one of the most fun moments, but overall, this entire project was a delight from beginning to end. It’s rare to work on something for well over a year and never tire of it for even a moment!
The most difficult part was definitely all of the anxiety I felt when the rights came through for two of the authors and the third one dragged their feet. I’ve had many projects in the past that I started but couldn’t complete because of copyright or other issues, and I began to worry that copyrights might be the death of this one, too. Fortunately, everything worked out beautifully, and now we’ve got this gorgeous edition of the book, with its fantastically beautiful cover.
Galvan: In wrapping up this interview, let me say congratulations and thank you for your work translating foreign texts and educating us about the people behind them.
Angles: Oh, my gosh. It’s my pleasure! This was super fun for me, and so I’m glad it was meaningful to you, too.
Galvan: As mentioned at the top, we ended our previous interview with mention that The Luminous Fairies and Mothra might be among your forthcoming translation projects. Having said that, it’d be remiss not to ask now: Is there another potential kaiju translation from you that we might be able to look forward to?
Angles: Well, I don’t have anything nailed down concretely, but there are two projects I fantasize about. One would be an anthology of Japanese kaiju stories, which I’m sure would sell like hotcakes. I’d love to bring together translations of the stories that were the bases for Rodan and other Toho films, then combine these with a selection from the hundreds of other kaiju stories by various authors—some super famous, some practically unknown.
I should point out that there are lots and lots of kaiju stories out there in Japanese. The overwhelming majority were never linked to any movie projects, so those texts are completely unknown to American audiences. Also, there was an entirely new wave of kaiju stories written after the 2011 disasters in northeastern Japan. Stories about unstoppable kaiju seemed like a particularly good way to reflect upon the renewed terror of radiation that swept the country following the Fukushima nuclear meltdown.
That brings me to the other project I fantasize about: a spectacularly wonderful full-length novel written by the bestselling author Miyuki Miyabe. She serialized Kōjin (The Rampaging God) in a newspaper from 2013 to 2014 (not long after the 2011 disasters), then put out the novel in book form shortly afterward. It’s about the sudden appearance of a kaiju, but Miyabe set this in northeastern Japan a couple of hundred years ago so that she could explore the complicated, disadvantaged history of the region. (The relative poverty of the northeast was one of the reasons that Fukushima was selected as a site for the nuclear reactor in the twentieth century.)
Like much of the literature I admire, The Rampaging God isn’t only an interesting story; it also has a lot to say about history and society. Miyabe is a genius, one of the most talented Japanese authors today. Some of her books have been translated into English before, even becoming bestsellers here. I am 100% certain that if I could find the right publisher interested in working on it with me, readers would absolutely love it!
