Godzilla’s Radioactive Origins

This year, everyone’s favorite nuclear bomb-born kaiju Godzilla turns seventy. In the lead up to this major anniversary, Toho studios released Godzilla Minus One, its thirtieth film in the franchise, across more than five hundred theaters in Japan in November of last year (November 3, the date of the first film’s release in 1954). In the United States, promotion has begun for the release of Legendary Pictures’ Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, which capitalizes on the box office success of the previous MonsterVerse iteration—Godzilla vs. Kong—from a couple of years ago. Timed with all this big screen “Goji” celebration, and taking us back to the movie monster’s ideological and historical origins, is the publication of the first English-language translation of the original Godzilla novellas by Shigeru Kayama, translated by Jeffrey Angles—a major boon for U.S. kaiju fans who have long wondered about, or perhaps didn’t even know about the existence of, these long unavailable works.