THE LUMINOUS FAIRIES and MOTHRA, best Valentines Day read I can imagine

THE LUMINOUS FAIRIES and MOTHRA
SHIN'ICHIRŌ NAKAMURA,TAKEHIKO FUKUNAGA,YOSHIE HOTTA (tr. Jeffrey Angles)
University of Minnesota Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$19.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The original story that hatched Mothra, one of the most beloved monsters in the “kaijuverse”—available in English for the first time

Mystical and benevolent, the colossal lepidopteran Mothra has been one of the most beloved kaiju since 1961, when The Luminous Fairies and Mothra was originally published in Japanese. Commissioned by Tōhō Studios from three of Japan’s most prominent postwar literary writers (Shin’ichirō Nakamura, Takehiko Fukunaga, and Yoshie Hotta), the novella formed the basis for the now-classic monster film Mothra, with a protagonist second only to Godzilla in number of film appearances by a kaiju. Finally available in its first official English translation, The Luminous Fairies and Mothra will captivate ardent, longtime fans of the films as well as newcomers.

Written just months after the largest political demonstrations Japan had ever seen, The Luminous Fairies and Mothra reflects the rebellious spirit of the time. In this original story, explorers visit a South Pacific island and capture a group of fairies, inciting the fury of the goddess Mothra, who sets out for Japan on a mission of rescue and revenge. Expressing a powerful social stance about Japan’s need to chart its own foreign policy during the Cold War, the novella’s political message was ultimately toned down in the Tōhō Studios film. Through this translation, Anglophone audiences will discover Mothra as a figure of protest fiction intricately reflecting the complex geopolitical situation in early 1960s Japan.

The Luminous Fairies and Mothra is translated into lively prose by Jeffrey Angles, who also wrote an extensive afterword about the novella’s cultural context, the unusual story of its composition, and the development of the 1961 film. Following Angles’s best-selling translation of the original Godzilla novellas, this new work will once again delight kaiju fans everywhere.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: You remember Mothra. Saturday afternoon after the teens woke up, the monster movies went on as we all stared hungrily at the weirdness onscreen (I was always most interested in the Japanese cars, natch). It was a window into a world whose anxieties never messed with my head (unlike In Cold Blood, Bonnie and Clyde, and their realistic like), but were riveting to my story-starved brain.

This translation is the first time I've ever encountered the stories that brought Mothra to our screens. I don't know that I was ever aware these stories existed as source materials for the film franchise before now. The three authors of this...novella? story cycle?...focus on the stranger who arrives on Mothra's island and what he learns of the culture, the man he tells his story to after he returns to Japan, and finally the geopolitical implications of the island between Japan and a stand-in for the USA. Like Godzilla the story is thinly disguised anti-US messaging intended to inform the ongoing debates in Japan about how much good it will really do to subjugate their political will to the worldwide hegemon. I chose that word for the US position because it sounds as ancient as Mothra's existence, yet like Mothra, is of very recent coinage and was coined in service of another imperial power.

A kid's-eye view was, "cool! Monsters blowin' shit up!" In the stories a much more thoughtful and nuanced argument is presented...the "fairies" are colonized, infantilized people of little individual agency, whose one hope of survival is collective action and a version of the violence inflicted on them. It is in reading Author/Translator Angles' essay around the text that I saw the kaiju phenomenon as the protest literature it is clearly and possibly for the first time...at least with any clarity it was the first time. It's very saddening to me that Mothra's source document was so invisible to my culturally developing self. Had I been in possession of the texts I might've cut ages out of my emotional maturation.

Seeing clearly what makes other cultures upset enough to create protest art around is extremely valuable. Even if you never walked into the TV room when one of these films was on I hope you'll look into the fascinating subject of where Mothra fits into Japan's literary culture just after their catastrophic defeat in WWII and the subsequent social and economic transformations enforced by the US victors. It was ongoing as the idea for this new mythology was being created. It's also the reason, we learn in the translator's essay, there is almost no evocative description of the world. It was to be left to the filmmaker to do the worldbuilding with as little hampering as possible.

What a delight to encounter this story familiar from childhood as an old man, and not only enjoy it again but enjoy it more now than I did then. Thank you, Jeffrey Angles. Thank you, University of Minnesota Press, for this and for everything else Minneapolis is giving the entire country in this winter of our discontent.