The Luminous Fairies and Mothra, by Shin’ichiro Nakamura, Takehito Fukanaga and Yoshie Hotta, translated by Jeffrey Angles
Mothra? Great literature? Maybe not great, and yet, the source material for the winged monster was a 1961 novella by three of postwar Japan’s brightest literary lights, Shin’ichiro Nakamura, Takehito Fukanaga and Yoshie Hotta.
In his new translation, Jeffrey Angles (who previously translated Godzilla) adds an explanation longer than the novella itself. By commissioning those three authors, Toho Studio hoped to endow its newest monster with gravitas. The studio “recognized that in addition to catchy visuals, innovative and thought-provoking plots were essential for keeping audiences satisfied,” Angles writes. The resulting novella was chockful of barely disguised references to heartless capitalism, bullying superpowers and nuclear weapons. As Angles explains, the notion of a novella composed by a relay of authors was not unknown in Japanese genre fiction. One discovery: the trio of writers drew deeply from Hugh Lofting’s Dr. Doolittle novels, down to the existence of giant, sentient moths. Turns out the Anglo-American children’s author developed a great following in postwar Japan, especially for his sensitivity to all living things. The Mothra film, in turn, inspired scenes in Hollywood’s 1967 Dr. Doolittle in a “chain of interlocking influences” stretching across oceans.
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