Review | Godzilla is the king of monsters. Here’s how he earned his crown.

That was the case for me. After my dad showed me “Godzilla” (the 1956 version with Raymond Burr) one day at our home in Carter-era Cold War America, I swore my everlasting allegiance to the King of the Monsters. Sure, he was a nightmarish kaiju (the Japanese term for “strange beast”) from an old black-and-white movie, but there was just something about him that children grew to love, leading kids like me into a lifelong fascination with Japanese culture.

Yet for all the movie tickets and branded merchandise the King of Monsters has sold, there has always been a missing piece of the puzzle for overseas fans: Godzilla’s literary legacy. Movie novelizations of Godzilla films, published in Japan, have never been commercially available in English, until now. “Godzilla” and its sequel “Godzilla Raids Again,” loose adaptations of the first two films by their original screenwriter, are both finally available in a single volume translated by Jeffery Angles, published by University of Minnesota Press.

Like Godzilla himself, these novella-length stories are products of another time and place, in this case the year 1955, when monsters and nuclear paranoia were rife. Read in the 21st century, they offer a fascinating glimpse into Godzilla’s origins and reveal how much the franchise and the audience have changed over the years.

Both “Godzilla” and “Godzilla Raids Again” were written by Shigeru Kayama (1904-1975), a poet who became a popular author of pulpy stories that combined mystery, thrills and science fiction. When Toho Studios film producer Tomoyuki Tanaka needed help developing ideas for a new giant monster movie (inspired by the recent success of the 1953 American film “The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms”), he contacted Kayama to write the first story.

Kayama used this opportunity to tell a cautionary tale that explicitly addressed the dangers of nuclear weapons. In all versions of Godzilla — the initial treatment, film and book — the story begins with a fishing boat that is attacked by an unseen force in the form of a blinding flash of light. This was a direct allusion to the fate of a real-life Japanese ship known as the Lucky Dragon No. 5 (Daigo Fukuryu Maru), which was contaminated by nuclear fallout from the 1954 atomic test at Bikini Atoll.

By grounding his story in real-world trauma and the shadows of war, Kayama ensured that Godzilla’s debut would be more than just a routine “monster on the loose” outing. Instead, it would mark the first time that atomic anxieties, which had been a taboo subject up until the end of the U.S. occupation of Japan in 1952, would be explored in Japanese pop culture.

Kayama’s scenario, known as “G-Project,” was further developed into the final shooting screenplay for “Godzilla” by director Ishiro Honda and writer Takeo Murata. Some changes were made, but Kayama’s original story beats and much of his atomic-powered subtext made it to the final film intact. Godzilla was a financial success, and much of the credit has since gone to director Honda, producer Tanaka and the impressive special effects overseen by Eiji Tsuburaya. Kayama’s name has sadly been lost in the shuffle, despite his major contributions to the kaiju film genre.

When the first wave of Godzilla mania hit, Toho quickly asked Kayama to craft a follow up. While the resulting1955 film, “Godzilla Raids Again,” was a rush job that pales in comparison to the original, Kayama did manage to give it one major innovation that would take Godzilla a step further away from his allegorical leanings: a second monster to battle with, which set the stage for fisticuffs with the likes of King Kong, the Smog Monster and Mecha Godzilla.

Also in 1955, Kayama published his novelizations of both “Godzilla” and “Godzilla Raids Again.” Instead of just retelling the stories direct from the screen, he used this chance to explore themes and ideas from his original scenarios before they were crafted into hit films by other hands.

Today’s readers should not go into the book versions of “Godzilla” and “Godzilla Raids Again” expecting lost Japanese literary masterpieces on par with those by Yukio Mishima or Kobo Abe. It helps to remember they were written by a pulp author and firmly aimed at young readers. But, like Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” they also connect the past to the present and ask us to consider how much the world changed when the atom was split.

The novelization of “Godzilla” opens with a stern note from the author:

As you readers already know, the main character of this tale, Godzilla, is an enormous, imaginary kaiju — a creature that doesn’t actually exist anywhere here on the planet. However, atomic and hydrogen bombs, which have taken on the form of Godzilla in this story, do exist. … People all over the world are pouring their energy into a new movement opposing the use of atomic and hydrogen bombs. As one small member of that movement, I have tried to do my part by writing a novel — the tale you now hold in your hands.

Devoid of big screen spectacle, the novel is a much starker experience than the film. Kayama’s book even omits the movie’s central love triangle between gloomy scientist Dr. Serizawa, handsome sailor Ogata and a young woman named Emiko. Instead, the focus moves to Shinkichi, a minor character in the film whose family is killed by Godzilla early on. Now seeking revenge on the creature as it continues to rampage across Japan, Shinkichi finds himself at the side of Dr. Yamane, a paleontologist who wants to study Godzilla to discover the secret of the creature’s longevity, as reparations for all the damage Japan caused in World War II. Science-driven ethical debate replaces some of the human interest and tragedy that helped make the film such a classic.

If Kayama was determined to further explore the cautionary aspects of Godzilla, he seemed less interested in the creature itself. Godzilla is rarely described in the text — maybe because readers already knew what he looked like from the film — although his body now emits an eerie radioactive glow not seen on screen. Godzilla is also hungrier than he was in the movies, and it’s implied that his attacks are motivated by the need to eat livestock and (gulp) human beings. Even if Godzilla winds up as something of a supporting player in his own story, his very existence keeps the plot driving forward, much like Bram Stoker’s original Dracula, another bloodthirsty monster audiences have come to embrace.

Angles’s excellent postscript provides more background on the postwar climate that gave birth to Godzilla, as well as a bio of Kayama in which we find out that the writer quickly became ambivalent about the monster he helped to create. He was surprised to see audiences, including children, feeling sympathetic toward a monster meant to symbolize the horrors of the nuclear age. To invoke Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove,” Godzilla might have been teaching us to stop worrying and love the bomb, which was not quite the original author’s intention.

Decades later, Godzilla is now a multinational entertainment franchise, set to return soon in a handful of movies and TV shows in both the United States and Japan, including his latest rematch with King Kong in 2024 and a series on Apple TV Plus. Meanwhile, the world that spawned him remains a dangerous place, full of nuclear proliferation and provocation.

The return of Kayama’s original giant monster, and its message, could not be better timed.

Patrick Macias is the co-author of “The Essential Anime Guide.” He also writes about Japanese pop culture at www.tokyoscope.blog

Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again

By Shigeru Kayama, trans. by Jeffrey Angles

University of Minnesota Press. 233 pp. $19.95