I love monsters.
I have loved monsters, particularly kaiju, for as long as I can remember. Sitting on the shag carpet in the basement, an oak floor-model TV taking up half the room mere inches from my Tupperware bowl, overflowing with buttered popcorn, of course. Pop’s in his easy chair, asking me if I’m ready once the credits end and Godzilla is poised to change the way I see the world forever.
Monsters have always held an interesting place in Japanese fiction. Sometimes terrifying, grotesque, absurd; sometimes sympathetic. But what I find most interesting, as someone who spends her days writing and researching (and a little translation now and then), isn’t just the creatures themselves (though Godzilla is pretty amazing); it’s what they can tell us about the people who imagined them into being. Why did they give those specific fears a physical form? And what changes when the monster isn’t just something to fear, but something that tells us about ourselves?
Monsters can represent forces beyond human understanding, revealing something instantly recognizable and familiar about the characters who have to deal with them. Environmental destruction, technological anxiety, global warfare, political instability, and so on, can be difficult to grasp when we talk about them as abstractions. While a monster is fictional, the fears and anxieties that seeded its creation may not be. With just a few words and a little imagination, they become creatures with bodies, movements, and intentions; something we can see and confront within the safety of a fictional environment.
Godzilla is probably the clearest example of this. When the original film came out in 1954, Japan was still trying to figure out how to live in the permanent wake of the decimation and trauma of WWII, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Earlier that year, Japanese fishing vessel Lucky Dragon No. 5 had been contaminated by radioactive fallout from American nuclear testing. Being afraid of radiation isn’t something audiences needed explained to them; they were living with it in the water, in the soil, in their hearts. Godzilla gave those fears a physical presence. He was something enormous and destructive that could easily be seen moving through the neighborhood.
But the Godzilla of Godzilla Minus One (2023) isn’t the same monster we first saw in 1954.
Over the decades, we’ve watched him destroy cities, defend humanity, and become something more than the monster he was born to be, as inseparable from Japan as the islands themselves.
Some films treat him almost like a natural disaster, while others depict him as something akin to a superhero. And I find that absolutely fascinating.
Godzilla is instantly identifiable no matter how much his appearance or behavior changes. But what he represents very much depends on the story being told. And Godzilla always survives because there’s always something new for us to see in him.
There are countless other examples in Japanese folklore, especially through yōkai, the wild and wonderfully weird beings and supernatural phenomena. And unlike kaiju, which tend to prefer dramatic entrances, yōkai often turn up in perfectly, frighteningly ordinary places. A river, a house, a stretch of road. Did I mention a river? They can appear somewhere you’ve walked a hundred times without giving them much consideration. And while some yōkai are more mischievous than anything else, others simply strange, some are terrifyingly dangerous. Remember that river I mentioned? The kappa are water-dwelling yōkai said to drag people underwater and devour their organs. Suddenly, that perfectly ordinary river looks a little different.
One of the really cool things about yōkai is how difficult it can be to categorize them. Calling them monsters can feel overpowering, because they aren’t necessarily evil, or even pose a threat. They might cause trouble, help somebody in need, or behave in a manner that can seem very alien to the humans encountering them. And that’s fine. Every strange experience or creature doesn’t need an explanation. There’s something very appealing about stories that allow things to remain a little mysterious.
Folklorist Michael Dylan Foster explores this in The Book of Yōkai. He traces how these creatures have moved through Japanese folklore and into popular culture, acquiring new meanings along the way. Trying to fit them all into one tidy “monster” category seems unnecessarily reductive.
Shigeru Mizuki understood this aspect of yōkai particularly well. He brought traditional yōkai into modern popular culture, giving them personalities, relationships, and problems of their own in his manga. His yōkai are often funny, sometimes unpleasant. Occasionally, they turn out to be rather sympathetic. In Mizuki’s work, these creatures have lives beyond whatever trouble they happen to cause humans. We spend time with them and can glimpse things from their perspective. And when you consider how easily people label anything unfamiliar or different as monstrous, Mizuki’s take on yōkai becomes especially thought-provoking.
Junji Ito takes our discomfort somewhere much darker. And he doesn’t even need a monster, in the usual sense, to do it.
In Uzumaki, an entire town becomes obsessed with spirals. It’s such a simple, ordinary shape that the premise almost sounds ridiculous when you try to articulate it. So, let’s step into the ridiculous.
Spirals appear everywhere, and there’s something about them that begins to affect everyone who comes into contact with them. Their bodies change. Their behavior becomes increasingly disturbing. Eventually the town becomes someplace you can’t reasonably live. There’s more to it, but I think that gives you the gist.
I think what makes Uzumaki so effective is that there’s no hard-science, physical, satisfying explanation for what’s happening. The characters can recognize that something is wrong, but that recognition doesn’t give them much control over it. And the reader isn’t in a better position.
As readers, we keep looking for some underlying logic, something that might explain the horror or give us a way out, but we’re just as helpless as the people experiencing it. There’s something deeply unpleasant about watching familiar things become threatening without having the slightest understanding of why.
Naoya Matsumoto’s Kaiju No. 8 looks at monsters from an almost opposite direction. Giant creatures become such a regular occurrence that the surrounding society has developed entire organizations to deal with them. There are defense forces and specialized equipment and even workers whose job is to clean up after a monster has been killed. I absolutely love that detail and kinda want that job. In Matsumoto’s hands, the extraordinary has become so ordinary that someone has to show up and deal with the mess.
Then the protagonist becomes a kaiju himself.
And that transformation raises so many questions the people around him aren’t prepared to even try and answer. He still thinks and feels like a human being. But his new body has placed him among the very creatures society has dedicated itself to destroying. The separation between human and monster suddenly becomes much less straightforward and clear-cut. Now we’re grappling with how much of our identity depends on our appearance, or on whether other people are willing to recognize us as human.
Of course, there’s a danger in reading too much into any of this.
I don’t believe every Japanese monster needs to represent a historical trauma or some hidden political anxiety. Sometimes a monster is just a monster is just a monster. Sometimes a monster is entertaining just because they’re enormous, horrifying, wonderfully ridiculous, and unlike anything we have seen (or hopefully will ever see). I’ve loved monsters and kaiju for most of my life, and I certainly wasn’t thinking about nuclear anxiety or zombies as the post-human experience every time I watched Godzilla flatten a city, or Rick narrowly escape some shambling, decaying bad boy on The Walking Dead.
Trying to explain every creature as a symbol can take a lot of the pleasure out of these stories if it gets out of hand. We should never lose sight of the fact that we can be aware of potential deeper meanings, but that there’s always room to enjoy the spectacle, the strange designs, and the sheer brilliant imagination involved in creating something that shouldn’t exist.
Still, I can’t let go of the ways monsters change as we find new uses for them.
Godzilla’s been around for more than seventy years, and he’s still being reinvented. And enthusiastically. Just look at the excitement surrounding next month’s release of Godzilla Minus Zero
And he’s not alone in that. Creatures and creations that used to belong exclusively to local folklore are finding new lives in manga, animation, films, games, and more. And sometimes the original meanings survive. And sometimes they change so much that the creature becomes almost unrecognizable to its original self.
That also helps explain why Japanese monster fiction has found audiences beyond the archipelago.
You don’t necessarily need to understand the historical background of a particular yōkai to appreciate a story about fear or loneliness. Being treated as an outsider isn’t exclusive to any one culture, even if the creature expressing it has a very particular or specific cultural origin.
But I do think that background is worth keeping in focus.
Knowing what was happening in Japan when the first Godzilla film was made changes how we understand it. And it should.
Learning about the folklore behind Mizuki’s characters can reveal details, almost like ‘easter eggs’ we might otherwise miss.
And as someone who spends her days and nights with her nose in a book, I personally find that the monster’s origin is just as rewarding as the stories themselves. The more I learn about where these creatures came from, the more interesting they become to me.
And I suppose that’s what keeps drawing me to Japanese monsters.
They offer a way to imagine things that are difficult to explain, whether that’s the world around us or something much closer to home. And, yes, sometimes we should fear them, but a lot of the time, they’re inviting us to question why we find them monstrous.
Happy Halloween, everyone! I’m off to watch Godzilla.