Royall Tyler

Takehiko Fukunaga

Flowers of Grass is Takehiko Fukunaga’s fully realized portrait of a young man of fastidious intelligence and great sorrow, and shows us how it is possible, seeing reality from the side of death and despair, to still choose life. Outside Tokyo, a tuberculosis sanatorium in the village of K has a six-bed ward that the narrator, an aspiring poet, shares with a student of linguistics and budding writer named Shiomi. After the stubborn Shiomi insists on undergoing a dangerous surgical procedure and dies in the process, two notebooks turn up in his bed-sheets. Flowers of Grass unfolds as the narrator reads them, asking himself if Shiomi’s death was a sort of suicide, and learning the details of his late friend’s two great loves: for a brother and sister, both of whom reject him. Fukunaga himself spent seven years recuperating from tuberculosis following World War II, and drew on his own experiences to create a fully realized portrait of a young man of fastidious intelligence and great sorrow, and how it is possible, seeing reality from the side of death and despair, to still choose life.

Flowers of Grass

Yoshie Hotta

Jeffrey Angles (Translator)

Shin'ichiro Nakamura

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.

Takehiko Fukunaga

About

Books

Join the club