Godzilla/Gojiro: Evolution of the Nuclear Metaphor Nancy Anisfield Answering his own question, “Why do the Japanese sympathize with [Godzilla] while the Americans see him as little more than a comic icon?” (Noriega 64), Chon Noriega first points out the difference between American and Japanese concepts of the Other: Western thought keeps the Other externalized and separate as a way of defining the Self by contrast. Japanese thought seeks to maintain both Self and Other within the culture by immersing the Self in the Other (Noriega 68). In the Godzilla movies, the positioning of the monster “Other” differentiates the Japanese films from their American releases. Godzilla films equate the monster with the atomic bomb, and Noriega shows how the Japanese versions, by symbolically repeating the trauma of Hiroshima, establish the monster as an “archetype of Japanese horror that explicates the present.” For Americans, however, the Other is overcome, and Godzilla’s death “represses American guilt and anxieties about nuclear weapons” (Noriega 68). The Japanese embrace the bomb/monster into their cultural conscience, whereas Americans push it away. What, then, would be the significance of a new Godzilla, an American creation who is totally immersed in American culture— contributes to it, reflects it, and ultimately even ingests it? Mark Jacobson's Gojiro (1991), a satiric novel derivative of John Gardner's Grendel, revises the Godzilla (Gojira) story, illuminating it in the narrow glow of the self-absorbed final quarter of the twentieth century. Gojiro is still a product of nuclear testing gone awry, but he is also a suicidal and reluctant movie idol. He journeys to Los Angeles, depicted in images suggesting a post-nuclear world. Searching for his identity and soul, Gojiro’s quest leads him to Hollywood moguls, atomic scientists, Southwest Native Americans, genetically damaged children, whizz-bang technologies, and a forlorn, reconstituted dodo bird. Despite its imaginative texture, much of the novel and its characterization of the monster is not completely new. It is the logical next step in the Godzilla series—the evolution of a classic movie monster. Moreover, this shift in 53 Copyright (c) 2004 ProQuest Information and Learning Company Copyright (c) Popular Press