Recommendation: “The Fishmen of Innsmouth" (1959) by Shōgo Matsumiya

Last summer while prepping for my talk on "Japanese Cosmic Horror" for G-FEST XXX, I re-visited Yonezawa Yoshihiro's essay "Lovecraftian Landscapes: Four Decades of H.P. Lovecraft and Manga", translated by Ryan Morris, and appearing in volume one of Asamatsu Ken's Lairs of the Hidden Gods (Kurodahan Press, 2005). Here I came across a reference to Shōgo Matsumiya's “The Fishmen of Innsmouth” (1959); the earliest Japanese adaptation of a Lovecraft story. This is a sexploitation retelling of Lovecraft's seminal "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (1936) localized for the Japanese magazine Moving Faces, vol. 1, no. 3 (March, 1959), which Yonezawa describes as a "tabloid strictly for men", but which we in the States would recognize as a Men's Adventure Magazine.

Eager to obtain a copy of Matsumiya's retelling I contacted pulp scholar Bobby Derie, proprietor of the excellent blog Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein, who, as the author of the landmark study Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (Hippocampus Press, 2014), I figured just might have one. As it turned out Bobby didn't have a copy, but immediately went out and obtained one that same day. He then scanned and sent me a copy, and also sent one to translator Dierk Guenther who began working on translating the story into English. As of today Shōgo Matsumiya's “The Fishmen of Innsmouth” (1959) has been fully translated and is available for free on Derie's blog, just follow the link...