Chapter 2 Botanical Allegory Metamorphosis and Colonial Memory in Abe Kōbō’s “Dendrocacalia”

Endemic Species, Endemic Histories

“Dendrocacalia” is the tale of an endemic species uprooted from the gaichi (a term meaning “exterior land” that was used to refer to colonized space) and pursued in the naichi (a term meaning “interior land” that was used to signify the Japanese mainland). The gaichi in question in the story is the Ogasawara archipelago, which is often referred to as the Bonin Islands in English. The full scientific name of the plant at the center of the story is Dendrocacalia crepidifolia (Nakai) Nakai (see figure 2.1). The name Nakai refers to the influential botanist Nakai Takenoshin, whom I discuss in more detail below. The use of a proper name at the end of a Latin species name indicates that the named individual (in this case, Nakai) was the first to publish a description of said species. Abe only uses the plant’s Latin name in “Dendrocacalia” (and not the Japanese name, which is wadannoki). Abe held a degree in medicine from Tokyo Imperial University, and while he never practiced medicine, a familiarity with scientific terminology can be found throughout his oeuvre. “Dendrocacalia” is unique, however, for its use of botanical terminology.

Despite its speculative subject matter, “Dendrocacalia” (much like Osaki’s Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense) is quite clear at the level of the sentence. Mutsuko Motoyama has argued that the style of “Dendrocacalia” is drastically more straightforward than any of Abe’s previous work, claiming: “Words are no longer symbolic and do not suggest ideas other than their usual meanings.”8 This clarity of language speaks to both Abe’s interest at the time in spreading literature to the masses (as evidenced by his involvement with Night Group and his work organizing among factory workers) and the influence of scientific literature on the narrative.9 The short story’s style performs the perceived objectivity of language inherent in scientific naming, while simultaneously narrating the violent consequences of such naming. At the same time, the use of the Latin name dendrocacalia speaks to the milieu in which the plant was taken up as a scientific object of study in Japan. In 1936, the Botanical Society of Japan published a series of articles that categorized the flora of the Bonin Islands. The articles were published entirely in Latin, save for a few passages in English. The dendrocacalia is featured in the fifth installment of this series.10 If we take seriously Hiromi Ito’s claim that “words and plants are the same thing” (as discussed in this book’s introduction), then Abe’s clarity of language and straightforward style become a formal choice related to his use of the scientific name dendrocacalia. The history of imperial botany and its use of latinized nomenclature is legible not only at the level of the sentence but also at the level of the word itself.

The dendrocacalia is a member of the Asteraceae family of flowering plants, which includes asters, daisies, sunflowers, and chrysanthemums. Within this large family, the dendrocacalia is unique. Endemic to the island of Hahajima, it grows only around Chibusayama, the mountain that stands as the highest point of the island and in the protected nature preserve called Sekimon. The unique ecosystems of the Bonin Islands have earned them the status of UNESCO World Heritage Site, and scholarly interest continues to grow as endemic species on the islands face increasing threats from nonnative species and climate change.11 Just as the many endemic species of the Galapagos Islands helped Charles Darwin develop his theory of evolution, so, too, have the endemic flora of the Bonin Islands contributed to continuing scientific research. The islands have even earned the nickname “The Galapagos of East Asia.”

Endemic species like the dendrocacalia are something of a puzzle. According to Itō Motomi, a researcher of plant evolution and biodiversity at Tokyo University, the origins of the dendrocacalia are mysterious: “From what kind of ancestors did (the dendrocacalia) evolve? In truth, we still cannot answer this question. We do not find a plant that closely resembles the dendrocacalia within the Asteraceae family.”12 For the Bonin Islands, the issue of unclear ancestry extends beyond the botanical realm and participates in the tension between internal and external (naichi and gaichi) that Abe stages throughout “Dendrocacalia.” By the time Japan officially claimed the islands as colonial property in 1876, the Bonin Islands had already been a contested site for decades. Both Britain and Japan believed the islands to be rightfully theirs, and Commodore Matthew Perry famously made a visit to the islands a month before landing on the Japanese mainland.13

This contested history led to a diverse population of human inhabitants on the islands. Records of the first Bonin Islanders to enter the Japanese family registration system (jinshin koseki), which was established by the Meiji government in the 1870s, demonstrate this reality. Of the initial five islanders that registered, one was British, one was Spanish, and the remaining three were Pacific Islanders.14 By 1882, the entire population of the islands was entered into the family registry, making the Bonin Islanders legal subjects of Japan.15 Despite the status of the Bonin Islands as colonial gaichi, residents of the islands joined the same registry as naichi mainlanders. As the historian David Chapman explains, the islands were unique among Japan’s colonies in this regard, as colonial territories such as Korea and Taiwan had their own “special colonial registers (gaichi koseki) that were administered by colonial offices and abolished after the end of the war.”16 Thus, according to their family registries, the inhabitants of the Bonin Islands belonged not to the colonial space of the gaichi but rather to the naichi metropole, even if they had been born in Britain or Spain.

The ambiguity over the status of Bonin Islanders took on a potentially violent nature in 1944, as the Japanese government ordered the forced evacuation of the islands. As close to seven thousand residents “returned” to the naichi mainland that had not been their home, they faced a situation similar to the one Abe allegorically narrates in “Dendrocacalia.” The Bonin Islanders were often greeted with suspicion and threats of violence in the naichi. As Chapman recounts, “with some members of this group having blond hair and blue or green eyes, the Bonin Islanders were often questioned about their origin and most times their interrogators were unaware of the existence of the Ogasawara Islands much less the small community of descendants of original foreign settlers.”17 When islanders were allowed back to their former home in 1946, they found it in ruins. US bombing raids had leveled much of the island of Chichijima, decimating buildings as well as plant life.18 Eventually, the islands were returned to Japanese sovereignty in 1968 and remain official Japanese territory to this day.

Of the Interior and the Exterior

As discussed in the previous chapter, Japan’s colonial project was deeply tied to the botanical realm through the extraction of natural resources and through scientific research that depended on imperial support and technologies. There is also a figurative connection between the rhetoric of colonialism and the world of plants that bears on Abe’s allegory. As Christy Wampole has demonstrated, postcolonial identity politics often invoke botanical metaphors such as “uprooting, transplanting, and vegetal invasion.”19 (These are the very concepts in which Hiromi Ito’s work revels and finds resistance, as I discuss in chapter 5.) A botanical metaphor is also present at the level of the Japanese language, as the Japanese word for colonization, shokumin, literally means “people planting,” a translation of the Dutch volkplanting. “Dendrocacalia” makes clear this link between Japan’s colonial history and plant life, as its protagonist becomes a dendrocacalia.

In the story, a man named Common (transliterated as Komon in Japanese) undergoes several transformations into the endemic plant. The name Common is unusual. It is possible that Abe’s use of the name was a means of creating a character devoid of any real identifiable characteristics. He did this frequently throughout his career by giving characters initials for names, as he does in this story with another character referred to only as “K.” However, given the story’s concern with scientific naming and Linnaean classification, it seems likely that Abe means to layer the scientific convention of referring to the non-Linnaean name of an organism as its “common name.” Understood this way, Common’s metamorphosis into a dendrocacalia is more pronounced as he moves from a common name (literally) into the scientific name used as the title of the short story.

As the narrative opens, Common suddenly feels as if he is turning into a plant one day while walking and absentmindedly kicking a stone.20 He feels the strong pull of gravity, and everything suddenly becomes dark. Within the darkness, however, he sees his own face “as if reflected in a train window.”21 The feeling is momentary and passes without incident. For the first half of the narrative, he is uncertain what is happening and struggles with the discomfort and near horror of bodily disintegration. He learns to turn his face back outward and resist metamorphosis. Common recognizes his becoming botanical as a kind of “illness.”22 Machiko’s brother Ichisuke from Osaki’s Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense would agree with this diagnosis, as he repeatedly pathologized the “moss-like disposition” found in that novella as a form of mental illness.

A year goes by without Common experiencing another plant metamorphosis, until one day he receives a mysterious letter from someone identified only as “K.” The letter asks Common to come to a café the following day. Common goes, believing the letter to be from a now-forgotten ex-girlfriend. Common undergoes another partial transformation while waiting for K at the café. During this metamorphosis, Common’s senses become heightened, and he loses a clear sense of time. The anxiety of this experience causes him to leave the café, whereupon he finds himself among the city’s bombed-out buildings (yakeato). Here, Common finally begins to accept his new existence as a plant. At this point, however, the director of a botanical garden (who serves as the story’s antagonist) appears and remarks on the rarity of coming across the dendrocacalia plant in the naichi, that term meaning “interior land” and thus the metropole of the Japanese mainland, as opposed to the gaichi, meaning “exterior land,” and thus the overseas territories of Japan’s colonies. The classification of the plant as a dendrocacalia (a gaichi plant from the colonies) marks a turning point in the narrative and sets up Abe’s allegorical play with notions of the interior and the exterior.

Abe uses the interior/exterior dichotomy in multiple registers throughout “Dendrocacalia.”23 Abe cites Kliment Timiryazev’s claim from his classic work of botany The Life of the Plant (originally published in Russia in 1878) that humans and plants have no qualitative differences, only quantitative ones. This was a radical claim, as it proposed that plants, like humans, have an interior life. Timiryazev was a highly influential botanist in his native Russia. He was a contemporary of Charles Darwin and an adamant supporter of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Timiryazev wrote an account of visiting Darwin in England when Darwin was working with his son Francis on their study of the botanical world titled The Power of Movement in Plants. While Darwin’s text influenced plant biology in Europe and the United States, it would not be translated into Japanese until 1987. Timiryazev’s The Life of the Plant, however, was initially translated into Japanese in 1934 and went through three printings in the following thirteen years. Building from Timiryazev’s claim that plants have an interior life, Abe works to destabilize the boundaries between the colonial binaries of an interior naichi and exterior gaichi. As Common becomes a tree uprooted from its native land, firm distinctions between naichi and gaichi begin to dissolve, just as the distinctions between human and plant dissolve through metamorphosis.

In order to explore the tension between the colonial markers of the internal naichi and the external gaichi, Abe focuses on the tension between the protagonist’s interior subjectivity and the external world. He builds a bridge between the naichi/gaichi divide and the subjective interiority/exteriority divide through a close engagement with plant life. As Common turns into a dendrocacalia among the yakeato ruins of war, he feels as if “the whole of the exterior world was becoming himself.”24 This is an astute description of botanical subjectivity, akin to Emanuele Coccia’s claim that “Plant life is life as complete exposure, in absolute continuity and total communion with the environment.”25 Yet where such botanical subjectivity proved generative for other writers and filmmakers, in “Dendrocacalia,” it becomes a site of governance. For through the figure of this flowering plant endemic to colonial space, “Dendrocacalia” suggests that the external gaichi is not something that exists outside of postwar subjectivity (as disavowal suggests) but rather that colonial history is alive within the postwar subject. For this reason, the plant itself becomes, for the director of a botanical garden that serves as the narrative’s antagonist, an object that must be captured and carefully controlled.

At the end of the story, the director of the botanical garden locks the dendrocacalia (and the colonial memory it embodies) away in a government-protected greenhouse, where its existence becomes static. The final image of “Dendrocacalia” is of the director laughing uncontrollably as he places a name card bearing the scientific name of the plant on the now fully metamorphosed Common. The 1952 version of the story features an illustration by Abe’s wife Machiko that captures the horror of this moment—a sense of terror increased by the scientific coldness on display (see figure 2.2). Within Abe’s allegorical configuration, the greenhouse is the site of disavowal and narrative control. It puts memories aside, where they can be manipulated and categorized by the state. It is a liminal space within the interior of the Japanese mainland where botanical specimens of the Japanese colonial exterior are forever marked as such.

Utopian Idealism in Botanical-Anarchist Subjectivity

The introduction of overtly political themes into Abe’s work caused critics, including his friend Haniya Yutaka, to position “Dendrocacalia” as a transitional text for Abe.26 Some have argued that the story marked a change from Abe’s existential and formally experimental early work like his debut novel For the Signpost at the End of the Road (Owarishi michi no shirube ni, 1948) to the more absurdist and Marxist themes found in his 1951 Akutagawa Prize–winning novella The Wall—The Crime of S. Karma (Kabe—S. Karuma shi no hanzai). The period in which “Dendrocacalia” was written was the most politically active period of Abe’s career. In 1950, he would officially join the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) and would remain a member until 1962, when he was expelled for alleged disloyalty.27

Although “Dendrocacalia” is positioned as the beginning of Abe’s embrace of Marxist thought, the seeds of his eventual discontent with Anarcho-Marxist ideology can be glimpsed in the story’s phenomenological engagement with plant life. Given Abe’s membership in the Night Group and the JCP around the time of his writing and rewriting “Dendrocacalia,” it is likely that Abe was introduced to the plant research of Kliment Timiryazev within a politically charged context. Timiryazev was first introduced into Japan as a Marxist thinker, albeit one who looked to the natural sciences for inspiration. The first of Timiryazev’s texts to appear in Japanese translation was published in 1931 in a collection titled The Present Stage of Marxist Philosophy (Marukusushūgi tetsugaku no gendankai). Included in this volume is a conversation between Timiryazev and Marxist philosopher Abram Moiseevich Deborin that took place in 1929. The two discuss natural science alongside the writings of Marx and Engels. In 1947, an article titled “Revolutionary and Scientist—A Short Biography of Timiryazev” (“Kakumei to kagakusha—Timiriyazefu shōden”) was published by the JCP in its magazine Science and Technology (Kagaku to gijutsu). As the title suggests, the article offers a biographical sketch of Timiryazev’s life, highlighting his major works and influence on contemporary Soviet scientists. It also recounts Timiryazev’s interest in Marxism and his relationship with Vladimir Lenin.

Writers of natural science, including Ilya Mechnikov, Peter Kropotkin, Charles Darwin, and Jean-Henri Fabre, heavily influenced anarchist thought in Japan, offering Japanese anarchist and Marxist thinkers “scientific evidence from the biological world for a modern anarchist temporality and subjectivity.”28 The writing of the influential anarchist thinker Peter Kropotkin describes this subjectivity as plantlike. He envisioned a subjectivity that was more of “an agglomeration, a colony of millions of separate individuals than a personality one and indivisible.”29 For Kropotkin, becoming botanical fostered a multiple subjectivity in which “the individual is quite a world of federations, a whole universe in himself.”30

Kropotkin helped Japanese Anarcho-Marxists forge links between a revolutionary subjectivity and plant life. Well-known writer and anarchist Arishima Takeo visited Kropotkin in Russia in 1906, where they discussed the ideas of Kropotkin’s classic text Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution.31 Kropotkin’s concept of mutual aid posits that within the paradigm of evolution, the fittest species survive through cooperation rather than competition. Kropotkin directly opposes competition in Mutual Aid and argues that it is in fact unnatural to compete: “‘Don’t compete!—competition is always injurious to the species, and you have plenty of resources to avoid it!’ That is the tendency of nature, not always realized in full, but always present.”32 For Anarcho-Marxist thinkers in Japan, Kropotkin’s theory of mutual aid provided an alternative to the competitive impulses of social Darwinism.33

In 1927, a partial translation of Mutual Aid was published in Japan.34 It included the first two chapters of the full text, and its title was reworked as The Lives of Animals and Plants (Dōbutsu to shokubutsu no seikatsu), a title similar to the Timiryazev text that Abe mentions in “Dendrocacalia.” Mutual Aid is a utopian text, even if Kropotkin himself took issue with the term. In his Modern Science and Anarchism (1901), Kropotkin writes, “It would not be fair to describe (a society of equals) as a Utopia, because the word ‘Utopia’ in our current language conveys the idea of something that cannot be realized. . . . (It) cannot be applied to a conception of society which is based, as Anarchism is, on an analysis of tendencies of an evolution that is already going on in society.”35 Here we see how Kropotkin, like Osaki, drew from evolutionary thought in order to envision a society free of social Darwinism.

In “Dendrocacalia,” however, Abe Kōbō ultimately critiques the utopian idealism of such an anarchist subjectivity informed by the botanical world. He does so by engaging directly with his own speculative phenomenological account of what a botanical-anarchist subjectivity would actually look and feel like, only to collapse the idealism of such subjectivity under the weight of colonial history. Abe’s botanical imagination brought him to this speculation, a shokubutsusei ripe with criticality. Abe’s shokubutsusei counters the claims that a utopian transcendence was possible in becoming botanical. This is because Abe follows Timiryazev by “giving plants their history.”36 The history of the dendrocacalia plant in postwar Japan was one of colonial violence.

Abe’s own history and oeuvre at large are themselves inseparable from Japan’s imperial project. Born in Tokyo in 1924 and raised in colonial Manchuria, Abe relocated to the Japanese mainland in 1946. During his prolific career as a writer, he wrote several stories set in the colonial space of the gaichi, including For the Signpost at the End of the Road, his 1952 short story “The Starving Skin” (“Ueta hifu”), and his 1957 novel Beasts Head for Home (Kemonotachi wa kokyō o mezasu). “Dendrocacalia,” however, is unique in that it grapples with Japan’s colonial project within the interior naichi of the Japanese mainland. Just as Abe’s concern with coloniality makes scattered appearances throughout his career, so, too, does his interest in plant life. While his best-known work, 1962’s Woman of the Dunes (Suna no onna), explores the relationship between the material world and human subjectivity in a sand-filled atmosphere devoid of plant life, several other works take up botanical life in order to question the status of the human subject. His 1957 short story “Lead Egg” (“Namari no tamago”) portrays an imagined future in which humans have become more plantlike, with green skin and extremely long lifespans. His 1975 play Green Stockings (Midori iro no sutokkingu) features an experiment in which a human is turned into an herbivore and thus comes to subsist only on vegetation. Abe would even revisit plant metamorphosis late in his career with 1991’s Kangaroo Notebook (Kangarū nōto), in which the protagonist begins to sprout radishes through his skin.

In a 1952 essay written about the advent of avant-garde ikebana (flower arranging), Abe paraphrases Jean-Paul Sartre’s comments on Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti (who was a contemporary of Abe’s fellow Night Group member Okamoto Tarō): “Plants are free, but the human body is not free. To speak of the relationship between the model and artwork, plants are unpredictable (gūzen), and the human body is a foregone conclusion (hitsuzen).”37 Abe found freedom in taking plants as a model to shed light on the disavowal of colonial violence in “Dendrocacalia.” The fantastical qualities of plant metamorphosis likely helped the story navigate the US occupation censorship that was still a lingering reality for Japanese writers in 1949. In this regard, becoming botanical was a strategy of subversion.

Greening Week and Phytophenomenology

Throughout “Dendrocacalia,” Abe engages in a speculative phenomenological account of becoming botanical that I refer to as phytophenomenology, with the Greek prefix phyto referring to plants (as it does in phytomorphism). In his experimentation with phytophenomenology, Abe demonstrates an acute understanding of plant life, likely drawn from his familiarity with the work of Timiryazev. Abe takes up the figuration of a utopian botanical-anarchist subjectivity espoused by thinkers like Kropotkin and carries it through to its logical (and literal) end point. “Dendrocacalia” explores what it would feel like to embody the kind of utopian subjectivity that Kropotkin called “a federation of digestive, sensual, nervous organs, all very intimately connected with one another, each feeling the consequence of the well-being or indisposition of each, but each living its own life.”38 Abe does this to critique the idealism bound up in such a figuration.

While the plant metamorphosis in “Dendrocacalia” is strange, to use the word Abe wrote in his letter to Haniya, the experiential account of Common’s metamorphosis aligns with scientific theories of plant life all the same. For example, as Common inspects the interior of the café and the exterior world outside the window while resisting becoming botanical and waiting for K to arrive, the narrator remarks how Common’s vision has become altered: “It was as if everything looked big, as if under a magnifying glass.”39 Common’s heightened vision settles on and intensifies the facial features of nearby patrons at the café. The results are grotesque: “The faces of customers occupying the space around him stood out strangely: moles on the sides of their noses, warts under their ears, half-gold teeth, long nose hair.”40

Theories of plant vision have circulated in scientific communities since at least 1905 when Austrian botanist Gottlieb Haberlandt proposed that the cells of a plant’s epidermal layer act like convex lenses, giving plants a visual capacity. Francis Darwin (son of Charles) became a proponent of this theory and wrote of it extensively. In 1908, British botanist Harold Wager even published photographs produced using the epidermal cells of various plants.41 Common’s sensitivity to light and uncomfortable visual experience seem to capture some of the peculiarities of this proposed “plant vision.” The list of heightened grotesque facial features registered by Common’s plant vision suggests that a plantlike subjectivity would not be ideal but rather uncomfortable and disorienting.

As Common struggles with his newly altered vision, an unknown man enters the café. The man stares at Common, at which point Common’s neck unhinges. His head falls forward, his eyes suddenly meeting his chest. Common realizes he is once again becoming a plant, and as he struggles to regain his composure, he notices a banner hanging on a sign outside promoting “Greening Week” (ryokka shūkan). This is a reference to a governmental program officially started in 1934 and resumed in 1947 (after having been suspended for several years between 1944 and 1946), in which Japanese citizens participated in rehabilitating the war-torn natural environment by planting trees (see figure 2.3). Greening Week was directly tied to the imperial house and featured an official ceremony conducted by the crown prince.42 The slogan for the 1947 campaign was “Repair the ruined land of our country with peaceful green.”43 The type of rhetoric that linked peace and rehabilitation to plant life persisted as Greening Week continued into the postwar era. The stated objective of the 1950 campaign was “To extend Tree-Planting Greening Week to the whole country, in order to rehabilitate a peaceful Japan that is beautifully green and full of culture.”44

Abe’s critique of the idealism found in Greening Week is connected to his critique of the idealism found in Anarcho-Marxist thought. The rhetoric of Greening Week ironically echoes the language Kropotkin used to express his vision of a new anarchist subjectivity informed by the botanical world. Greening Week proposed an imperially approved cooperative notion of subjectivity. It encouraged individuals to think of themselves as part of a larger network composed of humans and more-than-humans alike. Greening Week’s rhetoric resonates with Kropotkin’s vision of “continued endeavours—as a struggle against adverse circumstances—for such a development of individuals, races, species, and societies, as would result in the greatest possible fullness, variety, and intensity of life.”45 The rehabilitation of the war-torn natural world was one such endeavor.

Upon seeing the banner for Greening Week, with its advocating for a botanical subjectivity, Common’s body begins to dissolve. His internal organs “squeeze out to the exterior of his body.”46 The CPS theorist and self-proclaimed “plant neurobiologist” Stefano Mancuso explains how plant life functions through decentralization in this way: “Plants distribute over their entire body the function that animals concentrate in specific organs. Decentralization is the key. . . . [Plants] breathe with their whole body, see with their whole body, feel with their whole body.”47 As Common’s organs “squeeze out,” his perception likewise becomes decentralized in an unpleasant way. His hands become leaves. He loses a sense of time, and as he regains consciousness, he realizes it is already thirty minutes past the time K was supposed to have arrived.

This strange passage of time in “Dendrocacalia” is perhaps the clearest example of Abe’s phytophenomenology. The story attempts to approximate the time of plants through a tactile awareness of spring. In the earlier, 1949 version of the story, spring is mentioned at the start of the direct address that begins the story: “Go ahead and kick a stone while walking down the street. What are you thinking about? Go ahead, say it. Where are you? I can tell you the season. It’s spring. That spot where the stone rolled on the edge of the path—a dark, damp clump of soil. Green. Something . . . something is growing, right? Why, it’s within you. Isn’t there something like a plant growing within you?”48 The mention of “a dark, damp clump of soil” offers a phytophenomenological account of how plants experience the seasonal time of spring, for, according to Mancuso, plants have an acute sense of touch: “In the plant world, the sense of touch is closely related to the sense of hearing and makes use of small sensory organs called mechanosensitive channels, found in small numbers everywhere on the plant but with greatest frequency on the epidermal cells, the cells that are in direct contact with the external environment.”49 Mancuso goes on to posit that plants in fact possess a unique sense unavailable to humans that helps find moisture and that this watery sense is one of fifteen senses that exist within the botanical realm that are unavailable to humans.50 Perhaps Machiko’s belief in a seventh sense (as discussed in chapter 1) was more scientific than poetic after all.

As Common waits for K at the café and experiences plant vision, he looks out the window and remarks on the lack of moisture. He presents the scene in surreal and near-horrific language: “The busy asphalt street near the station for the national railway line was already dry and white. Even the mixed shadows floated up dry and white. Bicycles lined up and raced by, breaking up the dried-up shadows into small pieces and setting them afloat.”51 As Machiko became botanical in Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense, she watched as her brother’s apron “became hazy like mist, and transformed into clouds of various shapes.” Her utopian plantlike subjectivity found moisture, while Common’s dystopian subjectivity cannot help but focus on the absence of moisture.

“Dendrocacalia” imagines what the passage of time for plants would feel like. As Common sits anxiously waiting for K to arrive, he resists the pull of plant metamorphosis, and he feels the flow of time change. As he progressively becomes botanical, human clock time becomes dry and elusive: “Gradually, as it fell in rhythm with the beating of his anxious heart, the ticking of the wall clock hanging overhead appeared to speed up. Time felt like sand falling through the spaces in-between his fingers.”52 Common feels as if time is moving more quickly because plant time is remarkably slower than human time. In tune with the seasons and the natural diurnal cycle of sunrise and sunset, plants experience a much slower form of temporality than humans are accustomed to. It is only through time-lapse cinematography that human perception is able to grasp the slow unfolding that is the movement of plants. Plant movement has been the object of time-lapse cinema from its earliest days. In 1896, German botanist Wilhelm Friedrich Philipp Pfeffer developed a method of time-lapse cinematography that first demonstrated how plants move.53 In 1910, F. Percy Smith released his influential time-lapse film The Birth of the Flower, which makes a series of flowers opening their buds legible within human time. For this legibility to occur, plant time needed to be sped up to match human time. As the popularity of the 2022 BBC documentary series The Green Planet shows, there remains to this day a strong interest in speeding up plant time through time-lapse photography.

Common experiences what might be understood as the opposite of time-lapse cinematography. As he becomes botanical, human clock time gives way to plant time. Everything slows down within the embodied time Common experiences. Like a plant, any of Common’s small movements (looking out the window, for example) likely take a long duration of human clock time. A moment of plant time (such as the opening up of a flower bud) could take several human hours. For Common, the world within the café rushes by at an entirely different temporality. In the time it takes for him to unfurl the leaves that had been his fingers, around half an hour passes, and he realizes he can no longer meet K, the mysterious stranger who invited him there in the first place.

Once again, Common’s experience of botanical subjectivity is not utopian. It is not, in Kropotkin’s words, a multiple subjectivity in which subjects are “all very intimately connected with one another, each feeling the consequence of the well-being or indisposition of each.”54 On the contrary, becoming botanical disconnects Common from others around him. His plant vision makes them appear grotesque. His plant time makes him miss the time of his appointment with K. Caught between two temporalities, Common anxiously runs out of the café.

Becoming Oneself, Otherwise

Leaving the café, Common enters the crowds on the street and hears the following announcement somewhere in the distance: “It is currently Greening Week. To all passersby: Let us love trees. Plants provide harmony for our hearts that are in ruins. Plants make our neighborhoods clean and beautiful.”55 Common then comes upon the yakeato, those literal ruins of the city leftover from the war, and the very material ruins Greening Week looks to move beyond. Among the remains of war, Common begins another transformation. The loss of distinction between interior and exterior is made explicit during this metamorphosis among the yakeato ruins (as briefly discussed above): “He had a sense that this time he was clearly becoming a plant. Or rather, he felt the whole of the exterior world was becoming himself, and a tube-like part that had been himself up until this point but was no longer himself was becoming a plant. Yet he felt no need to resist. Wasn’t it just as the advertisement had said? ‘Our hearts that are in ruins.’”56

Greening Week posits a utopian scenario in which the ravaged internal spirits of a nation are healed by repairing the ruined external world with “peaceful green.” Common’s sudden embrace of the Greening Week rhetoric temporarily portrays the botanical becoming in “Dendrocacalia” as similarly utopian, as it looks toward plantlike plasticity to forge a new subjectivity. Up until this point in the narrative, Common has resisted the pull of becoming botanical. The story has been highlighting the uncomfortable phenomenological experience of plant subjectivity, resisting the pull of the utopian rhetoric bound up in the botanical-anarchist subjectivity that was espoused by anarchist thinkers and Abe’s contemporaries in the Night Group and the JCP. All of a sudden, however, Common lets go of such resistance.

In this moment, Common embraces plant metamorphosis as his subjectivity dissolves into the exterior world. It is here (and only here) that we find the potential for plasticity in “Dendrocacalia.” As he feels himself “clearly becoming a plant” among the wreckage of past bomb raids, Common, too, admits to having a “heart in ruins.” In the dissolution of a firm boundary between interior and exterior, Common feels the yakeato enter within him and glimpses how plant life can grow up through the remains of war: “It was as if the kind of rust that can only be seen in the yakeato had bled into him. A light pink color was blotted on the chimneys that remained and stood like pillars among the ruins, resembling a map. Even still, in the spaces between the crumbling, disordered slate and bricks, it seemed as if weeds were growing.”57

Common understands that plant metamorphosis is his chance, to borrow a phrase from Michael Marder, to become himself, otherwise. Marder writes of plant life: “Plants are together with what they attend to, and their being is a being-together with air, moisture, soil, warmth, and sunlight. In their attention to the elements, they become themselves. . . . When I linger with plants, I find myself thus in a communion with everything they are and live with. I am together with myself differently as well; I become myself, otherwise.”58

Through plant metamorphosis, Common becomes, if only for a moment, a different, radically other version of himself. For a moment he becomes a vegetal version that attempts to grow from and yet beyond the literal wreckage of the Japanese postwar. As Common surrenders to his botanical becoming, “Dendrocacalia” momentarily reads as a harbinger of the kind of revolutionary potential Hanada Kiyoteru saw in plants of the twentieth century. While not explicitly anarchist or Marxist in tone, the language Abe uses to describe Common’s new subjectivity shares the utopian leanings of anarchist thinkers like Kropotkin. As Common feels “the whole of the exterior world . . . becoming himself,” his sense of subjectivity is expanded far beyond regionally and temporally specific notions of national subjectivity.59 For a brief moment (and only for a moment), Common becomes, as Kropotkin envisioned, “quite a world of federations, a universe in himself.” He becomes like Osaki’s reed mentioned in the previous chapter, that plant with a spirit “as wide as the cosmos.”

The new form of subjectivity opened up in Common’s botanical becoming is suddenly legible in the very narrative form of “Dendrocacalia.” As Common embraces plant metamorphosis to move beyond a collective “heart in ruins,” the otherwise straightforward and objective language of the short story gives way to a different kind of botanical poetics. Offset from the rest of the narrative, “Dendrocacalia” presents a portion of the ninth elegy from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies (1923), a stanza that questions what it would be like to be a laurel tree. Abe was a great admirer of Rilke. For Abe, Rilke’s work offered respite during the turbulence of the war: “The generation of us that had been born and raised in the war knew nothing but wartime philosophy. The word ‘anti-war’ never even reached our ears. However, for some reason, I could never adapt myself to war philosophy. Within the fear of rejecting the world or being rejected by the world, Rilke’s world seemed like a wonderful den of hibernation. I indulged in Rilke’s world, especially The Book of Images and The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge . . . Rilke’s world was a suspension of time.”60 Rilke continued to inspire Abe in the postwar era and is featured heavily in Abe’s 1948 novel For the Night with No Name (Na mo naki your no tame ni). In “Dendrocacalia,” Rilke’s poetry becomes a part of Common’s all-too-brief glimpse into a liberatory botanical subjectivity as well as a transformation at the formal level of the text. It is both a “suspension of time” and a suspension of the otherwise objective language of “Dendrocacalia.”

As it slips into the realm of poetry, “Dendrocacalia” demonstrates a formal plasticity in the narrative that points toward the subjective plasticity Common experiences in this moment of metamorphosis. The original 1949 version of the story attributes the poem to Rilke, while the revised 1952 version does not. In both cases, however, a vague attribution follows the final line of ellipses: “Such poetry might have occurred to Common.”61 The insertion of this poetic take on becoming botanical (the very thing Machiko sought in Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense but could never accomplish) seems to pass through Common. He becomes a medium—a plantlike trait that serves as the focus of the next chapter of this book. For a moment, Common seeks shelter from the violence of the postwar in the space of the botanical realm, as it provides a site of potential to reconfigure subjectivity. Common suddenly feels the comfort of becoming botanical: “I have decided to be reduced to a single plant, right here. Once determined, becoming a plant is a pleasant feeling. Why not become a plant?”62 Common comes to understand the safe space that the botanical world provides. It is a space that, according to Marder, “provide[s] us with a very peculiar shelter where the traditional distinction between interiority and exteriority no longer applies.”63

This utopian moment does not last for long, however. A voice rings out in surprise, identifying and interpolating Common for the first time as a dendrocacalia, using the scientific name for the plant. A man that we will come to recognize as the director of a botanical garden approaches the transformed Common and pulls out a “naval knife.” The man remarks: “How rare to be able to collect a dendrocacalia in the Japanese naichi!”64 With this act of scientific classification, the director of the botanical garden forecloses the possibility of Common’s finding plasticity in the botanical world. The recognition of the dendrocacalia and its position within the Japanese colonial nexus shatters the utopian possibilities bound up in becoming botanical. The use of the plant’s scientific name draws attention to the complicity of botanical science in Japan’s colonial project. Likewise, the explicit use of the term naichi just as Common embraces the loss of distinction between his own interior subjectivity and the exterior world (“he felt the whole of the exterior world was becoming himself, and a tube-like part that had been himself up until this point but was no longer himself was becoming a plant”) shatters the utopian idealism of transcendence.

Once this occurs, the peculiar shelter of a botanical subjectivity no longer provides any comfort. Instead, Common is confronted with the reality of violence as distinctions between interior and exterior dissolve. The interior subjective space that opens up in plant metamorphosis forces Common to reckon with the repressed wartime memories harbored within, just as he is forced to reckon with his own face staring back at him. Standing among the bombed-out remains of the city, with a military knife in hand, the botanical garden director prevents Common’s attempts at moving beyond the historical realities of postwar Japan.

For the dendrocacalia plant is not, in the rhetoric of Greening Week, a “peaceful green.” It is a reminder of Japan’s external gaichi, a physical reality bearing witness to lands exterior to the Japanese mainland that had now, in the immediate postwar present of the narrative, either regained sovereignty (such as Korea) or found themselves in a state of political limbo at the hands of the US occupation (such as the Ryūkyū Islands or Okinawa and the Bonin Islands as well). The botanical garden director’s recognition of the dendrocacalia in the naichi mainland marks a turning point. The remainder of the story finds Common trying to evade and ultimately kill the director (with the military knife, no less), while the director likewise attempts to convince Common to come live within the space of the botanical garden. He assures Common he will be safe in the garden, as it receives “government protection.”65 Through the figure of the dendrocacalia, and the artificial environment of the government-protected botanical garden, Abe presents an allegorical diagnosis of Japan’s negotiation of wartime memory. Within this tale of plant metamorphosis is a critique of the “greening” or beautification of such memory. Abe’s allegorical figuration finds governmental authority safely and securely tending to such living memories, keeping them manicured and carefully categorized. They are out of time, suspended in artificial animation, like plant specimens in a greenhouse.

At the end of the story, the dendrocacalia-that-once-was-Common is carefully arranged in a collection that bears nameplates and national flags. It has been categorized and assigned a place within the logic of the nation-state. Once Common’s metamorphosis into the dendrocacalia is complete, there is no potential for further change. There is no further hope for plasticity. The dendrocacalia is preserved within what we might call “specimen time.” The greenhouse denies the plant its place in a living history. For in the greenhouse, there is no space for, in the words of Timiryazev, a notion of “organic Nature as a vast whole which is ever changing and transforming itself.”66 There is only stasis, regulated by the infrastructure of botanical science.

The Limit Beyond Which a Subject Becomes an Object

Before Common is locked away in the greenhouse and after his encounter in the bombed-out ruins with the director of the botanical garden, he visits the library to research plant metamorphosis. There, he begins reading about Dante’s Divine Comedy and Greek mythology, although he recognizes this as an “unscientific” way to begin searching for an explanation for something “actually occurring” in his body. Through his reading of Dante and Greek mythology, Common develops a folkloric/religious explanation for his plant metamorphosis. Within the Divine Comedy, the middle circle of the seventh level of Hell is populated by those guilty of the sin of suicide, whereupon they are turned into trees and become food for the mythical half-human/half-bird harpies. Common embraces this unscientific explanation and concludes: “Without knowing it, I guess I must have already committed suicide.”67

Common decides he must kill the director of the botanical garden who has been pursuing him. When they meet again, Common accuses the director of being a harpy. The director then condemns mythology and offers a scientific explanation in its place: “Isn’t Greek mythology a little unscientific, Mr. Dendrocacalia? It does more harm than good. Do you want to hear something more interesting? Have you read Timiryazev’s The Life of the Plant? This is what it says: there is no qualitative difference between plants and animals. There is only a quantitative difference. In other words, plants and animals are scientifically the same.”68

The Life of the Plant, originally published in Russia in 1878, participated in a revolutionary new approach to the study of plant life. By its very title, it grants a notion of “life” to the botanical realm. It views plants as subjects living their own lives, rather than mere objects of study. In his review of the Japanese translation of Timiryazev’s text in 1934, Nakajima Seinosuke contrasts The Life of the Plant to the many popular books on plant science that can be found in “any used book store in Japan for around 30–40 sen.”69 Nakajima suggests that Timiryazev’s text should serve as the basis for a new approach to the writing of popular science.70 In his preface to the 1947 edition of The Life of the Plant, translator Ishii Tomoyuki echoes this review: “Popular books and general introductions devoted to the study of plants are extremely common both abroad and in Japan. However, I do not know whether another general introduction exists that is as unique and as excellent as Timiryazev’s The Life of the Plant.”71 What Ishii finds particularly rare in The Life of the Plant is Timiryazev’s scientific engagement with a mysterious energy within plants that Ishii aligns with vitalism.

The director of the botanical garden’s claim that “there is no qualitative difference between plants and animals” can indeed be found in The Life of the Plant. Drawing from scientific research, Timiryazev investigates whether plants in fact exhibit characteristics that have previously been ascribed only to animals. These characteristics include movement, nutrition, respiration, stimulation, and finally, consciousness. Although he admits that the question of consciousness comes up against the limits of experimental inquiry and is thus scientifically unknowable, in each other case, he demonstrates that plants do in fact possess the same characteristics and internal processes as animals. Having reached this conclusion, he writes: “It follows that the difference between plants and animals is not qualitative, but only quantitative. The same processes take place in both kingdoms, but some of them predominate in the one and some in the other.”72 For Timiryazev, plants live lives in very much the same way as animals.

The Life of the Plant participated in a metamorphosis of scientific epistemology. It granted the botanical world a notion of life and exposed the previously hidden, internal forces of plants, granting them movement and potential consciousness. Having moved beyond the objective realm of the visible, Timiryazev asks: “Where is the limit beyond which an object becomes a subject?”73 Common’s botanical becoming in “Dendrocacalia” posits a similar question. Confronted with the hidden, internally repressed memories of colonial violence, the narrative questions how one becomes a subject of one’s own history rather than an object within it. In The Life of the Plant, Timiryazev asks: “Has a plant its history?”74 “Dendrocacalia” answers that it certainly does and that the question of who gets to narrate this history can be a matter of life or death.

The Imperial Lives of Plants

“Dendrocacalia” introduces the concept of plants having lives through the work of Timiryazev, but the notion of “the lives of plants” has its own history in modern Japan that extends beyond Timiryazev and sits directly within Japan’s imperial project. Beginning in 1939, publisher Shinchōsha (who would go on to publish Abe Kōbō’s collected works decades later) began selling a multivolume educational series titled New Collection for Japanese Boys and Girls (Shin Nihon shōnen shōjo bunko). The intended audience for this series was, as its title suggests, children. It included such nationalistic titles as Stories of Patriotism (Aikoku monogatari), Stories to Purify One’s Spirit (Kokoro o kiyoku suru hanashi), and Defending the Country (Kuni no mamori). As these titles demonstrate, the aim of this series was to mold children into proper imperial subjects.

Yet the series also included less obviously propagandistic volumes on literature (including Chinese and Western literature, in addition to Japanese), as well as volumes on agriculture and natural science. The seventh volume, published in 1940, is titled The Lives of Animals and Plants (Dōbutsu to shokubutsu no seikatsu)—the same title used for the first translation of Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid and essentially the same title as Timiryazev’s The Life of the Plant (which in Japanese is Shokubutsu no seikatsu). In using the title of Timiryazev’s text within an allegorical tale of Japanese colonialism, Abe (whether knowingly or unknowingly) entangles the utopian notions bound up in Timiryazev’s and Kropotkin’s texts to the propagandistic wartime text that shares the same name.

The Lives of Animals and Plants is divided into two sections, with the first half discussing more-than-human animals, and the second half taking up the botanical world. This latter half is attributed to Honda Masaji, a prominent prewar botanist who went on to assist the Shōwa emperor in botanical research after the war.75 Botanical research was a key element to rehabilitating the image of the formerly militaristic emperor in the postwar, just as it was a key component to the colonial project. The same concept (the notion of life in plants) that inspired a transcendent vision of subjectivity among Anarcho-Marxists also helped justify the very wartime violence that thinkers in the Night Group looked to move beyond. The introduction to The Lives of Animals and Plants grants “lives” to both more-than-human animals and plants. In a playful tone pitched at the young reader, it attempts to arouse curiosity in the natural world: “Each of these innumerable animals and plants are carrying on with their lives as they please. The bees flying outside your window, the monkeys in the deep mountains—they each have their own lives. The wild grasses on the roadside, the giant trees on the mountain peaks that reach toward the heavens—they each have their own lives. Isn’t it fun getting to know about the lives of these animals and plants?”76

For the writers of this propagandistic text, there is a logical progression that leads from the enjoyment of studying the lives of animals and plants to a nationalistic devotion to the Japanese Empire. The Lives of Animals and Plants functions within an ideology that naturalizes, through science and biophilia, Japanese nationalism. The introduction claims: “It has been said from long ago that there is not an evil person among those that love animals and plants. . . . A spirit that loves those animals and plants closely connected to human life develops into a spirit that loves its friends and the people around it. Furthermore, it develops into a spirit that loves its country.”77

This posits that a love for the Japanese nation is as natural as a childlike love for animals and plants. Yet as much as this ideology attempts to tie nationalism to a scientific study of the material world, it nonetheless resorts to the language of the immaterial. The introduction relegates the love for animals, plants, friends, and ultimately the nation to the realm of the spirit or mind (kokoro). The separation of the material and the spirit in The Lives of Animals and Plants does not foreshadow the coming of revolution, as Hanada Kiyoteru believed. Instead, it uses the supposed objectivity of science to justify the subjective experience of a militarized nationalism. Such ideology speaks to a claim the director of the botanical garden makes in “Dendrocacalia”: “A plant is purity itself—that word so full of pathos that has been expunged from everyday usage.”78 The implication of the director’s comment here is that the concept of “purity” was expunged from everyday use in the postwar because of its ties to wartime rhetoric. The use of the language of “spirit” in The Lives of Animals and Plants belongs to the same rhetoric.

For Honda, an interest in the interior world of plant life helps condition the spiritual interior of the human subject: “Those who are capable of loving grasses and trees are always extremely happy and are able to possess beautiful spirits [kokoro].”79 As the text’s introduction lays out for the young reader, a beautiful spirit is one that will naturally love its country. In this, Honda’s language resembles the rhetoric of Airin shisō, or Forest-Love Ideology, a pre- and wartime phenomenon that Tessa Morris-Suzuki calls “an intriguing mixture of ecological science and nationalist romanticism, which brought together elements from myth, literature, aesthetics and cutting-edge botanical knowledge.”80 The rhetoric of Airin shisō posited a natural link between the love of plant life and the love of the nation. The purported logic of this link between forest love and national love is exemplified in the opening lines of a short catalog that the Japanese Bureau of Forestry published for the 1910 Japanese-British Exhibition in London:

Along the western shore of the Pacific, there lies a group of numerous islands stretched in a serpent like form covered with rich verdant growths over two thirds of the area of the land. These verdant growths are none other than the forests of the Empire of Japan. The wholesome effects produced upon the land and the people by these forests are both striking and remarkable. The Japanese by nature love their forests and derive enjoyment from the prosperous and luxuriant growths of the same. The burning patriotism and the refined aesthetic ideas of the Japanese are in a large measure the outcome of the influence exerted upon the minds of the people by these forests.81

As this text argues, proper love of and care for the botanical world equaled a form of progress that justified the expansion of the Japanese Empire. By 1910, the Bonin Islands had already been part of the “numerous islands” of the Empire of Japan for several decades.

The entanglements of plant research and Japan’s colonial project are clearly legible in Honda’s section of The Lives of Animals and Plants. Early on, he discusses how the colonial space of the gaichi served as a site for the study of botanical life. Honda recounts a researcher who “replanted several four-to-five-hundred-year-old lotus seeds that had been dug up from the peat soil of Manchukuo. After a few years, they all produced splendid spouts.”82 Honda’s mention of the imperial puppet state of Manchukuo (Manshūkoku or Manchuria)—the gaichi space in which Abe Kōbō was raised—illustrates how colonial space was not only a source of resource extraction but also a site for botanical research. Honda’s use of this colonial name Manchukuo among a discussion of plant life makes the history of Japanese imperialism forever inscribed within the pages of his Life of the Plant. Abe ends up doing the same (perhaps unwittingly) by inscribing Timiryazev’s book of the same name within the pages of “Dendrocacalia.”

On the (Scientific) Name

There is yet another piece of colonial history inscribed within “Dendrocacalia.” It can be found in Abe’s decision to use the Linnaean Latin name dendrocacalia for the wadannoki. As mentioned above, the full name for the wadannoki in binomial nomenclature is Dendrocacalia crepidifolia (Nakai) Nakai, with the last name referring to the botanist Nakai Takenoshin. Although Abe’s text never attaches Nakai’s name to the name dendrocacalia within the narrative, scientific literature on the dendrocacalia gives Nakai credit for having been the first researcher to publish a description of the plant. A 1936 article by Tsuyama Takashi, written in Latin and published in the Journal of Plant Research (Shokubutsugaku zasshi), claims that Nakai first published a description of the plant in 1928. Tsuyama includes Nakai’s name in the official scientific nomenclature of the dendrocacalia.83

Nakai was a central figure of botanical research during Japan’s colonial modernity. He was the foremost scholar of plant life in Japan’s gaichi. Nakai published numerous studies of Korean flora, from which he hoped to craft a new method of classification for vegetal life beyond the Japanese Empire. As the historian Jung Lee explains, Nakai’s work on developing a universal classification system for plant life is inseparable from the history of Japan’s colonial project: “In conjunction with [colonial] expansion, the Japanese botanical establishment consciously chose an imperial path in modernizing Japanese botany. Nakai’s systematics, based on Korean plants, was a product of an imperial strategy that secured a Japanese ‘centre of calculation’ through specimens collected from expanding Japanese colonial peripheries.”84

The act of classification and naming once again bears traces of colonial legacy. The unique classification system Nakai developed grew out of his relationship to the specimens he studied in the metropole, not from plants living in their natural habitats. As Lee explains, Nakai only ever made short trips to the Korean peninsula and relied on specimens sent to the Japanese naichi from naturalists in the gaichi.85 (He did, however, serve as the chief director of a botanical garden in Japanese-occupied Indonesia in 1942.)86 For the most part, he studied and named colonial plants at Tokyo Imperial University, the same university where Abe studied medicine and Osaki’s brother Shirō studied agricultural science. Tokyo Imperial University was Japan’s only university to have founded a botany department between the years 1877 and 1918.87

In the revised, 1952 version of “Dendrocacalia,” the antagonist of the narrative signs a letter to Common as “Director of the K Botanical Gardens.” It has been speculated that the letter K refers to Tokyo Imperial University’s Koishikawa Botanical Gardens. Inspired by European colonial precedent, the first director of the Koishikawa Gardens, Matsumura Jinzō, acquired specimens from colonial gaichi to exhibit within the gardens.88 The allegorical image written into the fictional world of “Dendrocacalia” of the rare plant ending up in a greenhouse could well have been drawn from Abe’s own encounter with a real dendrocacalia at Koishikawa.

As the director of the botanical garden in “Dendrocacalia” pins a name tag to a metamorphosed Common bearing the Latin name Dendrocacalia crepidifolia, he relegates Common’s botanical becoming to the realm of colonial specimen, just as the historical figures who worked in the Koishikawa Botanical Gardens had done to the actual plants collected from colonial space during Japan’s colonial modernity. Although the director of the botanical garden in the fictional world of the story claims that finding a gaichi plant in the naichi is a rarity, within the real world of botanical research, it was not so rare at all. This is especially true of plants like the dendrocacalia that bear the colonial marker that is the name Nakai. As botanical research continues to use the name Nakai as part of the wadannoki’s scientific name, the life of the dendrocacalia remains tied to its place within Japanese colonial history. As such, it continues to be a plant of the twentieth century, even well into the twenty-first century.