Chapter 3 Botanical Media Haniya Yutaka, Hashimoto Ken, Itō Seikō, and the Search for Dead Spirits

Dead Spirits and Fractured Subjectivities

Haniya Yutaka grew up amid a backdrop of violence, through the turbulent history of pre- and interwar Japan. Like Abe Kōbō, he grew up in a colonial space. Haniya was born and spent the first part of his life in Japanese-occupied Taiwan. There he claims to have experienced something akin to the fracturing of subjectivity I discussed in chapter 1. Haniya recounts: “You could say that the structure of my thinking is fractured (bunretsukei). This fractured form of thinking began with my childhood in Taiwan. Generally speaking, I remember feeling uncomfortable in my existence there.”7 The fracturing Haniya speaks of was a direct product of violence: “People’s fathers, my parents’ friends, they would physically attack the Taiwanese people. And they were Japanese, just like me. In other words, I was friends with these attackers. So, in remembering the discomfort in all of that, I now realize it was the beginning of a certain fracturing.”8 Haniya has written that witnessing such violence made him “hate the Japanese” and that having to reconcile the fact that he himself was Japanese caused him to develop a distrust in self-identity.9 Haniya thus experienced the crisis of colonial violence close at hand, although from a relatively safe remove, to be sure. Nevertheless, the physical violence that led to Haniya’s fractured form of thinking left a lasting impression that would go on to inform his antiauthoritarian politics and his radical literary career, stretching all the way to his role as a leading voice in the ANPO (an abbreviation of the Japanese word for security treaty, Anzen Hoshō Jōyaku) protests of the 1960s that looked to halt the renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty.

Haniya moved to Tokyo in 1923 and eventually enrolled in the Nihon Daigaku preparatory school where he was exposed to the Marxist and anarchist thought that would later influence his critical writing. In 1930, he was expelled for poor attendance and began working for an office associated with the Zenō Zenkoku Kaigi, the communist faction of the prewar agrarian movement.10 The following year, he joined the Japanese Communist Party and was arrested for his political beliefs in 1932.11 After the failed coup attempt in 1932 known as the May 15 Incident, treatment of political prisoners in Japan worsened, and Haniya spent over a year and a half in incarceration.12 In prison, he would suffer from recurring, debilitating bouts of tuberculosis. Haniya would ultimately perform tenkō, the process by which leftists were forced to renounce their ideological beliefs and pledge allegiance to the imperial throne. According to Haniya, the tenkō statement he submitted read: “Within our solar system, the earth will be the first to collapse. The imperial system will collapse before this, but it will last for quite a while.”13 With this metaphysically tongue-in-cheek statement, Haniya was released from prison. In 1945, he helped found the influential literary magazine Modern Literature (Kindai Bungaku). It was in this magazine that he began publishing Dead Spirits in serial installments.

Technically an unfinished novel, Dead Spirits is a work of staggering length. It spanned nine volumes by the time of Haniya’s death in 1997. The first four volumes were published beginning in the immediate postwar moment of 1946, with Haniya continuing to write new chapters periodically for the rest of his life.14 Haniya characterizes the work as his attempt to “take flight from the constraints of the modern age” and says that the novel calls for nothing less than “a revolution of existence.”15 It was during his imprisonment that Haniya decided to rethink existence from the ground up: “My wanting to write a novel that could somehow break free of modern notions of time and space, as well as from one’s own body—that started while I was in prison. Which is to say, I came to think that a revolution just at the level of society was not good enough. There needed to be a revolution at the level of existence itself.”16 In this statement, we see Haniya’s disaffection with the Communist Party. Indeed, Dead Spirits has been read as “an unflinching critique of the Japanese Communist Party and Stalin’s Russia.”17

In Haniya’s desire for a “revolution at the level of existence,” we also see a desire to rethink the human more metaphysically, to reconfigure subjectivity beyond the confines of the human body. Haniya writes that one of the things he sought to resolve by writing Dead Spirits was the violence at the base of life that he believed could be glimpsed in the food chain, namely, that life feeds on other forms of life. This was an insight he claims to have first learned as an adolescent, as he witnessed the violence against Taiwanese colonial subjects. Haniya explains that plant life provides a framework to move beyond what he saw as the exploitation that underscores life itself: “Plants are able to photosynthesize with just sunlight and water. They don’t eat other beings. They’re fine with just light and water.”18 From the confines of a prison cell, Haniya turned to the nonviolence of plant life and envisioned a way to become anew that would eventually bring him into the expansive realm of the forest. Dead Spirits became his environmental response to the existential crises of his youth and his contemporary moment.

Like Osaki Midori’s Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense, not much happens in Dead Spirits, despite its length. Also like Osaki’s novella, it displays a botanical poetics and embodies a botanical form. Where Osaki’s work formally resembled moss in its repetitions and circular structure, Dead Spirits is vast like a forest. It stretches on and on. It is easy to get lost within. As Haniya wrote new chapters throughout his life, sometimes taking many years in between, it follows a temporal unfolding (both in terms of narrative and in Haniya’s timeline in writing the work) that mimics what I call “forest time”—a concept I develop in chapter 4 of this book. If, as Hiromi Ito claims, words and plants are the same thing (a statement I discuss in this book’s introduction), then Dead Spirits’ words have grown into formidable trees, daunting in number and complexity. One could wander in the forest of Dead Spirits for years and still not see everything there is to see within. This chapter presents just a small glimpse into its depths.

The novel unfolds largely through extended philosophical conversations, along with limited narration, in order to tease out the histories of a complicated web of characters: protagonist Miwa Yoshi and his formerly imprisoned activist brother, Takashi; Miwa Yoshi’s fiancée and her mother; Yoshi’s student friend Kurokawa; the vociferous and argumentative Kubi Takeo; the aphasia-ridden former prisoner Yaba Tetsugo; a pair of hospitalized mentally ill sisters named “God” and “Nighty-Night;” the philosophical doctor Kishi, who is in charge of the mental hospital where many of the characters find themselves. The narrative ultimately reveals that Miwa Yoshi, Miwa Takashi, Kubi, and Yaba are, in fact, biological brothers.

The overall tone of Dead Spirits is contemplative and mournful. The novel distills the trauma Haniya himself experienced in the interwar period and transmutes it into a haunting affect. There is dreamlike quality to the work, legible in the poetic gloss that opens the novel:

These ambiguous yet suggestive lines set the stage for the ghostly affect that will inhabit the text from within its dark forests. A polyvalent sense of loss runs throughout Dead Spirits. At times, the loss is concrete and personal, such as the loss of family and friends. At times, it is abstract, such as the loss of certainty in a belief in absolute truth. Japan’s loss in war hangs over the novel like a specter. It is not discussed outright, but it haunts the characters of the novel as they try to understand what it means to have survived into the postwar. Aphasia—the loss of language to silence—is a recurring motif. Where silence was a significant part of the botanical becoming written into Osaki’s Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense (insofar as it allowed characters to inhabit a “moss-like disposition”), silence in Dead Spirits speaks to the complicated status of language in the postwar landscape of Japanese literature. This is because Dead Spirits was published amid discussions of the wartime culpability of Japanese writers. The editors of Modern Literature published a journal titled Literary Signpost (Bungaku jihyō), the most popular feature of which, according to James Dorsey, “was a regular column called ‘Literary Prosecution’ (bungaku kensatsu), in which the editors and a host of others took literary figures to task for reactionary wartime writings.”20 In postwar Japan, language could be dangerous, and what one said in the past rang into the present with a newfound, threatening clarity. Haniya understood this all too well from his years in prison and his subsequent forced tenkō, the ideological conversion mentioned above. It was Haniya’s commitment to leftist politics even after his renunciation of the Communist Party that kept him from being labeled complicit in the war effort.

Dead Spirits’ narrative begins in a world where the war has ended but the damage lingers on. In the opening scene, Miwa Yoshi visits his friend Yaba Tetsugo in the mental hospital. Yaba has developed aphasia after an incident with the warden of the prison in which he was being held. The narrative never makes clear the origins of Yaba’s aphasia. Miwa Yoshi is told several different stories concerning Yaba’s treatment in jail, but ultimately there are no definitive words that explain the trauma Yaba underwent as a political prisoner. Yoshi’s brother Takashi (who is also on parole from prison) is a resident of this hospital as well and is bedridden with “an unfortunate mental illness” (fukō na seishinbyō). Although not confined to the hospital, Miwa Yoshi himself also exhibits signs of a fractured subjectivity, as language fails him time and again. Throughout Dead Spirits, Yoshi experiences excruciating emotional anguish as he attempts and fails (most often within the woods) to speak the words “I am myself” (“Ore wa ore da”). In this existentially unstable state, he looks throughout the narrative to reconfigure his subjectivity in a space beyond words, much like Machiko in Osaki’s Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense. Where Machiko turned to the small, indistinct realm of moss to become botanical, Miwa Yoshi turns to the expanse of the forest, a botanical space that Michael Marder suggests is ideal for the kind of existential rethinking Haniya sought: “Paradoxically, in order to recover ourselves we must lose ourselves better by learning to grow outward, to be an excrescence that, while remaining rooted, knows how to grow with nonhuman others—the elements, plants, and animals. The best place for this apprenticeship is the forest.”21

Assemblage, Attunement, and Kehai

As Miwa Yoshi takes long walks in tree-filled areas of Tokyo, his subjectivity begins to extend out into the forest around him. He becomes, in Marder’s words, “an excrescence” that “grows outwards.” The more he spends time among trees, the more Miwa loses a sense of himself and develops a botanical subjectivity in its place. As I have been theorizing in this book, a botanical subjectivity is multiple, a way of experiencing oneself as more than one self. As he becomes more plantlike and lets go of the confines of his body, Miwa Yoshi enters into an assemblage with the forest, a form of becoming in which individual entities are rendered part of something larger than themselves. Assemblages give rise to something new that is more than the sum of its parts. Jane Bennett writes that assemblages “are not governed by any central head. . . . The effects generated by an assemblage are, rather, emergent properties, emergent in that their ability to make something happen . . . is distinct from the sum of the vital force of each materiality considered alone.”22 Entering into an assemblage with the forest allows for the metaphysically new becoming that Haniya sought while in prison. It allows for a way to escape notions of self-identity that plagued Haniya since his childhood in colonial Taiwan.

As Miwa walks in the forest with his friend Kurokawa, he becomes a part of the forest assemblage, merging with the atmosphere around him: “The damp atmosphere coiled around the skin of the trees. It was the fragrant scent of night. Within the dark stand of trees, the sound of their feet as they stepped reverberated as if chips of the trees were gently being torn off. The howling wind continued to shake the treetops. The atmosphere cooled.”23 Miwa and Kurokawa, like the trees, are surrounded by a damp atmosphere in which something seems to always be bubbling up to the surface, born of movement and sound. Sound is important in Dead Spirits. Human characters may suffer from aphasia, but the forest consistently emits a droning hum. Miwa hears and senses static or a rumble in the forest that others cannot. As Miwa enters into the forest assemblage, he attunes himself to the atmosphere in a manner similar to the way a listener tunes in to a radio broadcast.

Since his childhood, Miwa has felt this sonorous presence in the forest. It is both haunting and threatening, and it renders him speechless:

In his childhood, at such times as when Miwa would play alone at the edge of the forest, he would suddenly become frightened. He had a feeling as if, from somewhere in the still silence of the forest, an indistinct rumble was occurring. Or rather, it welled up suddenly from the lonely environment unhindered. It was a presence that seemed to be hunting him down. A presence that seemed impossible to escape, no matter how hard he tried to run away, crying. . . . And so, no matter how much he was comforted, he was unable to explain a thing about that presence that pressed down around him.24

Miwa is attuned to the existence of something ghostly pursuing him through the medium of trees. As a child, this presence terrified Miwa, but as an adult, he comes to see it as a site of potential. In the aftermath of war, this presence becomes a space of the in-between. It is a presence not quite alive but not quite dead, not quite human but not quite plant. Dead Spirits names this potential kehai.

Haniya uses the word kehai throughout the novel to reference Miwa’s sense that someone, or something, is standing behind him, hidden just out of reach, both there and not there—a faint rumble, like radio static. Toward the end of his walk with Kurokawa, Miwa begins to feel the kehai presence of someone standing among the trees (just as Haniya himself had felt walking through Inokashira Park): “He began to have the feeling that in the dark stand of trees—the center of which was difficult to see—there was someone standing. The space around him that moved in tandem with him felt like a grey wall that he was propping up while it also propped him up, or like an expanding, endless mist. It was a portent that he had secretly named ‘cosmic presence’ [uchūteki na keihai].”25 Dead Spirits posits that the human can make contact with this “cosmic presence” should one rethink oneself as part of the forest and attune oneself to the ineffable sounds of botanical media. For someone like Haniya—imprisoned, often ill, forced to renounce his political ideals—tapping into this larger cosmic kehai provided a way forward in the face of great uncertainty. It pointed toward the revolution at the level of existence he deemed necessary in the postwar moment.

The word kehai appears after the novel’s first mention of a forest, which occurs in a temporal flashback. Miwa Yoshi and his friend Yaba Tetsugo are walking back from high school to their dormitory when “approaching the edge of a park where trees with yellowed leaves grew thickly,” they encounter a young girl pulling a dog’s ear, causing it to cry in a way that “reminds one of the extreme suffering of a battered human being.”26 Yaba steps in to end the dog’s suffering, pulling the young girl’s ears in turn. In response to Yaba’s response, a bystander cries out, “She’s mentally ill” and calls Yaba a “bastard,” to which Yaba replies, “I am Yaba Tetsugo.”27 Although in the narrative present of the novel Yaba is suffering from aphasia, in this flashback, he is able to declare his subjective identity in a manner that will elude Miwa Yoshi throughout the story (as Miwa is time and again unable to say “I am myself”). As Yaba states his name, all action in the forested park comes to a halt, except for a mysterious presence that emerges: “In an instant, a silent presence [kehai] came over.”28 With the violence of the scene (however we choose to interpret it) now over, the wordless atmosphere of kehai emerges as a cosmic presence. The dead spirits of the work’s title whisper within this forested presence in the aftermath of suffering.

The notion of kehai is botanical. In his theoretical text Trees, “ke,” and “ki” (Ki to ke to ki, 1993), the architect and critic Takizawa Kenji argues that there is a direct connection between the mysterious force of kehai and trees. He postulates that the words share a linguistic origin, as the word for tree in Japanese is a homonym for the first character of the compound word kehai, namely the vital force of ki/ke (the word tree is also read as both ki and ke under differing circumstances). Takizawa writes that trees “naturally signify the earth below, but they also possess the capability to extract the life energy [ki] from this dark world of dead spirits [shirei] that we know as the earth, and bring it up to the bright world known as the heavens. . . . We can imagine there was once a connection between the terms ‘vital energy’ (‘ki’) and ‘tree’ (‘ki’).”29 Takizawa’s use of the phrase dead spirits here is uncanny. While it is doubtful that he meant to reference Haniya’s novel, his description of kehai can easily be applied to Dead Spirits. Takizawa describes a phenomenological account of kehai that strongly echoes Miwa Yoshi’s childhood experience of being “hunted down” by a feeling of kehai in the forest: “The omen of terror born from the darkness is the drifting of ‘ke’ in the vicinity. . . . In the small environment enclosed within forests, the terror was likely comprehensible as something pressing down upon the body, a feeling like a god’s curse or the spirit of someone dead was just behind you.”30

Trees have a long history in Japan as spiritual objects occupying the middle position of the medium between humans and the supernatural realm. In Shinto belief and practice, trees become sacred as yorishiro, which are material objects said to house kami, the spirits of Shinto cosmology/ideology. Sacred trees are known as shinboku and are marked with ropes called shimenawa that encircle their trunks (see figure 3.2). The spiritual essence of trees can also be found in the concept of hashira, the sacred pillars used in shrine architecture. In each case, trees are a medium that mediate between the human world and the spiritual realm. Although much contemporary research on Japanese religion (including Japanese Buddhism and Shintoism) has questioned and critiqued the origins of such beliefs as somoku jōbutsu (the ability of plants to gain Buddhist enlightenment) and shinboku, there is nevertheless a long history of spiritual ideology and practice in Japan that has deemed the botanical world (and trees in particular) sacred.31

Dead Spirits is undeniably a spiritual novel, although it is certainly not a religious one. It does not invoke religious imagery such as shinboku, nor does it speak in Shinto terms of kami residing in the trees. Instead, Dead Spirits is Haniya’s attempt in the postwar moment to reclaim the natural world as a site of spiritual connection outside the fascistic confines of State Shinto ideology that helped justify Japan’s wartime colonial expansion. In chapter 2, I discussed how, through the ideology of Airin shisō, forests (and the love thereof) were used to justify Japanese patriotism in the wartime period. That Haniya would return to the forests in the postwar period demonstrates his desire to not only rethink the human from within the forest but to also rethink the forest as a site of transformation and potential resistance.

The trees of Dead Spirits are not figures of Shinto animism, although they borrow some of Shinto’s spiritual affect. Rather, they are media that occasion a “sense of vital interconnectivity,” to borrow a phrase from the environmental media theorist John Durham Peters.32 The forest is a medium in Dead Spirits in the sense that it is, in Peters’s words, an “enabling (environment) that provide(s) habitats for diverse forms of life.”33 Forests become an enabling environment for Miwa Yoshi to become botanical as he strives toward a new form of subjectivity that expands beyond the confines of his body into the haunted atmosphere that surrounds him, where diverse forms of life commingle with dead spirits. The forest is also a medium in the manner described by the environmental philosopher and media theorist Takemura Shinichi, who uses the language of multiplicity to account for the forest as an assemblage: “Not ‘a forest’ as a gathering of mere trees, but a forest as a singular moving body [undōttai], in which the ‘singular’ is simultaneously ‘many.’ A forest in which things that come to exist and things that are made to exist dissolve into one in time and in space.”34 For Takemura, like Peters, a medium is an enabling environment: “Trees exist . . . as a singular matrix in which various forms of life spontaneously come to be.”35 Talk about botanical potential!

Miwa Yoshi experiences the forest as a matrix in this way. For Miwa, the forest is a medium in which things come into being and pass away suddenly:

At night, Miwa Yoshi would open his window and gaze out on the dimly lit park. The elm trees drew dark shadows, and he could see their leaves fluttering noisily in the wind. There was no one to be seen within the park. Suddenly, he would have the feeling that he could hear the sound of hoarse coughing behind him. It seemed like a cough uttered unconsciously by an indistinct body that was about the same height as himself. While controlling his impulse to abruptly turn around, he stood still and listened closely. He could hear what sounded like the reverberation of wings rubbing together, from insects he couldn’t see that were hidden in the cracks of the pillars, along with the creaking of the floorboard joints. When he slowly turned around to look, of course . . . there was a lonely void in which not a single shape could be found.36

Staring out into the darkness of the matrix of the forest medium, Miwa Yoshi experiences the presence of something just behind him. He is attuned to a presence that is both there and not there, and he lingers on through a reverberating kehai that resembles the empty presence of radio static:

A reverberation that spread forth like a shadow did not disappear into the void. Covering his ears, he weaved his way through the faint buzzing that quietly murmured like a small stream, and before long a certain groaning could be heard. . . . It was a presence of a certain condition in which every moment was meshed together—every moment in which his sense of self piled upon another sense of self, where he wanted to cry out a certain phrase but was unable to. It was a frightening groan that brought with it an unpleasant expression, one that formed the strange scowl of gnawing down on oneself while trying to say the words “I am...”37

Within the matrix of botanical media, Miwa experiences, to paraphrase Takemura, the singular as many. Moments are meshed together, differing selves are piled atop one another. Within the buzzing of the forest, Miwa Yoshi becomes botanical, inhabiting a multiple subjectivity. He cannot finish the sentence “I am myself” because he is no longer himself. He has become a part of the forest and, phytomorphically, has lost the human capacity to declare an individuated identity.

Understood through the language of media, forests become a clear site of plasticity, that capacity for transformation that I have been arguing is central to the trope of becoming botanical. In Takemura’s image of a “moving body” that is both singular and many, we can see the very process of perpetual change and transformation that plasticity names. From the confines of his prison cell, Haniya yearned for a plasticity sufficient enough to accommodate a revolution at the level of existence itself. To be sure, the plasticity Haniya found in the forest was a destructive plasticity, a radical form of transformation that Catherine Malabou describes in language easily applied to the traumatized characters of Dead Spirits: “Something shows itself when there is damage, a cut, something to which normal, creative plasticity gives neither access nor body: the deserting of subjectivity, the distancing of the individual who becomes a stranger to herself, who no longer recognizes anyone, who no longer recognizes herself, who no longer remembers her self.”38

Entering into the forest assemblage requires the “deserting of subjectivity.” Miwa’s inability to say “I am myself” is the encapsulation of what Malabou calls “the distancing of the individual.” Malabou writes further of the subject undergoing the radical changes of destructive plasticity: “We return nowhere. Between life and death we become other to ourselves.”39 In the aftermath of Japan’s loss in war, with friends and relatives hospitalized and unable to speak, Miwa Yoshi responds to the existential dread of having nowhere to return by yearning to become something new, something “other to himself.” He seeks this otherness in the forest, where, drawn into an assemblage with tree media, he finds himself becoming botanical somewhere, in Malabou’s words, “between life and death.”

On Kyotai

Botanical media facilitate an exchange between Miwa Yoshi and the world of the dead, but they offer no concrete language from which to name this new botanical subjectivity. Trees may emit a low, haunting hum throughout the novel, but they do not speak in an anthropomorphic way. Trees are, to invoke Marshall McLuhan’s famous formulation, a medium, not a message. The closest Miwa can come to naming his new subjectivity is the term kyotai, or “empty body”—an empty signifier that names its own falsehood. The “kyo” of kyotai has many meanings, including a hollow or a void. In spite of clear connections to Buddhist cosmology, the word is Haniya’s neologism, and it serves as both a metaphysical rejection of Japan’s wartime political ideology and the seeds for a botanical resistance to an anthropocentric mindset that we can read as environmental. The human body was central to the ideology of Imperial Japan, both in the material form of its subjects and in the abstract form of the National Body, or kokutai. While postwar writers like Tamura Taijirō rediscovered the sensuality of the body after Japan’s defeat, Haniya registered the falsehood of the individuated body, pointing instead to the interconnectedness of human beings and nature. Fujii Takashi’s work on what he calls a “Post-Anthropocentric” tendency in Haniya’s writing goes as far as to claim that we can read Dead Spirits as a novel of the Anthropocene and that Haniya’s posthumanism ends up showcasing the extent to which humans have had a disproportionate impact on the health of the planet writ large.40

Whether or not we find an environmentalist message within Dead Spirits, it is clear that the reconfiguration of subjectivity bound up in the concept of kyotai is environmental. It is also metaphysical—a spiritually inflected environmental framework through which to rethink the human. Miwa coins the term kyotai in response to his repeated inability to speak the words “I am myself” within the botanical realm of kehai, most often during his long walks through the woods. In volume two, he sets out late at night to wander alone, and the narrative is characteristically metaphysical as it offers the following aside to frame Miwa’s walk: “In the wandering of the intoxicated self within vast space, a cosmic consciousness eventually arises.”41 Miwa Yoshi’s walks, for all of their mundanity, are cosmic. They put him in touch with a vastness much larger than the confines of his skin: “He was within a kind of mysterious rustling of the night, one he would find difficult to explain. It was not simply loneliness. There was a singular space, so to speak, along with him, one which moved in tandem with him.”42

Emanuele Coccia has argued that plants are intrinsically cosmic beings, as the process of photosynthesis puts plants in intimate touch with the cosmos. Solar energy is converted by their leaves into “living matter.” “Photosynthesis,” Coccia writes, “is, in this sense, a cosmic process of fluidification of the universe, one of the movements through which the fluid of the world constitutes itself.”43 As they perform this process of helping constitute the world (and, more directly, the atmosphere), plants become media. To explain this, Coccia quotes Kliment Timiryazev, the Russian botanist I discuss at length in chapter 2. Timiryazev writes: “The plant plays a role of a mediator between the Sun and the animal world. The plant, or rather its most typical organ, the chloroplast, is the connection that brings together the activity of all the organic world—everything we call life—to the center of energy of our solar system: such is the cosmic function of the plant.”44 In Dead Spirits, Haniya extends the mediative properties of plants (in the form of trees) to not only bring together “everything we call life” but also to bring together life and death.

Drawn up into a cosmic consciousness opened up by tree media, Miwa Yoshi feels the boundaries of his subjectivity dissolve. He becomes part of something much larger than himself, which makes him feel as though his own individuated sense of self is shrinking: “While the radius that moved in tandem with him (that radius that was in fact himself) gradually narrowed, the end point of this contraction seemed like a dot that was too small for the eye to see. It was like the pointed end of a funnel that seemed to have been pricked by a needle. . . . And with that small dot that was like the end of a needle, he transformed into an infinitesimal particle.”45 As Miwa feels himself simultaneously expanding (to the natural world around him) and contracting (to an infinitesimal sense of self), he feels the need to declare himself an individuated subject: “There was only one thing that Miwa Yoshi—who had become that singular existence of the infinitesimal—wanted to shout from the bottom of his heart. . . . It was, namely, the singular phrase: ‘I am myself.’”46 Once again, Miwa is unable to speak this singular phrase. Something prevents him from completing the self-declaration: “It was undoubtedly foolish, generally speaking, but once he began to mutter the words ‘I am,’ he was unable to continue muttering the final word ‘myself.’”47 Miwa Yoshi’s subjectivity lingers half-spoken in the forest, fractured at the level of the sentence. Kyotai names this cosmic fracturing and releases Miwa from the confines of his body. It allows him to identify as more than himself, as “other to himself,” to return to Malabou’s phrase.

The novel introduces the term kyotai via a conversation between Miwa and Dr. Kishi at the mental institution. The two discuss Miwa Yoshi’s lack of interest in living. After Kishi warns Miwa that such feelings are akin to suicide, Miwa corrects him by explaining that what he is in fact seeking is not death but rather the state of kyotai. Kishi thinks again of death: “Hmm, well. . . . You want to become a ghost. . . . Why, somehow, we’ve certainly entered into a strange conversation befitting a mental institution.”48 Dr. Kishi asks Miwa Yoshi if he believes in God. When Yoshi replies in the negative, Kishi asks, “And yet . . . you wish for kyotai. . . . Isn’t that itself a form of divinity? Of course, your subject here is very complicated, and I recognize it is a form of contradiction.”49 Miwa Yoshi interrupts: “Right, it is contradiction itself.”50

For Miwa Yoshi, contradiction is generative. His desire for kyotai is not a desire for death but rather for a kind of rebirth among botanical media that puts him in contact with the dead. Kyotai thus embraces the seeming contradiction of yearning for rebirth within the realm of dead spirits. Kyotai is Miwa Yoshi’s cosmological means of forging a new subjectivity within the forest, where he faces the contradiction of becoming botanical both despite and yet specifically because he cannot say “I am myself.” It is the contradiction of reimagining oneself as something other than oneself. It is the result of reimagining the human as plantlike, as a multiple being, and, in Coccia’s words, as “the only breach in the self-referentiality of the living.”51 It is the seeming contradiction of rethinking the human through plant life.

Hashimoto Ken and The Secret Life of Plants

In Dead Spirits, Haniya imagines how trees as botanical media can open up a channel of wordless communication between the living and the dead, but in a 1992 conversation with Tachibana Takashi, Haniya also questioned whether humans could engage in some form of direct communication with plants themselves. He recounts a story he heard concerning plants’ response to vibrations, suggesting that plants communicate via sound and that they could possibly understand language:

They say there is a difference between flowers that have been told to “Bloom into beautiful flowers!” and flowers that have not been told to do so. They say that the ones that have been spoken to will bloom beautifully. The first people to realize this said that the reason wildflowers grow and bloom so well near airports is due to the vibrations of the airplanes. . . . That if you play flowers Mozart and Beethoven, that they prefer Mozart. That trees also respond to vibrations. They say the writer Endō Shūsaku says things to his plants like that: “Bloom into beautiful flowers!” This is just a guess, but perhaps in reality, trees do respond to vibrations.52

Haniya goes on to claim that because humans are essentially “anthropocentric” (ningen chūshin shugi), they have not yet conducted ample research on whether or not sound elicits such responses from plants. Tachibana tells Haniya that, actually, there are experiments being conducted in greenhouses in which Mozart’s music is played for plants. He reports that he has heard plants prefer soft music.53 Then, as if suddenly realizing the esoteric and bizarre turn their conversation has taken, Tachibana mentions the mystical world of Haniya’s Dead Spirits: “All of these things—kehai, spirits, the existence of objectively real objects from the other side that are invisible to the eye, the concept of kyotai which comes up again and again in Dead Spirits, the existence of things that have not yet come to be—these all belong to another dimension, don’t they?”54

With this question, Tachibana acknowledges the relationship between the ideas Haniya explores in Dead Spirits and theories of the paranormal. Their conversation naturally flows from Haniya’s experience of kehai in Inokashira Park to the parascience of experimenting with plant communication. Tachibana’s claim that the botanical figures of kehai and kyotai “belong to another dimension” demonstrates how the forests of Dead Spirits are botanical media. According to Tachibana, they sit in the middle of two different dimensions. Tachibana and Haniya’s discussion of parascience entangles Dead Spirits within the same pseudoscientific milieu as one of Japan’s most prominent writers of the paranormal, Hashimoto Ken. In recollecting stories of experiments on plants involving classical music, it is likely that Tachibana and Haniya were discussing the best-selling (and highly controversial) study of plant parascience that introduced Hashimoto Ken to the world stage: Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird’s The Secret Life of Plants (1973).55 The Secret Life of Plants was translated into Japanese in 1987, only five years before Haniya and Tachibana’s conversation. Chapter ten of The Secret Life of Plants, titled “The Harmonic Life of Plants,” discusses at length the history of sound experimentation on plants and mentions how “airport-level noise” has been used to “awaken seeds.”56 It further discusses a series of experiments in which cucurbit gourds were exposed to either rock music or classical music, and it details how they responded differently to each. Although Haniya and Tachibana never mention The Secret Life of Plants by name, their discussion of airport noise and plants’ preference of classical music could easily have been drawn from this chapter of the text.

Hashimoto Ken appears in the third chapter of The Secret Life of Plants, titled “Plants That Open Doors.” The chapter discusses experiments that use electricity to communicate with the botanical realm. It focuses on researchers who took inspiration from the controversial work of Cleve Backster, a central figure in plant pseudoscience who worked for the US Central Intelligence Agency and used his experience with polygraph machines (or “lie-detectors”) to test the limits of what he called “primary perception.” Primary perception, according to the title of Backster’s book of the same name, refers to the belief in “biocommunication with plants, living foods, and human cells.”57 Backster claimed that communication with plants was indeed possible through the medium of the polygraph machine.

In one sense, Hashimoto Ken and Haniya Yutaka were opposites of one another. Haniya wrote of trees as botanical media that served as a conduit to the ineffable spiritual presence of kehai. He did so through the challenging medium of a multivolume novel that was full of philosophical musings and literary allusions.58 Hashimoto, on the other hand, wrote of botanical media as a direct means of speaking with plants and dead spirits, and he did so through accessible books of popular science and television appearances. Hashimoto became something of a media sensation, as he and his wife appeared frequently on Japanese television to demonstrate their ability to speak with plants. Footage of the Hashimotos and their talking cacti (in which they attempt to teach a cactus to speak the Japanese syllabary) can be seen in Walon Green’s 1979 documentary film The Secret Life of Plants, which is based on Tompkins and Bird’s book (and features a soundtrack by Stevie Wonder). Despite their differences, however, both Haniya and Hashimoto were interested in the liminal status of the botanical realm as a site of possibility.

Like Haniya, Hashimoto’s turn to plant life was a response to the trauma of Japan’s wartime period, albeit from the other side of the political spectrum. According to the autobiographical account posted on the website of the Japanese Parascience Association (Nihon Chokagakukai), Hashimoto was drawn to science as an expression of his fervent nationalism for the Japanese military empire: “It was said that in war, victory or defeat was decided by the quality and quantity of scientific weapons. However, the leaders of Japan at that time said things like ‘We will definitely win because the Japanese people have an unsurpassed spiritual strength’ and ‘Japan is the land of the gods, and so a divine wind will blow.’ I disagreed with their thinking and committed myself to expend all my energy so that Japan would win the war. I had always wanted to become an inventor if possible, so I thought I would invent a new weapon for Japan.”59

Hashimoto’s nationalist desire to invent weapons of war brought him to Tokyo Imperial University in 1945 to study science—the same institution at which Osaki Midori’s brother Shirō and Abe Kōbō had studied. However, Hashimoto’s dreams of aiding the war effort quickly evaporated: “A divine wind did not blow, and in the end, Japan was defeated. Japan was unable to develop a new weapon, but the United States developed the atomic bomb. I thus lost my life’s purpose.”60 Hashimoto’s lamentation that “a divine wind did not blow” demonstrates the extent to which Shinto ideology was infused into the rhetoric of war. The notion of a “divine wind,” or kamikaze, was mobilized to famously horrific ends. In seeking to reestablish a metaphysical relationship with the natural world in the postwar moment, Haniya was resisting the kind of State Shinto ideology that Hashimoto claims to have viewed as “his life’s purpose.”

Hashimoto’s willingness to discuss his complicity in Japan’s imperial project sets him apart from the other figures I discuss in this book. Hashimoto himself makes it clear that his interest in science was driven by his militaristic nationalism. Instead of turning to the botanical realm to grow beyond the violence of war, Hashimoto found in plant life a new direction for his belief in the divine once the divinity of the imperial system was thrown into question. In the aftermath of Japan’s surrender to the United States, Hashimoto’s belief in the existence of a divine force did not diminish but rather found a home in New Age parascience. Just as we find botanical science entangled in Japan’s wartime empire (as discussed in chapters 1 and 2 of this book), so, too, do we find an imperial legacy within botanical pseudoscience.

Hashimoto writes of his confusion with and ultimate conviction in the scientific relationship to nativist (i.e., Shinto) modes of spirituality: “Do gods still exist even though a divine wind did not blow and Japan lost the war? I, who loved science and wanted to become a scientist, kept on believing in the existence of gods.”61 After being introduced to Taniguchi Masaharu’s spiritually inflected scientific text Truth of Life (Seimei no jissō, 1937), Hashimoto found a new purpose and devoted himself to the scientific study of the spiritual/paranormal realm during an age when new religions flourished in the postwar loosening of restrictions on religious practice. He would go on to found the Japanese Parascience Association and develop the “alphacoil,” a machine that Hashimoto claimed could solve all kinds of health and psychological issues.62 His appearance in The Secret Life of Plants would cement his status as a leading figure of parascientific plant research—up until the fervent backlash against the book, that is.

That Haniya Yutaka would ultimately be drawn to the dubious findings of The Secret Life of Plants merits a look at Hashimoto’s own engagements with the botanical realm. To a certain degree, Hashimoto looked to rethink the human through plant life, but I am not suggesting that his work offered the same promise of botanical resistance as did the other figures I discuss in this book. Rather, Hashimoto demonstrates the ambiguous position of becoming botanical, namely that it can be used both as a means of resistance and for serving state power depending on its mobilization. To be sure, Hashimoto’s vision of teaching plants to speak was an anthropomorphic dream, far from the phyotomorphic tendencies of becoming botanical. Nevertheless, he belongs to a history of modern Japanese writers who saw, in plant life, a way to communicate with the dead.

In 1966, Hashimoto published an account of parascientific research titled Mysteries of the Fourth Dimensional World (Yojigensekai no shinpi). The work became a bestseller and was in its eighteenth printing by the time Tompkins and Bird wrote The Secret Life of Plants.63 Mysteries of the Fourth Dimensional World is a hodgepodge of supernatural claims that draw equally from scientific evidence and spiritual speculation. Chapter titles include such wide-ranging topics as “Animals Have Precognition,” “A Telepathic Phenomenon Anyone Can Experiment With,” and “Does the Spirit World Exist?” For Hashimoto, the paranormal realm was a place of dead spirits, and like Haniya before him and Itō Seikō after him, Hashimoto imagined making contact with these spirits. In the fourth section of Mysteries of the Fourth Dimensional World, titled “Challenging Modern Biology,” Hashimoto offers an account of haunted media, to borrow Jeffrey Sconce’s term. In a subchapter titled “Is a Spirit Radio Possible?,” Hashimoto explains how, late in his life, Thomas Edison conducted research on “spirit radios” that were able to communicate with the dead. Although Edison was ultimately unable to make contact with the spirit realm via radio, Hashimoto suggests that recent technological developments could make the completion of a spirit radio actually possible. The issue, argues Hashimoto, is overcoming the signal-to-noise ratio and determining where exactly the message emerges from the medium. It would take his discovery of Cleve Backster’s work on plants and polygraphs for Hashimoto to theorize that plants could be the medium through which this spirit radio could be actualized.

Talking Cacti and Spirit Radios

After learning of Backster’s “discovery” of plant communication, Hashimoto began his own experiments with botanical subjects and eventually became a proponent of plant intelligence. With the help of his wife, Hashimoto began attaching polygraph machines to cacti to teach the plants how to speak and sing. Hashimoto would go on to author numerous books about communicating with plants, including How to Talk with Plants (Shokubutsu to ohanashisuru hō, 1995) and Plants Have Minds (Shokubutsu ni wa kokoro ga aru, 1997). Although these texts share Dead Spirit’s interest in the otherworldly status of the botanic realm, they posit the opposite scenario of the wordless subjectivity of kyotai that Miwa Yoshi finds within the forest. In Dead Spirits, Haniya turned to the liminal presence of kehai to rethink human subjectivity as more botanical. Hashimoto, however, attempted to rethink botanical subjectivity as more human and claimed that direct communication via language is possible between humans and plants. Hashimoto assured readers, “You too can talk with plants!”64 His books abound with anthropomorphic drawings of plants that turn the multiple subjectivity of the botanical realm into an individuated, humanlike mode of being (see figure 3.3).

Hashimoto claimed that plants could understand human language and respond through the polygraph machine: “I have claimed that ‘plants too have minds,’ and have attached polygraphs to cacti. When I called out to these cacti, ‘Cactus-san, Cactus-san, if you do have a mind, please move the needle of the polygraph machine,’ the needle of the polygraph made large movements.”65 The Secret Life of Plants portrays Hashimoto’s experiments in a playful light: “Transformed and amplified by Dr. Hashimoto’s electronic equipment, the sound produced by the plant was like the high-pitched hum of very-high-voltage wires heard from a distance, except that it was more like a song, the rhythm and tone being varied and pleasant, at times even warm and almost jolly.”66 The sounds produced by the cacti are a far cry from the sounds of the forests in Dead Spirits, which give Miwa Yoshi a “feeling as if, from somewhere in the still silence of the forest, an indistinct rumble was occurring. . . . It was a presence that seemed to be hunting him down.”67 Hashimoto’s parascience turns the liminal, haunting rumbles of kehai into an accessible language that is “warm and almost jolly.” This is indeed the feeling we get watching Hashimoto’s wife teach a cactus to speak Japanese in the film version of The Secret Life of Plants. It is uncanny but also quite humorous to hear the cacti respond “ah” (i.e., the first sound of the Japanese syllabary) at Mrs. Hashimoto’s prodding.

There is nevertheless an uncanny echo of the Hashimotos’ experiments with polygraphs in Haniya’s Dead Spirits. The fifth volume of the novel, which Haniya published in 1975 after a twenty-six-year hiatus, introduces a concept that Miwa Yoshi’s friend/secret brother Kubi calls the “Telephone Box of the Dead.” Kubi proposes that if the body of someone dying were attached to electric probes, a machine would be able to receive transmissions from the body at a cellular level and move a needle to indicate a response from the dying consciousness. In effect, Haniya is describing a polygraph machine and imagining that it could serve as a medium to speak directly with the dead or at least those on the cusp of dying. It is possible Haniya borrowed this idea from Abe Kōbō’s science fiction novel Inter Ice Age 4 (Dai-yon kanpyōki, published between 1958 and 1959), in which a dead body is attached by electrodes to a computer equipped with artificial intelligence. It is unlikely, however, that Haniya was familiar with Hashimoto’s work at this point of writing Dead Spirits, as it would take a few more years for The Secret Life of Plants to appear in Japanese. Nevertheless, their shared interest in the polygraph as a medium for extrasensory communication is striking, if not outright mysterious.

To be sure, Hashimoto never proposed attaching electrodes to human bodies, either alive or dead. Still, he was passionately interested in finding a way to communicate with those who had passed on to the other side. In a 1971 article published in the journal Mental Science (Seishin Kagaku) titled “Singing Cacti” (“Utau saboten”), Hashimoto explains that his ultimate goal with plant research is to invent a spirit radio, not unlike the one that would come to serve as the premise of Itō Seikō’s Radio Imagination some forty years later. Where Itō’s spirit radio functions as a medium that brings together the living and dead in the aftermath of the national/natural catastrophe that was/is 3.11, Hashimoto imagines his spirit radio as a more personal medium that can connect one to their deceased grandparents.68 Hashimoto believed plants could serve as the missing piece to this spirit radio. Throughout his career, he fervently claimed that plants have minds, and yet in his figuration of the spirit radio, he refers to plants as machinelike, effectively denying them the kind of subjectivity he posits elsewhere: “What kind of apparatus exists to change spirit waves [reiha] into electricity, so that we can receive them? I am conducting various experiments, but I have not been able to find a spirit wave transducer. . . . Minerals have proven complicated, but it seems living beings could work. Not higher living beings like humans, but rather simple beings. Plants more so than animals, or bacteria—beings that are closer to machines.”69

As he proposes that plants could be the perfect medium to receive spirit waves, Hashimoto upholds an evolutionary hierarchy that places humans above other living beings (a hierarchy Osaki Midori rejected in her work). Even though plants can speak, sing, and make contact with the dead, they are, according to Hashimoto’s logic here, nonetheless at the bottom of the evolutionary ladder. Drawn into an assemblage with humans, dead spirits, and electric apparatuses, plants seemingly trade their “secret lives” for the role of machines. They become specimens, objects of experimentation, much like the dendrocacalia at the end of Abe Kōbō’s story that I discussed in chapter 2. Hashimoto’s cacti are ironically stripped of the very voice his experiments originally sought to find. Instead, they become only a channel for the voice of dead spirits. They become pure medium, devoid of any kehai or presence of their own.

Curiously, a cactus also appears in Haniya’s Dead Spirits. In the fourth chapter, we are introduced to Ogi Tsuneko, a young woman who lives next door to a Korean man named Yi Poyan. Yi tends to a solitary cactus in his room. Ogi recounts that Yi believes that “cacti are the strongest plants in the world.”70 For Haniya, the cactus is meant to stand in for Yi’s “self-reliance”: “Cacti live in the desert and support themselves with only the smallest amount of moisture. This is meant to resemble Yi’s spirit.”71 Far from the expansive role he gives trees in the novel, the cactus functions at the barest stage of symbolism. For Haniya, cacti were neither medium nor message, but merely metaphor.

Shinboku and the Fear of Plasticity

Trees occupy an even more complicated place in Hashimoto’s work than cacti. This is because trees, more so than any of the plants he discusses, were tied to Shinto belief. If Hashimoto truly did lose his life’s purpose once the “divine wind” did not blow during WWII, and if he truly did wish to continue “believing in the existence of gods” all the same, then it was the tree that allowed him to combine his faith in a Shinto cosmology with the pseudoscience of the paranormal. In How to Talk with Plants, he includes a chapter titled “Do You Believe in ‘Tree Spirits?’” (“Anata wa ‘ki no tama’ o shinjimasuka?”) that discusses the tradition of Ushi no koku mairi, or the “Ox-hour Shrine Visit,” in which a “deeply jealous woman” visits a Shinto shrine around two o’clock in the morning and nails a straw doll meant to represent their rival in love into a shinboku.72 Hashimoto explains that the purpose of this ritual was to enact a curse on the woman’s rival, ultimately resulting in their death.73 This tradition, Hashimoto argues, should not be dismissed as mere superstition. Hashimoto wants readers to take the shinboku seriously.

Religion and spirituality overlap in Hashimoto’s writing in strange ways. The tension between science and religion is the main topic of his 1988 book Science? Or Religion? (Kagaku ka? Shūkyō ka?). In this book, he once again recounts his disillusionment with Japan’s loss in war, writing that while the postwar era of peace was something to be happy about, “we Japanese also lost a certain something, something important: piety (patriotism).”74 Hashimoto’s clear conflation of religious piety with nationalism is striking. The specter of imperial divinity (and Hashimoto’s grief over its loss at the end of WWII) hangs over the rest of this book, which goes on to sing the praises of the alphacoil and its potential to heal the sick. In his earlier book Mysteries of the Fourth Dimensional World, Hashimoto claims that what parascience looks to uncover is precisely the presence of gods: “Long ago, a scholar once claimed: ‘If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.’ This is true. There are gods. Deep in your subconscious, in a world of higher dimensions that far surpasses the third and fourth dimensions. . . . There we find unlimited law and knowledge, and in addition, we find a human-like personality and unlimited love. I believe we are inclined to give this the name ‘god.’ Parapsychology is in the process of discovering gods.”75 This is typical of Hashimoto’s take on religion. He presents a New Age in-between that enfolds things like ESP and communication with the dead into an amorphous spirituality that avoids direct connection to established religion, except in the cases where Hashimoto laments the loss of a nationalistic belief in Shinto and emperor worship that enabled the Japanese during wartime to “survive each day while feeling able to endure extreme hardship in order to attain their objective.”76

By and large, Hashimoto does not discuss plant life when he ruminates on “gods” and the possibility for parascience to become a new form of spirituality. Yet Hashimoto’s discussion of shinboku is an exception, and it is one that complicates his parascientific view of “gods.” This is because shinboku are tied to Shinto ideology, a system of belief that propelled his interest in science in the first place. Hashimoto has a difficult time reconciling a Shinto view of shinboku with his belief in plant communication. In what comes to resemble Haniya’s figuration of kehai in Dead Spirits, and of Miwa Yoshi’s feeling of a “presence that pressed down around him” in the forest, Hashimoto describes a menacing, spiritual atmosphere that surrounds shinboku: “Shinboku are without exception very old trees. Most likely, from long ago, humans have felt the presence of tree spirits in very old trees. For example, even when people today stand in front of giant trees that are a thousand years old, they likely feel that particular atmosphere that floats through the air around them. They feel a sense of intimidation that is somewhat spiritual.”77 Hashimoto argues that the “Ox-hour Shrine Visit” ritual involved a form of telepathic communication between humans and shinboku: “Human scorn is directed into the trunk of the shinboku as the nail is driven in. In a manner of speaking, an intense telepathy is cast (toward the shinboku).”78 What is curious here is that elsewhere, Hashimoto excludes “regular” trees from the capacity of telepathic communication. Despite his firm belief in telepathy and plant consciousness (an idea he explores in detail in a chapter from How to Talk with Plants, titled “Plants’ Words Might Be Telepathic”), the idea of tree telepathy becomes somewhat suspect: “Up to now, I have seen many instances of plants having miraculous abilities, but I imagine that even for a tree, (telepathic communication) is an abnormal situation. This type of abnormal situation—a paranormal phenomenon unthinkable to the average human—was likely quite rare.”79

Within a body of work that purports to explain a step-by-step method to communicate with plants, Hashimoto loses certainty when it comes to trees. His sudden hesitation to claim that humans can communicate with trees speaks to the history of the shinboku (to once again paraphrase Timiryazev) and its place in nativist notions of spirituality. Shinboku were special. They possessed a Sacred shokubutsusei that was not to be confused with other trees. Thus, by and large, Hashimoto focused on other, less ideologically implicated forms of plant life. He did not attach trees to polygraph machines. He did not attempt to teach trees the Japanese language, as he did with cacti. This is because bound up in the figure of the thousand-year-old shinboku was an “intimidating” force that was also spiritual. If Hashimoto wished to keep believing in the gods, then he would need to leave trees alone in his research.

In the crisis of defeat in war he thought was divinely inspired, Hashimoto held on to the shinboku as divine, denying it a place in his new paranormal worldview. In an attempt to explain the haunting aura of the shinboku, Hashimoto ultimately turns to the psychoanalytic language of projection: “In psychology, there is a rule that states, ‘what you fear manifests itself.’ Just like a movie where the things burnt into the film appear on the screen, the world of the unconscious eventually gets projected onto the three-dimensional world of ours.”80 What Hashimoto truly seemed to fear by continuing to project a nativist spirituality onto the shinboku was precisely the kind of plasticity that Haniya found in regular trees, like those he remembered in Inokashira Park. Hashimoto may have believed in the plasticity of human subjectivity (insofar as parascience depends on this), but unlike Haniya, Hashimoto did not posit that trees could occasion a rethinking of the human.

In his work of arboreal philosophy Cosmic Tree (2004), Takemura Shinichi argues that trees do indeed have their own history, but that it is history that cannot be limited to a singular human construct like spirituality: “When we say, in one breath, a thousand-year-old tree, it does not connote a tree that has continued to live without change for a thousand years as a singular self. The expression should be read as signifying a multiple ‘narrative’ in which various histories are interwoven, and as an incessantly reorganizing self.”81 A tree, in other words, is a multiplicity, and as a multiplicity, it comes up against the limits of ideological interpolation by systems of belief like Shintoism. For Hashimoto, the tree, as an “incessantly reorganizing self,” was too plastic. In works like Haniya’s Dead Spirits, the tree could be rethought as something new, as something spiritual but not tied to nativist tradition. For all of the potential Hashimoto saw in plant life, and in his pseudoscientific approach to understanding plant life, he ultimately feared the transformative plasticity bound up in this kind of botanical becoming. He may have believed that he could teach plants to be more like humans, but he never questioned what it would mean for humans to be more like plants.

Hashimoto Ken’s books sold well in the era of The Secret Life of Plants, but today, they are long out of print. They are obscurities to be found in used bookstores, not on shelves next to translations of CPS texts—although, as I recounted in the introduction to this book, the Japanese translation of The Secret Life of Plants remains in print. The infamous legacy of The Secret Life of Plants has undoubtedly impacted Hashimoto’s own legacy. Nevertheless, his experiments have gone on to have a ghostly afterlife of their own. In 2017, filmmakers Elise Florenty and Marcel Türkowsky released Conversation with a Cactus, a nonnarrative experimental film that reflects on and reenacts Hashimoto’s research on plants. The artists’ statement in the official press release for the film reads:

Conversation with a Cactus is an exploration of self and other, myth and history, truth and false, seen through a cosmology of signs and stories that reveal the different ways in which the Hashimoto experiment was received. The film retraces the utopia the experiment generated, and the way it was perverted by the japanese [sic] media. With a defiance of the division between documentary and fiction, the experiment becomes itself object of the film’s incapacity to demystify the Hashimoto legend. Eventually something else is more important than the question of whether Hashimoto’s findings are valid, whether plants are therefore able to sense, speak or think: the concept of a possible other speech, a post human perspective on the world that the figure of the witness-bearing plant embodies.82

In its concern with a “post human perspective on the world,” Florenty and Türkowsky’s Conversation with a Cactus rethinks Hashimoto’s work and finds a way to transform it into something far more in line with contemporary CPS thought. It turns Hashimoto’s pseudoscience into a kind of visual poetry with its own botanical poetics. In the medium of cinema, Hashimoto’s legacy finally becomes botanical.

Itō Seikō and Botanical Life

We can find traces of Hashimoto’s legacy in other places as well. In his 1983 examination of cacti titled Cacti Illusions (Shaboten gensō), the novelist and cacti enthusiast Ryūtanji Yū writes of witnessing experiments on television in which polygraph machines were attached to cacti to facilitate communication. Although he does not state outright that it was the Hashimotos in front of the camera, we can likely assume it was. The television demonstrations inspired Ryūtanji to conduct his own experiments with cacti and polygraphs. Ryūtanji argues that cacti make for the ideal specimens because they are mere “blisters” that fill up with gas like balloons, unlike trees and grasses that are fibrous. This, Ryūtanji argues, makes them more conducive to electricity.83

More recent, however, is Itō Seikō’s 2013 novel Radio Imagination—one of the best-known literary responses to 3.11. Radio Imagination presents a scenario that could have been taken directly from the pages of one of Hashimoto’s largely forgotten texts. The story of a deceased DJ broadcasting out to the living and dead in the aftermath of 3.11, Radio Imagination presents trees as botanical media. Over sixty years after Haniya began writing Dead Spirits, Itō Seikō likewise embraced the mysterious realm of the forest as a means of working through trauma. Radio Imagination searches for plasticity in the botanical realm in response to the haunting losses occasioned by 3.11 and finds hope rather than fear within the cosmic presence of trees.

Itō Seikō has had a diverse career. He started performing as a rapper in the late 1980s, and he published his first novel, No-Life King (Nō raifu kingu), in 1988. Since the 1980s, Itō has continued writing both fiction and nonfiction while also creating music and contributing to Japanese television, radio, and cinema. Upon its release, Radio Imagination was his first novel in over fifteen years. Perhaps more than anything, Itō is well known for his writings about plants. In 1999, he published Botanical Life (Botanikaru raifu—shokubutsu seikatsu), a collection of online journal entries that spanned several years and discussed the plants Itō cared for on the veranda of his Tokyo apartment. The nonfictional work was subsequently made into a television drama, cementing Itō’s reputation as a plant fanatic.

In Botanical Life, Itō Seikō writes directly of kehai in relation to plants. Like Haniya before him, he finds an aural quality to this presence: “The wind has become warm since around the end of April. A presence [kehai] that I find difficult to describe permeates the space among the plants which I cannot determine are either alive or dead. It is a subtle presence, but it is also blatant. . . . The plants emit this kehai throughout the veranda like a chirping cricket hidden from sight.”84 Much like Miwa Yoshi in Dead Spirits, the subtle presence of kehai renders Itō speechless in Botanical Life: “I nearly lose all words in front of these green beings [midoritachi] that possess a short but tremendous life force [ikioi].”85 In language that resembles both the figurations of disturbance ecology in the films of Yanagimachi Mitsuo and Kawase Naomi, which I discuss in chapter 4, and the overwhelming destructive and reproductive power of plants found in the work of fellow “botanical writer” Hiromi Ito, which I discuss in chapter 5, Itō Seikō envisions the green life force of plants—a force he phytomorphically believes exists within humans as well—as simultaneously deadly and regenerative:

Plants are a singular life form that emerge from planetary systems. They adopt a curious green substance from the exterior world, and silently wait for something. Like the previously mentioned kehai, I don’t know what this “something” is. It is a “something” that is threatening, yet also desirable. I have the feeling that perhaps that “something” is the destruction of all life on earth. From that day forward, the cosmic substance called “green” that exists within each of us will cover the earth. At times I am shocked that I, too, am wishing for this day along with the plants.86

Itō’s daily encounters with plants on his veranda give way to this complex, cosmic philosophical take on the relationship between plant and human life, and the relationship between life and death themselves. Itō views plants as both singular and multiple, infused with a “green” essence or life force that exists within human subjectivity, ready to emerge and cover the globe in “the destruction of all life on earth.” Written in 1997 (two years after the final volume of Dead Spirits was published and also the year of Haniya’s death), this passage from Botanical Life anticipates the coming of creative destruction. Read in the hindsight of the Tōhoku triple disaster, it eerily presages the stakes of Radio Imagination.

Radio Imagination reads like the curious offspring of Haniya’s Dead Spirits and the writings of Hashimoto Ken. Like Dead Spirits, characters in Radio Imagination become botanical within assemblages with the forest. They look to move beyond the trauma of loss by becoming botanical. And like a page out of Hashimoto’s parascience, the botanical assemblages of Radio Imagination become media in the form of a spirit radio that can communicate with the dead. The majority of the novel is told via direct address in the manner of a radio broadcast, through the voice of a deceased DJ named Ark. Miraculously, DJ Ark’s broadcast reaches out to both the living and the dead in the aftermath of 3.11. He broadcasts from atop a giant cedar tree (which, again, is sugi in Japanese). From the top of this tree, the deceased DJ Ark gives a voice to those who have recently lost their own. He engages in on-air conversations with both living and dead “callers,” several of whom recount their traumatic experiences. It is a work of many voices, a kind of collaborative narrative that is held together by the conceit of the radio program.

The novel arouses the spiritual affect of trees by drawing an explicit connection between the cedar tree and purported ancient spiritual beliefs. In an exchange with an elderly listener, DJ Ark is reminded of the spiritual significance of the cedar and the deep connection between dead spirits and the natural world. This spiritual connection is not of the kind Hashimoto wrote of in his discussion of shinboku. Instead, we find a more diffuse, more plastic form of spirituality that runs throughout Radio Imagination. The listener’s story to DJ Ark is full of ellipses and contradictions, far from formalized: “I have heard that from time immemorial spirits [tamashi] have floated up to the top of trees. Spirits crawl the earth. . . . Since the arrival of Buddhism . . . we Japanese feel . . . the spirits of those who have passed have not only gone off to the far away Pure Land. They have surely merged [dōka shite] with trees and boulders. . . . They are closely watching over the living. . . . The other side is right there.”87 Within the spiritual logic of Radio Imagination, DJ Ark’s dead spirit finds its natural place atop the cedar where it merges with the tree, as spirits have done “since time immemorial.” But this spiritual merging, for all its connection to the past and nativist ideology, gives way to something new. The cedar tree forms an assemblage with the dead spirit of DJ Ark and becomes a spiritual medium that Itō incorporates into the medium of radio. The sacred tree transforms into a radio tower. If The Secret Life of Plants made it possible to imagine plants listening to music, Radio Imagination makes it possible for the botanical realm to broadcast music to listeners, both living and dead.

Moving Forward with the Dead

The botanical radio broadcast is DJ Ark’s attempt to help the traumatized subjects of Japan’s largest modern natural disaster cope with loss. Nearly twenty thousand people lost their lives on March 11, 2011, as a magnitude 9.1 earthquake off the northeast coast of Japan’s main island Honshū set in motion a tsunami that reached over an estimated 130 feet in size. These two natural disasters resulted in a third, human-made disaster—the catastrophic meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Like Haniya in the immediate postwar, Itō looked for a way to adapt to a radically changed world in the face of these crises. Also like Haniya, he saw in the botanical realm a framework for change in the face of unspeakable trauma. Radio Imagination is the story of how botanical media leads to plasticity and a rethinking of the human in the wake of 3.11. Put differently, Radio Imagination is the story of a post-3.11 botanical imagination.

DJ Ark explains that he named his son Sōsuke (the first character of which means “grass”) “with the hope that, as he grew, he would be vibrant and able to bend in the wind, however it may blow.” This is the plasticity the novel seeks, as Radio Imagination is populated with characters struggling to bend in the metaphorical wind of a post-3.11 Japan.88 The resilient, ever-changing tree and the supple blade of grass bending in the wind present a new form of subjectivity that responds to the pervasive fear of both present and future catastrophe, a reasonable fear given the still-unfolding nuclear event and the ever-present possibility of future earthquakes and tsunamis. Plasticity allows for the construction of what Catherine Malabou calls “the post-traumatized subject” who, she claims, “disconnects the structure of the always already. The post-traumatized subject is the nevermore of the always already.”89 The post-traumatized subject is, in other words, like the “incessantly reorganizing self” that Takemura Shinichi finds in trees. Plant life helps Itō and the characters he writes into Radio Imagination learn how to grow anew as post-traumatized subjects.

Much like Abe Kōbō in “Dendrocacalia,” however, Itō is cautious of moving too quickly past the trauma of crisis. Itō decides to “stay with the trouble” (to once again borrow Donna Haraway’s phrase) by lingering with the dead spirits of 3.11. The novel’s fourth and penultimate chapter is narrated from the perspective of S (a Fukushima volunteer who serves as the focus of the novel’s second chapter as well) and consists entirely of a conversation between S and a woman with whom he has been engaged in a romantic relationship. Over the course of their conversation, it becomes clear that the woman has died in the disasters of 3.11. S discusses the important role the spirits of the dead play in constructing a future-oriented national subjectivity: “All we can do is remake this country together with the dead. Who are we that we continue to put a lid on the situation as if nothing happened? What will happen to this country?”90 Despite its invocation of national identity, it is here that we find Itō’s call to resistance. As a novel that looks to bring light to an unfolding crisis increasingly covered up by the state and news media, Radio Imagination resists like a tree and grows up and out of the “lid” put on the situation. As it does so, it finds common roots with past crises.

S looks back over Japanese history, finding in the past not a repetition of the “always already” but rather the potential for remaking: “At the time of the Tokyo air raids . . . and at the time when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and the time it was dropped on Nagasaki, and all the times of all the other many disasters, did we not move forward hand in hand with the dead? Yet, at some point, this country stopped being able to hold hands with the dead. Why is this? . . . I think it’s because we stopped listening to their voices.”91 The assemblage of DJ Ark and the cedar tree restores the ability for the living to hear these voices. It opens a channel to the ghostly realm that Haniya likewise opened in the wake of war, including the “Tokyo air raids” of which Itō writes. Itō thus suggests that the only way to adapt and become anew is to look to the past for precedent and to look for a way to connect to the dead as a means of moving forward.

The giant cedar tree broadcasting out to the living and the dead seems to accomplish this need to both embrace the past and yet move on. Taking the shokubutsusei of trees seriously, we can see how trees like the one at the center of Radio Imagination are, to return to Takemura’s claim, “a multiple ‘narrative’ in which various histories are interwoven” and “an incessantly reorganizing self.” This image of the tree as a collection of histories that come together and support the growth of something new operates on several levels in Itō’s work. It is in this image that we find the formal qualities that make Radio Imagination a work of becoming botanical. As a collection of voices speaking to one another—some alive, some dead, overlapping, and all contributing to the medium of the radio show—the novel itself comes to resemble a tree in its multiplicity and overlapping temporalities. At the same time, this is also the subjective state that the novel proposes as a means to rethink the human. Radio Imagination suggests that we should all become like the cedar itself, a medium that connects to the dead and to the past. It is in opening oneself up in this way that one allows a future to emerge.

Yet there is a bitter irony in Itō’s arboreal futurity. This is because large swathes of forest (including many cedars) have been irradiated in the wake of 3.11 (see figure 3.4). Their future is murky at best, having not received the “decontamination” efforts towns and cities have. Radioactivity continues to circulate through forest ecosystems, impacting more-than-humans and humans alike.92 The Japanese Forestry Agency has been hesitant to cut down these irradiated trees, fearing exposure to forest workers. At the same time, according to Satoru Miura, “radioactive contamination of forests has affected people economically and altered rural lifestyles, as forests comprise 71% of Fukushima Prefecture and many people make a living from harvesting forest products. Large-scale radioactive contamination of forests is the main problem interfering with revitalization and reconstruction following the Fukushima nuclear accident.”93 What kind of future can emerge from such a forest? If the prewar cedars of Inokashira Park became part of the “dead spirits” that haunt Haniya’s writing, the cedars of the irradiated forests of Fukushima become something else in Itō’s Radio Imagination. They become figures of the undead. They become botanical media that stand between humans and ionizing radiation that threatens to foreclose any possibility of an easy adaptation to crisis.

Botanical Subjectivity as Media, All the Way Down

The ninth and final volume of Haniya’s Dead Spirits (published in 1995) presents an even murkier, less certain vision of the future than Radio Imagination. The principal characters all gather at a birthday celebration for Mrs. Tsuda, the mother of Miwa Yoshi’s fiancé Yasuko. They sit around a large table and discuss many of the philosophical concerns the text has raised in its previous eight volumes over the span of nearly half a century. Miwa Yoshi and Yasuko discuss Miwa’s philosophical difficulty in recognizing himself as an individuated subject. Miwa tells Yasuko, “The impression I am given is that throughout the history of existence, thinking that ‘I, am, myself’ is a singular trap meant to keep one existing.”94 In the final moments of the narrative, Miwa Yoshi is finally able to declare that “I am myself,” albeit in a fractured form separated by commas. He concludes that the belief in the unified subjectivity that the phrase “I am myself” names is merely a “trap” set to keep one living, a subjective trap set in the name of futurity.

Yasuko counters by mentioning a previous conversation the two shared with their friend Kurokawa in chapter 8: “[Kurokawa] said: ‘There is a “self” that is “the first of its kind in the universe.” . . . A creation that is entirely new and completely terrifying.’”95 In this exchange, Yasuko offers Miwa Yoshi the promise of plasticity, of a future as a subject “[disconnected from] the structure of the always already,” to return to Malabou’s language. Yasuko offers the promise of a subjectivity that is “the first of its kind in the universe.” Staring ahead into the darkness, Miwa loses his ability to speak and replies that he can “say no more.” As the novel once again returns to silence, the figuration of botanical media emerges: “Afterwards, the reverberation of those short, blunt words were drowned out by a murmuring which unexpectedly arose above the long, narrow table. It was, so to speak, a deep, deep, deep murmuring that was difficult to hear, a murmuring that leaked out in a never-ending welcome from large, old floorboards of firm, woody substance in secret small rooms. It was like the reverberation of a secret and profound arboreal symphony [mokushitsu kōkyōkyoku] that plays on and on from distant and dim ancient forests.”96

Language fails Miwa Yoshi once again, and the deep, cosmic reverberation of kehai returns. Like the cedar tree of Radio Imagination, the ancient forest medium of Dead Spirits broadcasts an unending musical score. Yet unlike the final song broadcast in Itō’s novel—Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song”—the “arboreal symphony” that hangs in the air of the final chapter of Dead Spirits does not offer a clear promise of a future. It does not offer any redemption. Instead, it remains in an infinite loop of indeterminacy, “forever welcoming” but “difficult to hear.”

Not all forests were as “distant” and “difficult to hear” for Haniya, however. In a short 1986 essay/fragment that was likely intended for Dead Spirits titled “Echo” (“Kodama”), the forest begins to reverberate deep within human subjectivity, phyotomorphically: “Something dwells deep in the dark forest within my heart. When I cry out, ‘I am myself,’ all that comes back is the cruel, never-ending reverberation of ‘You are still not yourself.’”97 Haniya calls this reverberation a “mysterious echo that eternally negates, from deep in the dark forest within my heart.”98 With a dark forest deep inside his heart, Haniya (and/or perhaps Miwa Yoshi) is denied an individuated subjectivity, and he becomes a botanical medium himself, through which a never-ending echo (a word that literally translates from the Japanese kodama as “tree spirit”) reverberates on and on, forever reminding him that he is other to himself.

As Haniya writes of his own subjectivity becoming a medium, he highlights how one medium can become an environment for yet another medium to emerge, as John Durham Peters has argued.99 We see in this essay how the medium of writing is the enabling environment that provides a habitat for botanical media to emerge. For as much as Haniya and Itō were concerned with making contact with the dead, their works give life to language in the form of novels. Both Haniya and Itō ultimately suggest that writers themselves are, first and foremost, mediums. In the second chapter of Radio Imagination, during the long van ride from Fukushima to Tokyo that takes up the entirety of the chapter, a group of Fukushima volunteers discuss the role of spiritual mediums in communicating with the dead. They recount an experience of witnessing spiritual mediums at a memorial ceremony held at the Hiroshima Peace Park. S, who is a writer by trade and suffers from hearing problems, laments that he is unable to hear the mysterious spirit radio broadcast about which the others talk. He discusses the status of writing with his fellow volunteer Kimura, who tells the group: “I don’t understand much about writers, but I think that they are those that hear voices in their hearts and give expression to them as words. It’s not that they talk to them directly like spiritual mediums, but they turn the voices into words later on.”100 Kimura does not see writers as spiritual mediums that can speak directly to dead spirits, but he nonetheless views them as channels through which the words of the dead can emerge.

This is true of Haniya and Itō themselves. As they sought to become botanical and embraced trees as media, these two writers, separated by decades of turbulent history, became a type of media through which the kehai presence of dead spirits found a voice. Like Miwa Yoshi in Dead Spirits, they were no longer bound to a singular subjectivity that would declare “I am myself.” Instead, they could embrace the space in between the “I am . . .” and the “myself,” leaving it open as a channel for something new, for transformation. In the space of that medium, they brought forth, in words, the haunting reverberation that emerges in the space between trees, as Dead Spirits describes it: “The faint reverberation of trees rubbing up against each other from deep within a dark forest somewhere far, far away.”101 Perhaps if, as readers, we attune ourselves in the right way, we can hear something new in this botanical symphony, something interwoven with the past but sprouting new branches all the same.