Epilogue Botanical Models
In the introduction of this book, I introduced Gregory Bateson’s “syllogism in grass”:
Such phytomophoric logic has been at the heart of this book. It served as a starting point meant to shake up the way we conventionally think about both humans and plants and to help us consider the ways in which we share more in common with botanical life than we usually admit. Now, in this epilogue, I would like to take Bateson’s syllogism one step further, drawing from the insights of the preceding chapters:
Men are grass.
Grass does not die.
Men do not die.
We might call this the phytomorphic extreme, a “syllogism in undying grass” that pushes us to consider how humans live on beyond death, much like plants themselves. This idea—that in becoming more plantlike humans can rethink death—was envisioned by all of the figures discussed in the book. In one way or another, each chapter here has ended with the idea that plant life challenges clear notions of life and death, and as such, each chapter has ended by challenging the very notion of an ending. Chapter 1 closed with the image of Osaki Midori springing back to life like dried moss given water. Chapter 2 ended with the dark legacy of scientific naming, a kind of afterlife of the dendrocacalia plant that keeps it frozen in colonial time. The end of chapter 3 found dead spirits continuing to speak through writers who themselves searched for a way to communicate with the dead via botanical media. Chapter 4 focused on the ongoing cycles of death and rebirth found in disturbance ecology. Chapter 5 hoped that Hiromi Ito’s own hope for becoming botanical through secular migration would come back to life like the plants and plantlike humans found in her poetry and prose. In the spirit of these artists and the plants with which they were engaged, I want to end this book by tying it back to the beginning, thereby embodying a rhizomatic structure that defies the notion of an ending.
It is fitting that a book about rethinking plants (and rethinking the human through plant life) should resist closure. The relatively long span of time covered in this book—beginning in the early Shōwa era and ending in the contemporary moment—is only a blip of time for some of the plants discussed in these pages. Take, for example, the Jakushinsan camphor discussed in chapter 5. The stretch of turbulent history discussed in this book, with all its various crises, is but a fraction of the lifespan of this over eight-hundred-year-old tree. It lived long before Osaki Midori began writing, and it will live long after the writer of this book (i.e., me) has passed on. To think in a more plantlike way is to acknowledge that the botanical realm ultimately exceeds the boundaries of our human knowledge production, including our periodization of history and our paradigms for understanding plant life, be they scientific, aesthetic, spiritual, or some combination of these three. By letting plants guide our way of thinking, we can think anew about the ways in which historical crises borne of Japanese imperialism and capitalist exploitation are themselves not yet finished. Like plants, the systems that have perpetuated violence have adapted and taken on new forms. The extractive system of Japanese colonial botany discussed in chapters 1 and 2 lives on in the exploitative timber extraction from Southeast Asia discussed in chapter 4. The scientific categorization of plant life likewise discussed in the first two chapters of this book sprouts anew as a means of controlling both human and plant migration in chapter 5. Remember the aspen discussed in the introduction, that grove of seemingly separate trees that, deep down, was one organism? The crises brought together in this book are entangled in a similar way. Deep down, they share roots and continue to grow and change. If we think of them like plants, might we not be better able to tend to them and trace their entanglements across decades, and perhaps even further?
With this in mind, I want to conclude with one last look at how plant life defies human-centered ideas of temporality. Nearly a century after Osaki Midori wrote about mosses falling in love in Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense, the popular novelist and essayist Miura Shion published a botanical novel titled A World Without Love (Ai naki sekai, 2018) that reads like a contemporary reimagining (or what we might consider a rebirth) of Osaki’s novella. There is an uncanny overlap between the two stories, as if Miura’s tale is a vegetal offspring of Osaki’s, one that had been buried in the soil waiting to sprout. As outlined in chapter 1 of this book, the protagonist of Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense, Machiko, watches from the sidelines as her brothers engage in scientific research. She cleans, cooks, fails at writing poetry, and dreams of becoming botanical to escape the confines of the small house that she shares with her male family members. In A World Without Love, it is a young female graduate student named Motomura Sae who studies plant biology. At T University (which is almost certainly meant to be Tokyo University, a site for botanical knowledge that has appeared many times throughout this book), Motomura researches the leaves of Arabidopsis thaliana, commonly known in English as thale cress and in Japanese as shiroinunazuna.
Motomura becomes acquainted with Fujimaru Yōta, a twenty-something-year-old delivery man who works at a restaurant (and lives in a small apartment above it) near her research lab. In an inversion of Machiko learning of plants from her scientist brother Ichisuke, in A World Without Love, it is Motomura who opens Fujimaru’s eyes to the wonders of plant life. She invites him to view a leaf under her microscope, and Fujimaru sees the secret life of the botanical realm: “A galaxy spread out before his eyes. Within the darkness was scattered countless silver specks. . . . A beautiful, lonely galaxy existing inside of a tiny leaf.”2 Fujimaru sees the infinitesimally small world of the leaf become the expanse of a star-filled galaxy. Osaki saw something similar when she wrote of there existing “within a thin reed/a spirit as wide as the cosmos.”3 In the microscope, Fujimaru glimpses the potential of becoming botanical, just as Machiko did looking over the mosses on her brother’s desk. The world of plants once again becomes a potential site of change, as it offers Fujimaru a sense of wonder that has been absent in his constricted life centered around the restaurant.
Motomura grounds Fujimaru’s poetic vision of becoming botanical in scientific fact. She explains that the nucleus of each cell shines during the process of DNA duplication. She tells Fujimaru that humans are, to a certain extent, not so different from the plant he just looked at, as “Even within our own bodies, cells are moving around in the same way.”4 Motomura diminishes the ontological distance between humans and plants but quickly stresses that the vegetal world is fundamentally different from the human world: “Plants do not have brains or nervous systems. In other words, they have no thoughts and no feelings. They have no concept of what humans call ‘love.’ In spite of this, they reproduce vigorously, take on all varieties of forms, acclimatize to their environment, and live all over the Earth. Don’t you think that’s miraculous?”5
The novel’s title, A World Without Love, thus refers to the world of plants, a world that Motomura believes is devoid of thinking and feeling. In addition to Miura’s novel presenting the inverse of the gender dynamics found in Osaki’s Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense, it also comes to the inverse conclusion of Osaki’s moss-love, namely, that plants categorically cannot experience emotions such as love. Although she finds in plants a reproductive power that Hiromi Ito has written about envying (as discussed in chapter 5), Motomura’s interest in and envy of the botanical realm stems from her belief that plants have no emotions whatsoever and thus no emotional attachments. This may seem like a far cry from the other works I have discussed in these pages. Throughout, I have been discussing writers and filmmakers who saw in the botanical realm a means to inhabit the world differently. Whether through evolutionary thinking, botanical science, spirituality, or ecology, these novelists, poets, and filmmakers all thought plants were more like humans than conventionally believed. Indeed, this is the starting point for critical plant studies (CPS). The works brought together in these pages have imagined what it could mean for humans to become more plantlike. In the process, they have experimented with plant vision, plant perception of time, plant movement, plant communication, and, yes, plant emotions. A World Without Love denies plant life these capacities. One gets the sense that Motomura and her colleagues would scoff at the extraordinary claims put forth in Tompkins and Bird’s The Secret Life of Plants, as discussed in chapter 3 of this book. The tarnished legacy of that work permeates Miura’s novel and gives us a glimpse into the uphill battle thinkers in CPS have had to grapple with by taking plants and their capacities seriously.
All the same, A World Without Love is a tale of becoming botanical. Like Wandering the Realm of the Seventh Sense before it, Miura’s novel portrays a woman yearning to move beyond the gendered expectations of a patriarchal society and finding the capacity to do so in the botanical realm. To be sure, A World Without Love grants Motomura a certain degree of agency as a woman in STEM research (a field heavily dominated by men in Japan), but the novel also sets up a narrative that seems destined to end with Motomura leaving plants behind and falling in love with Fujimaru. As Motomura teaches Fujimaru about plant science, he develops romantic feelings for her, and the dramatic tension of the story revolves around the conventional will-they-or-won’t-they trope of romance novels. Surprisingly, Motomura refuses Fujimaru’s advances to the very end. In this subversion of genre, we find the novel’s plantlike form. Miura takes the conventions of the romance novel and rethinks them to be more plantlike. It is as if she is experimenting on the form of the genre in a way analogous to her character’s experiments on thale cress. If we accept the novel’s premise that the world of plants is a world without love, then it makes a certain sense to have a botanical romance novel without any romance.
Once again, however, if we follow the plant in the story (thale cress) and give it its history, we can see how A World Without Love may be a novel without romance, but it is not a novel devoid of desire. This is because thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana) is one of the most common plant species currently experimented with/on in botanical research. It is often called “the model plant” for its unique shokubutsusei, which a listing on the US National Science Foundation website describes as follows:
Arabidopsis is not an economically important plant. Despite this, it has been the focus of intense genetic, biochemical and physiological study for over 40 years because of several traits that make it very desirable for laboratory study. As a photosynthetic organism, Arabidopsis requires only light, air, water and a few minerals to complete its life cycle. It has a fast life cycle, produces numerous self progeny, has very limited space requirements, and is easily grown in a greenhouse or indoor growth chamber. It possesses a relatively small, genetically tractable genome that can be manipulated through genetic engineering more easily and rapidly than any other plant genome.6
The desire to control and modify thale cress has been strong in botanical science for decades. It was the first plant to have its entire genome sequenced, which was completed in the year 2000. It is often considered a weed, but it has accomplished extraordinary and fantastical things in its history. This is another reason why The Secret Life of Plants permeates A World Without Love. Motomura may indeed scoff at Tompkins and Bird, but scientifically credible experiments with thale cress in the 2020s sound much like the incredible claims of their pseudoscience. For example, thale cress was the first plant successfully grown in lunar soil, albeit in a laboratory on Earth using moon dust retrieved from a lunar mission.7 Thale cress has likewise been grown aboard the International Space Station (ISS) to study the effect of microgravity on plant life.8 These experiments were conducted at the ISS’s KIBO laboratory, named after the Japanese word for hope (see figure 6.1).
Figure 6.1. Thale cress being grown aboard the International Space Station KIBO Laboratory. Source: NASA Johnson Space Center / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain.
In 2023, researchers in Japan published a paper on an experiment conducted on thale cress by which they used a fluorescence microscope and a green fluorescent biosensor to help make visible how the plant uses volatile organic compounds (VOC) to warn neighboring plants of threats such as insects.9 Aesthetically, the videos these researchers have produced of thale cress communicating via VOC are strikingly beautiful. Green fluorescent light spreads across leaves against a black background in what could easily pass for an experimental art film.10 A botanical poetics that lies in between science and poetry can be glimpsed in these videos. It is easy to imagine that Fujimaru saw something similar in the plant when “A galaxy spread out before his eyes. Within the darkness was scattered countless silver specks. . . . A beautiful, lonely galaxy existing inside of a tiny leaf.”11 What Fujimaru likely did not know was that the tiny leaves of thale cress were simultaneously spreading out into the galaxy aboard the ISS.
Thale cress is a model plant for the study of plasticity, that shokubutsusei discussed throughout this book. Experiments with thale cress aim to better help humans understand epigenetics, or how environmental factors influence the expression of genes without change to DNA sequence. It may not be “an economically important plant,” but it is poised to serve a major role in how agriculture (and the industry thereof) adapts to climate change.12 In 2022, for example, a research team at the University of Hiroshima conducted experiments on thale cress and rice to help identify genes that could be manipulated to engineer crop plants that would better withstand flooding and drought.13 Epigenetic research on and manipulation of thale cress are concerned with rethinking the biological model of the plant, of engineering it to better serve human needs amid anthropogenic climate change.
If we allow thale cress to guide our reading of A World Without Love, we can find the desire to manipulate and rethink the model plant in ways that echo colonial botany, insofar as the research on thale cress in space serves the desire to eventually colonize other planets. More down to earth, however, is an undercurrent of crisis that runs quietly under the text’s surface. Miura is also rethinking models in her novel, both literary and broadly cultural. She does so by critiquing and manipulating a cultural phenomenon that has grown out of a botanical imagination in contemporary Japan, the emergence of the so-called herbivore man who lacks sexual desire. This is to say, in A World Without Love, thale cress shows both its material and semiotic face. It draws our attention to material concerns about future food scarcity and semiotic concerns about the metaphorical male preference for plants over sex. These two concerns may seem far afield, but they share roots in the botanical realm of A World Without Love.
Herbivore Men
Motomura, the female scientist at the center of A World Without Love, has no interest in romance. Instead, she tells her family that she is “married to the plants.” With this new form of becoming botanical, A World Without Love entangles the writing of plant life in the social phenomenon of the herbivore man (sōshoku danshi or sōshoku-kei danshi). The concept of the herbivore man emerged in Japan around the end of the first decade of the 2000s. Promotional copy for Miura’s novel alerts potential buyers that A World Without Love is an “Herbivore Love Novel” (Sōshiku-kei ren’ai shōsetsu). The cultural buzzword in question was first used by writer Fukasawa Maki in 2006 to refer to the purported rise of feminized young men in Japan who were not assertive in seeking out sexual relationships with women. The word herbivore (literally “grass-eater” in Japanese) marks this lack of assertion by implying that sexually assertive, masculine men are “carnivores.”14 In other words, a metaphorical preference for plants has come to name a societal change that the philosopher and critic Morioka Masahiro (another early adopter of the term) has called an “epochal event in the history of the male gender in Japan.”15 Morioka links the emergence of herbivore men to a decrease in violence in postwar Japan. In a 2013 essay, he calls the phenomenon “a byproduct of Japan’s sixty-six years of peace following World War II” and includes data to argue that the number of homicides committed by men has steadily decreased in Japan since 1955.16
Of course, Morioka’s definition of violence is extremely narrow and overlooks much of the unspectacular violence-as-backdrop that informed the botanical becomings I have discussed throughout this book. Nevertheless, there is a strange resonance between the books and films I have focused on here and Morioka’s claim that a decrease in violence has resulted in a more plantlike form of subjectivity. Is this not, to a certain degree, what the writers and filmmakers that I have brought together in these pages imagined as they attempted to rethink what it means to be human in alliance with plant life? If so, is the herbivore man an embodiment of a botanical subjectivity, a product of becoming botanical?
Not exactly. Morioka may see the herbivore man as a kind of evolutionary movement in a utopian direction for Japanese society, but the more he develops a link between herbivore men and a notion of “peace,” the more problematic his claims become:
[If] the emergence of herbivore men is a byproduct of Japan’s post-war peace, I think it is something that must be welcomed. There is nothing more valuable than the absence of war. Very few of the young people in today’s Japan have been trained to kill, and none have experienced combat on the battlefield. If they were told to kill a person standing in front of them they would presumably not have any idea how to do so. Of course, there are many brutal crimes such as rape and murder committed in Japan, but in comparison to other countries their number is considered low. I think that one of the reasons for this is that for sixty-six years Japan has not directly taken part in a war and Japanese territory has not been the site of combat. We must not forget that the achievement of Japan’s post-war peace has been made possible by American military power through the treaty of mutual security between the United States and Japan.17
Morioka positions herbivore men as the embodiment of a postwar peace that is ultimately structured by systemic violence. One need look no further than to the still-occupied colonial space of the Ryūkyū Islands (or Okinawa) to see how “American military power” perpetrates its own forms violence, be they sexual (in the case of numerous high-profile instances of rape) or environmental (in the case of a purposed base relocation that threatens coral reefs and the critically endangered dugong). One could also look to Hiromi Ito’s Three Lil’ Japanese (as discussed in chapter 5), a novella that ends on a violent note at the American-run Yokota Air Base in Western Tokyo. This novella and the other texts examined in this book are responses to precisely the kind of violence and catastrophe Morioka neglects in his praise of peace, the kind of violence that serves as “both a backdrop to and condition for the intimate terrain of . . . everyday lives,” to return to Dole et al.’s words one last time. In its botanical becoming, the so-called Herbivore Love novel A World Without Love responds to a backdrop of normative gender roles that, while not explicitly presented as catastrophic or violent, nevertheless threaten to coerce its female protagonist into a life of heterosexual domesticity for which she has no desire.
A World Without Love takes the notion of the “herbivore man” (as defined by Morioka) and turns it on its head. It uses the model plant of thale cress to shatter Morioka’s model of the peaceful herbivore male. It literalizes the metaphorical preference for plant life it names by having Motomura eschew heterosexual love in favor of a botanical subjectivity that survives and thrives without romantic attachments. It is a botanical subjectivity that rethinks the human by rethinking gender roles and resisting literary conventions associated with them. This is the novel’s radical intervention, one that would likely have appealed to both Machiko, the protagonist of Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense, and Osaki, the writer thereof.
Digging for Connectivity
A World Without Love takes the highly gendered concept of the “herbivore man” and reimagines it through the lens of the botanical realm, and what emerges is the figure of Motomura, a female protagonist of a romance novel that actively resists and subverts the conventions of the genre into which she is written. It is a romance novel in which there is no romance, only a desire for plants. Near the novel’s end, Fujimaru comes to accept the fact that Motomura is devoted to plants and that her lack of interest in romance is not a personal slight. He reaches an epiphany about Motomura’s devotion and experiences his own moment of becoming botanical that leads him to see humans and plants as “the same.” He tells Motomura: “That passion you have, that feeling of wanting to know—can’t we call that ‘love?’ You’re the same: you, Motomura—you who desire to know all about plants—are the same as the plants here in this laboratory, which are the objects of the human desire to be known. You both live in a world in which love exists.”18 Fujimaru reimagines “love” as the desire to better understand the world of plants. For him, every text examined in this book could be considered a work of romance in this way, insofar as they all desire to better understand the botanical realm.
In her review of A World Without Love, Fukasawa Maki, the writer who first coined the term herbivore man, picks up on Fujimaru’s reconfiguration of love and its supposed connection to the desire to know. She laments how the term she created, which initially was intended to refer to young people who placed value on things over romantic love and sex, has taken on a negative connotation and is now viewed as something “pathetic” (nasakenai).19 A World Without Love, Fukasawa believes, restores the concept of the “herbivore man” to its intended meaning: “That ‘productivity’ is something that comes only from a man and a woman getting married and having children, or that ‘rationality’ is to be found in a phony, inadequate value system that says ‘important research is that which has immediate use’—such things are not to be found in this story.”20 Following Fujimaru, Fukasawa finds in Miura’s novel a kind of love not bound to notions of gender or even species: “The feeling of ‘wanting to know,’ whether that want is directed toward people or directed toward plants, is something that overflows with love.”21
In Fukasawa’s figuration of knowing plants we witness the ambivalence of becoming botanical. On the one hand, Fukasawa’s botanical imagination is one that seemingly pushes back against capitalist instrumentalization, as it rejects what it calls a “phony, inadequate value system” that privileges rationality and productivity. At the same time, however, it renders the botanical abstract, denying plants their history. A World Without Love, for all of its attempts to break out of a model of gendered heteronormativity and reproductive futurity, is nevertheless entangled in the still-very-much-unfolding history of thale cress and its ethically questionable mass instrumentalization in botanical research. Was the desire to know this particular plant’s genome sequence something that overflowed with love? Is the desire to modify thale cress to better withstand the extremes of drought and flooding something that overflows with love? Or is it rather, to quote the previously mentioned listing on the website for the National Science Foundation, a desire to “(exploit) the scientific and practical advantages of the model organism”?22
The plant scientist Nicholas Harberd, in his 2007 book devoted to thale cress titled Seed to Seed: The Secret Life of Plants, is inspired by the plant to question the very nature of scientific research and the desire to know the botanical realm:
Yesterday, I reread some of what I’ve written here. I thought I’d see if I could identify threads, continuing themes. I think that some are clear: the advance of the seasons in garden, fen, and wood; the growth of the thale-cress plant as part of that advance; a record of events in the lab; an account of our research, of its deepening understanding of the hidden mysteries of growth.
Yet I find myself stumbling as I write. The word research an impediment. Discomfort with the idea that I ‘study’ something, that that something is ‘biology’. Why do I feel like this? Why do these words make me pause?
Is it that they are isolating terms? That I ‘study’ the growth of the hazel leaf, or the activity of a gene, by isolating it from the rest of the world? That by doing so I cut it off, reduce the connectivity of one thing with another?23
Harberd’s Seed to Seed (which was translated into Japanese in 2009) is full of such ruminations. Formally, the text resembles Itō Seikō’s Botanical Life (discussed in chapter 3) in its use of daily entries to theorize plant life and record observations over the course of a year. It poetically captures his affinity-bordering-on-love for thale cress while also foregrounding his discomfort with the objectification of the model inherent in conventional science. Harberd’s anxiety over reducing the “connectivity of one thing with another” gives way in the end to a botanical imagination that looks for connectivity and context: “This notebook has served its purpose. I have direction. Have shifted our science away from a focus on the hidden secrets of plant growth to a broader vision that considers simultaneously the plant in the world and the world in the plant.”24 Thale cress may point some scientists toward outer space, but it brought Harberd back down to Earth.
As I have tried to illustrate by following the plants in my readings of modern Japanese literary and filmic texts in this book, not all attempts at knowing plant life stem from love, and sometimes finding “the plant in the world” means digging in the soil of forgotten and unpleasant histories. Naming, categorizing, and experimenting with plants can certainly grow out of an affinity for the botanical realm, but these acts can also serve state violence. To reiterate a claim I made in the introduction, becoming botanical is a potential that can be mobilized to different ends, at different points in time. Context matters, or, to paraphrase Harberd, connectivity matters.
Given the 2023 experiments conducted in Japan with VOC use among thale cress, it seems safe to say that even if the botanical realm is a world without love, it is still a world with connectivity and concern and care for others (granted, of course, we remember the difficulty in determining the line between self and other among plant life). If we take seriously the fact that thale cress releases VOC to warn other plants about potential harm, then shouldn’t we also take seriously the call to rethink the ethical obligation humans have to plant life? Such ethics should in turn inform our work with plants, including academic work. In this book, I have tried to demonstrate that part of this ethical obligation can be found in recognizing that plants have their history, to invoke Kliment Timiryazev one last time. An ethically informed approach to plants in both CPS and Japanese studies would locate plants in their time and place and follow the sometimes-uncomfortable entanglements they have in national, cultural, and intellectual histories. There is much potential for our fields to become botanical. Let us dig in and get started.