Chapter 5 Botanical Migration Empathy and Naturalization in the Poetry and Prose of Hiromi Ito

Rootlessness and Being Controlled “Like a Plant”

Contrary to the common image of the plant as that which is rooted in place, Ito’s works suggest that migratory humans and plants share a condition of rootlessness. Christy Wampole has argued that “Rootedness is a primary organizing trope that accommodates the need to feel connected to something outside the self . . . this subterranean, botanical form seems the ideal metaphor to communicate that desire.”11 In Ito’s work, however, the connection to “something outside of the self” is found precisely in the movement of uprooted bodies. Her wild poetry and cultivated prose show how humans become botanical as they uproot and leave their native soil and eventually adapt to new environments. This is plasticity at work. Ito’s writing presents a record of the subjective experience of this adaptation or acclimatization, an ongoing process she aligns with naturalization. The word naturalization applies to both humans and plants. Humans become naturalized as they are granted legal citizenship, while plants become naturalized once they are considered an established part of an ecosystem that is not their native home.12

In Ito’s poetry and prose, a botanical subjectivity emerges through the process of naturalization. It emerges, for example, in the young girl Natsukusa, who serves as Wild Grass on the Riverbank’s narrator, as she comes to understand her experience existing between the riverbank and the wasteland—which is an existence between Japan and the United States—in botanical terms. She thinks to herself in an internal dialogue marked off by parentheses: “(I want to become a plant that grows vines)/ (I want to become a plant that grows spikes full of seed)/ . . . (I want to be naturalized).”13 This is a hope that runs throughout Ito’s work. It is a hope to become botanical through the rootless act of migration.

For Ito, becoming botanical is a form of resistance to the biopolitical control of human migration. As Shinozuka argues, “Much of the current rhetoric in the media continues to tap into the native-invasive binary and discussions of human migration across US borders. But few scholars discern how politicians presently draw upon language that has historically been deployed against plant and insect immigrants, in addition to other unwanted foreigners.”14 Catriona Sandilands is an exception to Shinozuka’s claim, as she argues that state policy on migration operates through a dehumanizing, botanical logic of its own: “People and animals are increasingly organized and controlled like and even as plants in a neoliberal biopolitical universe.”15 For Sandilands, the human body is increasingly controlled like a plant, and “what is at the forefront of current political debate is where and when and how we are to live as reproducing, productive bodies who serve the polis by way of being, simply, alive. Growing. Populating. Spreading. Invading. Vegetating.”16 Ito’s work confronts this vegetally inflected form of biopolitical control by resisting the “being, simply, alive” that Sandilands describes and forging instead a “becoming, complexly, alive” in alliance with the botanical realm.17 In other words, Ito’s poetry and prose resist the biopolitical control of migratory bodies—a form of control that Sandilands claims treats humans “as plants”—by taking the botanical logic being imposed on humans and finding an emancipatory quality within it. Ito’s writing declares: “If you treat me like a plant, then I will respond, fiercely, like a plant.”

Wild Grass on the Riverbank revels in the vegetal qualities of “growing, populating, spreading, and invading” and finds, through these qualities, an experience of migration shared between humans and plant life. The recognition of this shared experience gives rise to what I call “botanical empathy,” which is a deep identification with other migratory bodies that bridges a gap of alterity believed to exist between humans and plants, and among humans of different nationalities. Botanical empathy is an emergent property of becoming botanical. It comes close to the radical sense of collectivity that Karen L. F. Houle finds in the botanical realm as she argues that “plant-becoming opens up thinking about relations as transient alliances rather than strategies. It credits the accomplishment of identity and intimacy as a radically collective achievement, crossing faculties, bodies, phyla”18 Through botanical empathy, Ito’s writing forges an international and multispecies collective of migrants, both human and plant, that stretches across generations and attempts to resist state control of when, where, and how one can live and create new life.

Secular Migration

Hiromi Ito began her career as a poet in the late 1970s, publishing her first poetry collection in 1978, titled Sky of Plants (Sōmoku no sora). Her early poetry tackles taboo and often-gendered subject matter. One of her best-known poems, “Killing Kanoko” (Kanoko koroshi, 1985), is a graphic meditation on abortion and postpartum depression.19 Ito’s frank discussions of sexuality and violence, along with her “shamaness-like” performance style, have made her a prominent figure in contemporary Japanese literature and earned her a reputation as “the igniting force behind the subsequent flourishing of ‘women’s poetry.’”20 In addition to numerous poetry collections (including collaborations with photographer Nobuyoshi Araki), Ito also began writing literary nonfiction early in her career, including her 1985 essay collection/instruction manual on pregnancy and breastfeeding titled Good Breasts, Bad Breasts (Yoi oppai warui oppai). Poetry and literary nonfiction have remained the twin pillars of Ito’s prolific career ever since.

In the early 1990s, Ito began living between the United States and Japan, staying in Southern California for three months at a time (as determined by her tourist visa) and then returning to Kumamoto, the southern prefecture in Japan that her aged parents called home. In 1997, Ito acquired a Permanent Resident Visa (or “Green Card”) and settled in the San Diego suburb of Encinitas with partner Harold Cohen (the British-born artist who developed AARON, a computer program that uses artificial intelligence to generate artistic images) and her three children (two of whom she relocated from Japan and one fathered by Cohen).21 After Cohen’s death in 2016, Ito returned to Japan and has been living between Kumamoto and Tokyo ever since.

It was in the United States that Ito began to write seriously and critically about the botanical realm. She has described how tending to houseplants and garden plants helped create, in her Southern California home, a familiar atmosphere reminiscent of Japan.22 Over time, Ito’s love of and care for plants developed into a form of political critique. Confronted with her own precarious existence as an immigrant in the United States in the wake of the September 11, 2011, terrorist attacks (a precarity that only increased with time, culminating with the anti-immigrant platform espoused by the Trump presidential campaign in 2016) and with the reality of immigration and asylum seekers entering Southern California along the US-Mexico border, Ito looked to plants to make sense of migration and its control by the state.23

In Ito’s work, plants are not apolitical, aestheticized objects. Nor are they immobile bystanders bearing witness to the long unfolding of human migration throughout history. Rather, they are active participants in that history. Plants move, travel, and migrate. They engage in what the early American ecologist Herbert Mason has called “secular migration,” a type of migration that he describes as “often persistently directional through long time, and always (involving) the lineal succession of individuals.”24 Secular migration is a form of movement and acclimatization that takes generations to achieve. Using the secular migration of naturalized plants as a model, Ito casts her own history (and that of her family) as part of a much larger movement of human bodies across time, space, and generations. It is a movement that includes asylum seekers like Ramírez and his daughter, whose photograph Ito aligned with Wild Grass on the Riverbank. To be sure, Ito’s experience in Southern California is not commensurate with the tragedy that befell Ramírez and other asylum seekers along the southern border of the US. However, what Ito’s particular botanical becoming makes possible is a compassionate recognition that uses a plantlike logic to find similarity in the act of migration while also maintaining the alterity and particularity of individual experiences. Becoming botanical allows Ito to theorize a shared struggle against biopolitical control of migration that is not equally distributed, a fact that holds true for both humans and plant life.

Migration is not an individual traversal of distance in Ito’s work. Like plants that participate in secular migration, Ito casts migration as a familial/reproductive project that spans time in addition to distance. This form of migration echoes the vegetative qualities that Sandilands proposes are those most controlled in contemporary biopolitics: growing, populating, spreading, invading.25 This is made clear when Wild Grass on the Riverbank states imperatively: “Be carried from your native land to foreign soil, where you will grow wild and propagate.”26 By the end of the poem, Natsukusa will leave her mother in the riverbank (i.e., Kumamoto) and return to the wasteland (i.e., Southern California), where she will realize her desire to “become a plant that grows spikes full of seed” and naturalize through the process of endless, botanical reproduction:

Natsukusa’s “giving birth to one bud after another” is an image of secular migration, which Mason describes as “the linear reproductive succession of individuals through time.”28 It is a reminder that migration is not merely the movement of bodies from point A to point B but is also a process that unfolds in a long durée through the creation of new life in new soil. Wild Grass on the Riverbank (as well as many of Ito’s other works) portrays migration as an ongoing process in this way, forever unfolding, unstable, and in flux within the deep time of plant life.

In the Migratory Middle of Nation and Family

In the preceding chapters of this book, I have argued that becoming botanical served as a point of departure and a route by which writers and filmmakers in Japan attempted to rethink the human and the plant, to reconfigure subjectivity, and to head somewhere new in response to crisis. In other words, I have argued that becoming botanical led to a migration away from the human realm and into the realm of vegetal life. In Hiromi Ito’s writing, however, it is the literal act of migration itself that leads to becoming botanical. Ito’s tales of human and botanical migration suggest that while immigration is, in Mason’s figuration of secular migration, a “linear succession of individuals through time,” it is not experienced as a unidirectional process. It is, rather, an unending negotiation of one’s place between two or more geographical points, as well as points in time. It is a process that unfolds in the in-between zone of becoming. The movement is the point. And the movement is, counterintuitively, plantlike.

Much of Ito’s work since the 1990s has focused on her experience of shuttling back and forth between the United States and Japan. There is a kinetic energy to these texts as they recount the endless comings and goings of Ito herself and the semifictionalized characters modeled on members of her immediate family. Wild Grass on the Riverbank opens with the frenetic movement of migration from a child’s perspective (the young narrator Natsukusa):

This unsettled movement reoccurs throughout the poem following the frequent relocation of the family at its narrative center. This sense of kinetic movement runs throughout Ito’s oeuvre. Both The Thorn-Puller (Togenuki: shinsugamo jizō engi, 2007) and A Father’s Life (Chichi no ikiru, 2016) recount the turbulent period Itō spent traveling between Southern California and Kumamoto while caring for her dying father. More recent works like Twilight Child (Tasogareteyuku kosan, 2018) and Travels (Michiyukiya, 2020) find form in their back-and-forth movement between various locations in the United States, Japan, and Europe. Taken collectively, these works narrate an unending series of migrations that form the creative core of Ito’s writing.

Understood as an unfolding, ongoing process of movement and subsequent acclimatization across time, migration in Ito’s work becomes, to borrow another term from Deleuze and Guattari, an enactment of the “middle”—a zone of heightened possibility that brings previously separate points together, where they can create something new: “The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed. Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle.”30

The figurative image of a “stream without beginning or end” that “undermines it banks” captures the creative flow of migration in texts like Wild Grass on the Riverbank. As Ito’s writing shuttles between Japan and the United States (and other countries as well), it produces a sense of a “middle” that destabilizes national identities. Ito’s characters (including the semifictionalized versions of herself and her family members that she writes into her prose pieces) do not identify as wholly Japanese or American. Instead, they move through the middle of these identities by becoming botanical. This is the case in Tree Spirits Grass Spirits. Here, Ito includes a chapter that unfolds in the middle of interstate travel and destabilizes national borders by recounting a road trip with her youngest daughter, called Tomé in this case, from Southern California up north to Washington State: “Around this time, I had been thinking about naturalized plants. In Japan, the season for summer grasses had just begun. Along the riverbanks of Kumamoto, the young stems of seitaka-awadachisō (or Canadian goldenrod) are surely beginning to grow all at once. Seitaka-awadachisō and matsuyoigusa (or Chilean evening primrose) are both originally from North America, and I decided that I wanted to see someplace where they grew, at their own pace, in native soil.”31

The movement of Ito and her daughter up the West Coast of the United States is set alongside the (much longer, much older) movement of naturalized plants: Canadian goldenrod and Chilean evening primrose (see figures 5.1 and 5.2). Itō knows these plants from her native soil of Japan, where they have been naturalized, but she wants to see them in their native soil of North America, which is also “native” soil to her daughter.

These overlapping histories of migration cross in the middle and give Ito a chance to reflect on her own place in the middle of a family lineage that stretches across national borders. The chapter ends with Ito and Tomé driving home via Highway 101 and passing by forests of redwood trees. In a later chapter of Tree Spirits Grass Spirits, Ito writes of how the giant redwoods of California used to be categorized within the same family as the sugi (or Japanese cedar) before the advent of the APG (Angiosperm Phylogeny Group) system of categorization separated the two: “The sugi which have grown native in Japan since time immemorial, those sugi that started out as tiny grasses—it made me happy that those sugi were close relatives to these giant trees. . . . And now that the Taxodiaceae family has been incorporated into the Cupressaceae family and the sequoias and the sugi have been separated, I have become absolutely and completely devastated.”32

The reclassification of sequoias in the 1990s removed them from an extended family that once stretched across national borders and included the Japanese sugi (that tree that served as the focus of chapters 3 and 4 of this book). Ito’s point here is that such classifications are arbitrary, prone to change, at the whim of those in power. Like migration itself, the classification of migratory plants is in a kind of flux that can separate families. As she and Tomé stop along the road to view the same sequoias while returning home to Southern California, Ito comes to recognize that even without a direct familial relationship between the Japanese sugi and the sequoia (Ito uses the word shinseki, or “relative,” in the above quote), she and Tomé are nevertheless related to these trees through a shared determination as migrants to survive in California for many generations into the future:

The plants growing around the large trees (which were small by comparison) were full of leaves and blooming flowers. Each one embraced the sunlight and blew in the wind, glistening. The large trees accompanied innumerable small trees. In other words, in this case, the several-hundred-year-old trees were all female. I too was female. Tomé, who I had taken along with me, was a young woman—she too was female. The young sprouts which were the trees’ offspring were shorter than we were. The fresh green of these young trees, which seemed as if they were holding out their tiny hands, told me, with a determined expression that resembled the clenching of tiny teeth, that they planned to live for several hundreds of years to come.33

As Ito stands in the middle of the road, in the middle of a road trip with her daughter, she finds solidarity with the giant redwoods. She sees an overlap in their migratory histories and understands that secular migration places her in the middle of this history, with a past and “several hundreds of years to come.” It is a sentiment echoed poetically in Wild Grass on the Riverbank:

In both scenes, we see, in Sandilands’ words, “an attentive and lively practice in which the possibilities for ecological kinship are able to germinate, proliferate, and even effloresce.”35 As a space without firm boundaries, the zone of the middle (Deleuze and Guattari’s “stream that undermines its banks”) encourages such ecological kinship by eroding the ontological distance between humans and plants. The blurring of national boundaries becomes a blurring of familial boundaries as well, as Ito extends a notion of kinship to plant life (a gesture Osaki did as well, in chapter 1).

In another chapter of Tree Spirits Grass Spirits, titled “Living Trees and Dying Trees” (“Ikiteiru ki to shindeiku ki”), Ito further encapsulates the notion of the middle as she lies beneath a famous camphor tree, the Jakushinsan no kusu in Kumamoto. The piece begins by recounting the shock and heartbreak Ito and her family suffered as a beloved pepper tree is cut down in their neighborhood in Southern California. She recalls how each family member had a personal relationship to this tree and suggests that the removal of the tree severs a tie that once helped to bind her family together. The chapter then takes flight and recalls a trip Ito made from California back to Kumamoto with her daughter Kanoko and Kanoko’s American husband. Shortly after they arrive in Japan, Ito’s aged father passes away. Consumed by grief and overwhelmed by the necessary errands pertaining to her father’s death, Ito decides to accompany Kanoko (who is pregnant) and her husband to see the nearby giant camphor tree. As they arrive, Ito begins to think about family lineage and death, placing herself in the middle of a flow of time (from her father, to herself, to her daughter, to her daughter’s unborn child) that she finds replicated in the leaves of the tree:

The tree was in a well-maintained park, but there was no one around. Flowers bloomed in clusters along the path leading from the parking lot: violets, veronica plants, henbits, tiny and common vetches. Kanoko and her husband held hands and walked around the giant camphor. I laid down on the bench that had been placed under the tree.

I looked up, looked at the tree, looked at my hands, looked at the sky. It was a lightly cloudy sky. It was a giant, giant tree covered in wrinkles. They were tired, sad hands covered in wrinkles. As I was gazing at them, I realized I’d made a big mistake. I’d just been thinking that the red color on camphor trees this time of year was from new growth. But that wasn’t so. It was the old leaves that had turned red, and they were mixed in with the green of the new buds. The red leaves rustled in the wind, and rained down to cover the surface below, just like a cherry tree as it loses its blossoms.36

Ito invokes the classic image of the cherry tree losing its blossoms (although a step removed through the camphor tree) to reflect on the passing of her father and her own aging glimpsed in her “tired, sad hands covered in wrinkles.” Yet unlike the cliché trope of cherry blossoms scattering and signaling the transience of life, the camphor tree simultaneously presents “the green of new buds” as its older leaves fall. Through this unceasing cycle of birth and death embodied in the Jakushinsan camphor (which is believed to be eight hundred years old), life (and Ito’s place in the middle of it) becomes, to return to Deleuze and Guattari’s words, “a stream without beginning or end.” Life becomes a perpetual botanical becoming that moves across generations. The tree is the embodiment of “becoming, complexly, alive,” to return to my reworking of Sandilands’ figuration.

The piece does not end here, under the camphor tree, but keeps moving and returns to Southern California. Ito mentions yet another tree, one she notices as she brings her youngest daughter Tomé to and from school. At first, Ito is unsure if the tree is a wax tree or a bead tree. As Tomé brings her a branch of the tree one day, Ito concludes that it is, in fact, a bead tree: “Of the Meliaceae family, the genus melia, native to Asia, native to Kumamoto.”37 This encounter with a bead tree, which has, through secular migration, arrived and taken hold in Southern California from Asia, provides Ito a chance to reflect on her own place in the middle of secular migration—a middle between Japan and the United States, and a middle between her parents and her children:

I remembered that long ago, when I had first moved to Kumamoto, people had told me that those trees along the highway were wax trees.

Be that as it may, the trees growing along the highway are not wax trees, they’re bead trees. It was three years ago that I realized this, in the April that my mother died, in that busy time I spent traveling between California and Kumamoto during April and May. During that time, the bead trees started blooming here and there, and then they bloomed in full.

Wax trees and bead trees actually look exactly alike, but their flowers are different. The flowers of the wax tree don’t draw attention. The flowers of the bead tree are gorgeously vibrant and bloom in May. And so now, these flowers that Tomé picked in our neighborhood in Southern California—these were undoubtedly from a bead tree.38

The bead tree entangles Kumamoto (and with it, the death of Ito’s mother and father) and Southern California (where her young daughter picks its flowers). Ito and her writing flow through the middle of this entanglement, in “another way of traveling and moving” that Deleuze and Guattari describe as “proceeding from the middle, coming and going rather than starting and finishing.”39 This way of moving is a form of becoming, one that is shared by both humans and plants, by both the bead trees that grow between Kumamoto and Southern California and by Ito and her children, who likewise grow between Kumamoto and Southern California.

Alterity and Fertility in the Botanical Realm

Ito rethinks the human by challenging any claim to identity or subjectivity tied to place. While local spirituality and history were instrumental to the botanical becomings discussed in chapter 4, Ito offers something different in her work: a multiple subjectivity rooted in the rootlessness of unending movement, much like Deleuze and Guattari’s “stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks.” There is, in this figuration, an uncanny visual echo of the watery border where Ramírez and his daughter tragically succumbed to the cruel logic of national separation, as discussed above. Yet the figurative unending stream is also where Ito’s writing draws together migrants of all types (human and plant alike) and forges a sense of solidarity that resists biopolitical control by stretching across borders both national and special (as in “species”) through the act of becoming.

Deleuze and Guattari famously liken the unending process of becoming to a rhizome, that plant-borne structure that I called, in chapter 1, messy and uneven, leading somewhere new and venturing into uncharted territory. They claim the rhizome “has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.”40 The humans and plants that populate works like Wild Grass on the Riverbank and Tree Spirits Grass Spirits are rhizomatic in this way. They exist between Japan and the US in an unending process of adaptation. It is through an embrace and a championing of the migrant as an “interbeing” that Ito’s work constructs its notion of botanical empathy. After all, the migrant, in Ito’s literary universe, is plantlike, and plants, in the words of Michael Marder, “simply cannot be conceived as individual organisms, but instead as subjects with deeply pluralistic identities, ranging from their own decentralized intelligence . . . to their interdependent survival. On the face of it, plants’ radical otherness has to do, in part, with this fluidity of the distinction between self and other.”41 What is empathy but a “fluidity of the distinction between self and other?”

Writing from within the middle, Ito breaks down the barriers between humans of differing points of origin as well as between humans and plants. She creates characters that identify somewhere between human and botanical. In her 2005 prose collection Aunt Green-Thumb (Midori no obasan), Ito imagines that she herself may even be part plant: “It’s possible that in the process of growing up, I was, without my knowing it, violated by crawling and creeping vines, stalks, and leaves. I was meant to be human, but there’s the possibility that I have the blood of plants mixed in somewhere.”42 Within Ito’s literary universe, the line between the human and botanical realms is a permeable border, as permeable as the national borders that both humans and plants traverse. As such, the human characters of her poems and prose phytomorphically exhibit plantlike characteristics.

This is particularly true of Wild Grass on the Riverbank, in which seemingly human characters are able to regenerate cut-off appendages.43 They are able, like plants, to wither and die, only to be reborn in spring (a shokubutsusei I discuss more at the end of this chapter). The naturalized plants of the riverbank (i.e., Kumamoto), become kin to protagonist Natsukusa and end up becoming a manifestation of herself. About halfway through the poem, a new “sister” appears named Alexa (which is written in Japanese as Arekusa, a homophone for “Wild Grass”). The poem suggests that Alexa is in fact a kind of avatar of the naturalized “wild grasses” that surround Natsukusa and her family. Eventually, Natsukusa realizes that Alexa is not a sister but rather a part of her own psyche that has been projected out into the botanical realm:

The two plants listed in the last line, called himemukashiyomogi and ō-arechinogiku in Japanese and commonly called fleabane and horseweed in English, are difficult to differentiate by sight. Natsukusa sees herself (and her other “self,” Alexa/Arekusa/Wild Grass) in and as these naturalized plants. They become anthropomorphized first as part of Natsukusa’s family and then as a manifestation of her botanical subjectivity. The poem engages in this anthropomorphism in order to then engage in phytomorphism. The zone of the middle opens up in the movement between these two “-isms.”

Ito has written of the difficulty she experienced in reaching this point of indeterminacy between humans and plants. In Tree Spirits Grass Spirits, she describes the challenges she faced writing about naturalized plants in Wild Grass on the Riverbank while doing justice to their more-than-human characteristics: “Every summer during the period in which I wrote this poem, I would look out toward the riverbank and watch the Sorghum halepense, the Conyza sumatrensis, and the Solidago altissima rise and fall as they blew in the wind. I thought a lot about them. How could I put them into words? Would I be able to represent their movements, their life force, exactly as I saw them?”45 Ito recounts that it took years to properly capture the way these naturalized plants moved in the wind, ultimately arriving at this section from Wild Grass on the Riverbank:

Unlike Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense’s Machiko, who struggled to write nonobjectifying poetry about the moss she observed (as discussed in chapter 1), Ito finds a way to capture the very essence of plant life in verse. She explains that once she found the right language to describe these plants, “(an) emotion . . . like malice came out on the surface of it. I don’t know why it turned out this way, when I was intentionally trying to push emotion aside.”47 The subjective power of plant life rises to the surface of Ito’s poetry against her own intentions, as if the plants used Ito as a medium to find a voice and will of their own—a phenomenon discussed in chapter 3 of this book.

Even as she writes of human characters becoming botanical and forging international and multispecies alliances, Ito acknowledges the limits of truly knowing and/or embodying the botanical world. This is particularly true of her prose writings, which tend to be more overtly autobiographical in nature and thus tied more closely to a human point of view. Ito writes time and again of her identification with naturalized plants in Tree Spirits Grass Spirits while inevitably upholding the radical alterity of plant life. The book’s opening chapter, “The Plants in My Front Yard” (“Zentei no shokubutsutachi”), speaks of Ito’s inability to fully embody the botanical life force for which she yearns. It begins, much like Wild Grass on the Riverbank, in media res: “Returning to Southern California from Japan early in the New Year, I found the sky blue and the air dry and hot at both the Los Angeles airport and the small airport closest to where I live. At the airport in Kumamoto, a light snow had been falling.”48 Ito goes on to describe the various trees and flowers that populate her yard in Southern California. She writes of the oxalis:

When its long flowering season comes to an end, oxalis withers all at once, and each one uproots from the soil. But at that point they have already left behind many small radish-like bulbs within the earth. It’s a fertility more amazing than that of mice or rabbits.

Each bulb sleeps a whole year and then opens its eyes in spring. They grow and spread out their leaves and clump together luxuriantly, blooming dignified yellow flowers. I couldn’t help but feel that with their way of life as “naturalized plants,” and with that very name, that they were somehow of my own flesh and blood. I had prayed for the kind of aggressive fertility they had, but I only gave birth to three children. I didn’t have enough strength. It was disappointing.49

Ito simultaneously calls naturalized plants “of (her) own flesh and blood” and recognizes that they possess an “aggressive fertility” that exceeds the capabilities of a human like herself. She admits to “praying” for this botanical capacity and being disappointed by not actualizing the botanical becoming required to make it possible. Yet there is a way in which Ito was able to enact such a botanical becoming. As Natsukusa endlessly propagates at the end of Wild Grass on the Riverbank, Ito is able to accomplish, through poetry, what the oxalis accomplishes in her backyard. Ito writes of Natsukusa “giving birth to one bud after another.” Ito may not have attained the “aggressive fertility” of plant life that she found necessary for secular migration in real life (and in the autobiographical prose that recounts this failure), but she is able to carve a space in the middle for Natsukusa to do so. It is here, in the middle of a botanical imagination, that Wild Grass on the Riverbank finds radical empathy for kindred, migratory spirits, be they tree, grass, or human.

Invasive Role Models and Fellow Countrymen

The indeterminacy between migratory humans and plants found in Ito’s work extends into the legal realm of forced removal, where the lines between weeding undesirable plants and deporting undocumented immigrants blur. There is a reoccurring association in Ito’s writing between the removal of naturalized (invasive) species of plants and the precarity Ito herself has experienced as an immigrant in the United States. A section near the end of Wild Grass on the Riverbank links the removal of the invasive ice plant to the removal of “invasive” immigrants:

This scene is repeated in Tree Spirits Grass Spirits, where Ito writes of the non-native species growing in a small park near her house in Southern California. She describes the removal of the ice plant as akin not only to deportation but also to genocide:

Even in that park next door to our house, non-native plants find their way in. Since the park is designed to protect native species, the non-native plants are, of course, forcibly exterminated. One that’s seen as particularly hostile is ice plant, which was planted as ground cover, and holds water in its leaves and grows easily, spreading out all over, covering everything up, destroying everything in its path. Sometimes the organization that manages the park conducts a large-scale assault on the ice plant, and the corpses that have been uprooted are piled up in heaps. I know they’re plants, but there is no other word I can use besides “corpses.” It’s a terrible sight, and I have to cover my eyes.51

Ito is horrified by the sight of the dead ice plant (see figure 5.3). She empathizes with this invasive species and refers to their uprooted bodies as “corpses,” a word used in reference to plants throughout Wild Grass on the Riverbank as well.

The native-invasive dichotomy has become a topic of discussion within critical plant studies and has served as the central concern for such studies as Shinozuka’s Biotic Borders and Banu Subramanian’s Ghost Stories for Darwin (2014). What does it mean to empathize with an invasive species, especially in an age of ecological precarity? Subramanian’s take on the issue resonates with Ito’s empathy for the invasive ice plant:

There are striking similarities in the qualities ascribed to foreign plants, animals, and people, and these debates track each other. The xenophobic rhetoric is unmistakable. The point of my analysis is not to suggest that we are not losing native species, or that we should allow the free flow of plants and animals in the name of modernity or globalization. Instead, it is to suggest that we are living in a cultural moment where the anxieties of globalization are feeding nationalisms through xenophobia. The battle against exotic and alien plants is a symptom of a campaign that misplaces and displaces anxieties about economic, social, political, and cultural changes onto outsiders and foreigners.52

Subramanian’s diagnosis of a cultural moment in which anxiety over “economic, social, political, and cultural changes” feed into xenophobic ideology that gets displaced onto the botanical realm is precisely the background of crisis against which Ito writes. Like the other texts discussed in this book, Ito’s books often do not make spectacles of crisis. Rather, xenophobia and the crises of anti-immigration policy serve as an undercurrent that runs throughout much of the writing Ito produced while living in California. Far from being a “displacement” of this xenophobia onto plant life, Ito’s empathy for the ice plant is an empathy for the unruly migrant unwilling to submit to control. As Subramanian makes clear: “As long as exotic/alien plants know their rightful place as workers, laborers, and providers, and controlled commodities, their positions manipulated and controlled by the natives, their presence is tolerated.”53 Ito feels more akin to those plants that don’t know their “rightful place.”

Another question arises: By expressing a deep empathy for the plight of the ice plant, is Ito not reinforcing, to a certain extent, an anthropocentric worldview? Michael Marder has warned that such anthropocentrism can come specifically from an empathetic approach to plant life: “When humans empathize with plants, they, thus, ultimately empathize with themselves, turning the object of empathy into a blank screen, onto which essentially human emotions are projected. A presumably sensitive ethical approach veers on the side of instrumentalization, in that it uses the plant as a means for personal catharsis and an outlet for the content of bad conscience.”54 To be sure, Ito’s empathy for plants does become an empathy for humans (who share their migratory movement). But her botanical empathy does not serve as an “outlet for the content of bad conscience,” as Marder cautions. Instead, it serves as a radical destabilizing of an anthropocentric worldview, one that has instrumentalized and discounted the value of not only plant life but migratory human lives as well.

Ito expresses a deep concern for the plight of the migratory ice plant and concludes the chapter by extending this empathy toward fellow human migrants: “Even though I’ve learned that naturalized plants have exterminated the native plants, I’ve come on over to the side of the invasive, and resigned myself, thinking, ‘Hmm, well, the native plants were weak, and so it goes.’ If anything, naturalized plants are the ones that are fierce and indefatigable, and, to an extent, it seems that they served as my role models.”55

Ito boldly declares invasive species her “role models.” As role models, invasive naturalized plants teach Ito of the persistence necessary for secular migration, or the unruliness necessary for resistance. They likewise teach her about phenotypic plasticity, which Marder characterizes elsewhere as a “ceaseless striving toward the other and becoming-other in growth and reproduction.”56 Invasive plants also teach her to empathize with those humans deemed “invasive,” a term that carries significant weight in the border community of Southern California that Ito called home at the time of writing.

Ito’s claim that invasive species are her role models is striking because it not only redeems the unwanted plants that populate Southern California; it also casts Ito alongside these unwanted migratory bodies. Ito’s botanical empathy reaches what Marder calls “the extreme,” in which “to empathize with plants is to recognize in ourselves certain features of vegetal life, rather than to project the metaphysical image of human existence onto other life-worlds.”57 In other words, Ito’s empathy is phytomorphic. The feature of vegetal life that Ito recognizes in herself is the “fierce and indefatigable” resolution to naturalize, to transform and become anew in new soil.

While I read Ito’s embrace of the invasive as a form of resistance to biopolitical control of human bodies in immigration, I nevertheless acknowledge a potentially dangerous quality to her language here as it veers toward the social Darwinist logic that Osaki Midori rejected in her work (as discussed in chapter 1). Ito’s claim that the flourishing of the ice plant is justified because the “native plants were weak” takes on a colonialist hue, especially in the settler-colonial space of California. It is somewhat difficult to square such logic and language with Ito’s stated interest in Native American culture. She claims one of the main reasons she came to California was to study Native American poetry and storytelling. At the heart of Ito’s writing on migration is a question that Marder articulates well in botanical terms: “How could one draw together the world of human beings and that of plants, while resisting the temptation to sacrifice the specificity of either perspective?”58 We can modify this question to address humans of different nationalities as well: How could one draw together the varied experiences of humans migrating to the United States, while resisting the temptation to sacrifice the specificity of each individual set of circumstances? Ito’s writing attempts to answer these questions through becoming botanical. For it is within the botanical realm that Ito’s work maintains a sense of poetic wonder at the radical otherness of the plant world, which she then extends to those human refugees less fortunate than herself. A similar sense of poetic wonder is in turn extended to the Indigenous peoples of the United States. Ito’s long-form narrative poem Coyote Song (Koyōte songu, written between 2005 and 2007) includes narrative elements from the folklore of various Native American tribes, including the Nez Perce, the Ponca, the Winnebago, and the Alsea. It is a poetic tribute to a “United States” that far predates the arrival of the ice plant and all that it stands for metaphorically.

There is, to be sure, a potential for oversimplification in Ito’s botanical empathy. Reducing a diverse population of humans (and/or plants) with differing circumstances and struggles to the general category of “immigrant” can just as easily swing toward the kind of xenophobic rhetoric Ito’s empathy looks to overcome. Yet we can also see in Ito’s self-identification with marginalized immigrant communities a kind of reclamation of power. It is as if Ito recognizes the power held by the word immigrant (a power used to xenophobic ends by the US immigration enforcement agencies for much of Ito’s tenure living in Southern California) and redirects its totalizing simplicity to destabilize any claims to a “native” belonging to place. If it sounds overly simple, that is because it is overly simple to Ito: all bodies migrate, even those deemed “native.” In Tree Spirits Grass Spirits, Ito writes of kyūrigusa, or “cucumber grass,” as a vegetal example of the arbitrariness of such designations as “native” and “naturalized”: “They say cucumber grass is a naturalized plant. Even so, they say it’s an ancient naturalized plant, one that came around the same time as the ancestor of barley. How in the world could we call this a ‘naturalized plant?’ Is it right to do so? If it were humans we were talking about, wouldn’t they already be considered fellow countrymen? As a humble immigrant myself, this is a question I can’t let go of.”59

Focusing on the deep history of plant migration, Ito asks: Where does the distinction lay between “native” and “naturalized” or between “immigrants” and “fellow countrymen?” Based on her experiences as an immigrant in the United States, Ito is aware that such distinctions lay in the hands of those in power. Throughout Wild Grass on the Riverbank, there is a tension between the freedom of movement found in the botanical realm and the biopolitical control exerted on migratory human bodies by governmental agencies. The fear of arrest and deportation looms over the poem. Within its opening pages, Natsukusa describes her experience with immigration authorities at the airport in the wasteland of Southern California, as the poem gives way to an extended section of run-on prose:

It took one day and one night to reach immigration, the route was lined with many, many immigrants who had run out of energy, collapsed along the way and shriveled up, no matter how wealthy the country, they never make the path to immigration any shorter, their wealth won’t help us, there is just sadness, curt answers and pain, those places are nowhere in particular, and to make matters worse, there is no guarantee we’ll even make it through, little brother didn’t notice but I did, our passports were bad passports, I had noticed alright, at immigration in every country, the men made unfriendly faces and stared at their computers, that’s because our passports are bad passports.60

Here, at the start of Wild Grass on the Riverbank, innumerable desperate human bodies become botanical and “shriveled up” (hikarabiteimashita) as they wait endlessly for a chance to enter the United States. They embody, in their dried-up husks, Sandilands’ claim that humans are “controlled like and even as plants” in the contemporary biopolitical control of human migration. Ito recognizes this and decides to turn it on its head. If migratory humans are controlled “like plants,” then they can, to again paraphrase Sandilands, grow, populate, spread, invade “like plants.”

By the end of Wild Grass on the Riverbank, Natsukusa will come to see herself as one of these desperate bodies rendered plantlike, but she finds freedom in the fact that such self-recognition in the botanical realm can lead to new possibilities. In the last section of the poem, Natsukusa returns to the wasteland without her mother. Her experience at the airport immigration office is markedly different than her first time through. While there remains a legal challenge to Natsukusa’s entry (she still has a “bad passport”), she learns how to move through the middle:

This is Natsukusa’s true moment of epiphany. It is here that she learns she must become botanical and naturalize in order to avoid legal trouble. The poem hinges between human naturalization, in which Natsukusa is told she must become a legal citizen to “solve the problem” of her passport, and plant naturalization, as it lists three of the naturalized plants featured throughout the poem. Through secular migration, these three plants naturalized to the riverbank of Kumamoto. It is now Natsukusa’s turn to do the same in the wasteland.

This epiphany is not singular. It blooms in Natsukusa’s botanical subjectivity, opening out to a multispecies collective that incorporates all migratory bodies she encounters in the wasteland. She leaves the airport with her younger brother and sister and finds herself in the middle of just such a collective that includes both humans and plants:

We left the airport building, and we waited for the bus a long time while keeping ourselves out of the rain, we got on board the bus and shook back and forth for a long time, the windows of the bus were miserably dirty, the people (got) on board and got off a few at a time, all of the people had left the places where they had been born naturally and had come here, the things growing here were alive, living, life, live oaks, sage thickets and cacti and agave . . .

And that’s how we reached the wasteland

Familiar landscapes, trees, and plants

There were things that had grown there naturally

There were things that had come from elsewhere and spread62

The wasteland becomes the sum total of “things that had grown there naturally,” like “live oaks, sage thickets and cacti and agave,” and “things that had come from elsewhere and spread,” like those humans who had “left the places where they had been born naturally.” The native, naturalized, and invasive all become “fellow countrymen” in the middle.

As she arrives in her old neighborhood, Natsukusa once again encounters human immigrants who have “dried up.” She realizes they are no different than herself:

Within the botanical realm, Ito and her characters are “just like” those naturalized plants that left their native homes and “just like” those human immigrants told to “Go home.” Natsukusa realizes she is “just like” those immigrants who “are dead,” immigrants who have died tragic deaths but can somehow come back to life through becoming botanical (a shokubutsusei that I will discuss in the concluding paragraph of this chapter).

Natsukusa is able to see herself in these “dried up” husks of migratory bodies because she has spent the majority of the poem learning about naturalized plants. Before leaving the riverbank, she shares a conversation with an immigrant man who teaches her the names of several unfamiliar plants. Their conversation hinges on the fact that one of the plants, Paspali urvillei (tachi-suzume-no-hie in Japanese), is not featured in the “plant book” Natsukusa uses to identify the plants of the riverbank. The man explains that it is “newly naturalized” and thus not included in the book. He teaches Natsukusa about the prevalence of migratory plants, showing her that plants from elsewhere have adapted to the riverbank and become an integral part of their ecological fabric. At the same time, he speaks of the difficulty of acclimatization to a new environment, a difficulty shared by humans and plants alike:

Natsukusa (who, as discussed above, has a botanical alter ego in the form of Alexa/Arekusa) thus learns to process her own experience of migration (first to the wasteland, then to the riverbank, and then back again) through the migratory experience of naturalized plants. But she also learns of the difficulty of acclimatization. As the man tells her, not all migrants “get accustomed to things.”

This is true of Ito herself (or at least it is true of the semifictionalized version of herself at the heart of her work). Before she could find the literary (and critical) potential in uprooting, she would first need to find a way to acclimatize to her new surroundings in Southern California, just like the many naturalized plants there. In order to grow, populate, spread, and invade (to use Sandilands’ figuration once again), she would need to turn plastic and transform. Just as it took Ito several years to capture the movement of naturalized plants in words (as she claims was the case in Tree Spirits Grass Spirits), so, too, would it take her several years to identify with migratory plants in a radical way and to find the botanical poetics from which to posit a notion of empathy that moves between migratory humans and plants.

The Struggle for Acclimatization and Plasticity

Ito began writing about migration after she arrived in Southern California in the late 1990s. Her early works written in California, including House Plant (Hausu puranto, 1998) and La Niña (Ra nīnya, 1999), do not make a clear link between the secular migration of plants and human migration in the way her later works do. Yet they are both works of a botanical imagination. House Plant and La Niña are attempts to find a language that can describe the process of acclimatization that is required to reach the status of naturalization.65 Although they do not fully develop a notion of botanical empathy, they display a plantlike plasticity as they record the process of adaptation to a new environment. House Plant stages the difficulties Ito and her family faced settling in Southern California in the form of a semiautobiographical novella.66 Some of these difficulties are linguistic. The novella portrays the first-person narrator (who is based on Ito but remains nameless throughout) struggling to learn English. She worries about losing her ability to properly communicate in Japanese as well.67 From its opening lines, the narrator of House Plant pays close, plantlike attention to the climate of Southern California: “When I come out of the building the sky is very blue. The sunlight very dry, everything very Californian. I feel as though the sky is teasing me, the blue sky, the sunlight. It doesn’t matter what I’m doing, doesn’t matter what state I’m in; the sky never changes in the slightest. The sky is sky, very blue and clear.”68

The narrator struggles to describe this non-Japanese climate with Japanese words: “I’ve been trying to find a suitable word to describe the blue sky, but I haven’t found one. In Japanese we say an-autumn-clear-sky or a-Japanese-cloudless-sky, a-spring-like-autumn-day, but they all mean autumn weather in Japan, a clear, cloudless blue sky. But much calmer.”69 How, Ito asks, can one acclimatize to a new environment without the right words to describe even the climate itself?

Ito’s follow-up to House Plant, titled La Niña, poses this question as well. The title is a play on words, as la niña (or “little girl” in Spanish) refers both to the daughter character in the text (a fictionalized version of one of Ito’s daughters) and the weather pattern of the same name that influenced the climate of Southern California around the time Ito wrote the story. The novella’s narrator (again based on Ito but nameless in the story) struggles to comprehend the increased rainfall that is characteristic of la niña weather. She likewise struggles to understand the gendered aspect of the name la niña and envisions it as a kind of migration of its own: “La niña—that small thing (feminine noun), that female child, those little girls, those daughters, no, I don’t think it’s plural, even if it is a feminine noun. But the image I have is of multiple girls making their way across the waves, headed this way.”70 In La Niña, Ito (or, rather, the narrator based on her) has not yet found the creative space of the middle. She experiences discomfort with the climate of her new home that exacerbates the personal struggles each family member experiences trying to adapt to their new lives in California. The narrator’s daughter develops an eating disorder, while the narrator herself wrestles with painful memories of her ex-husband, whom she has left behind in Japan. Ito repeats a refrain throughout the narrative that speaks to the uprooted feeling of existing between Japan and the United States: “Two spirits, one body” (Kokoro wa futatsu, mi wa hitotsu). This phrase could easily be deployed to describe a botanical subjectivity, which I have been arguing throughout this book is a multiple subjectivity. Ito’s use of the phrase in La Niña is far from botanical, however. It does not point toward a creative embodiment of plantlike qualities that Ito writes into her later work. Here, in La Niña, “two spirits” in “one body” is a hindrance to acclimatization. It prevents the narrator from being present or moving forward. It is not liberatory.

Both House Plant and La Niña are early steps toward becoming botanical, but they do not move beyond the metaphorical figuration of uprooting. Both focus on their narrator’s isolation in her new home. In House Plant, the loneliness of uprooting becomes palpable after the narrator’s one American friend, Claris, moves away. The narrator feels that she was able to communicate with Claris, claiming that when “talking with Claris, I never felt that any of my words were getting lost.”71 Once Claris moves away, however, the narrator remarks that her “life was silent for a while.”72 In this silence is a loneliness that permeates the text, producing what appears to be a strong desire for “rootedness,” defined by Christy Wampole as “a conservative desire for comfort. Comfort here means the existential consolation of strength-giving sameness.”73 As the narrator of House Plant feels different and out of place in her surroundings, she looks for examples of “strength-giving sameness,” but she cannot find any.

In these early California novellas, Ito has yet to find the sameness in difference that she writes into the botanical empathy of later texts. Overall, House Plant sees difference as a hindrance to acclimatization. Yet there is a moment in which the narrator finds something approaching a sense of community among fellow migrants. She attends a dinner party with her husband (named Aaron, likely after the computer program developed by Ito’s partner Harold Cohen) and her friend Claris (who was still living there at the time). The remaining guests are, like the narrator, not US citizens. Among them is a woman the narrator refers to as “Dietlin(d),” the final letter of her name bracketed to highlight the fact that the narrator is unable, as a native Japanese speaker, to properly pronounce or hear the compound consonant of nd. Although the narrator dreads attending the party (“They cause me so much distress”), she finds a sense of camaraderie with the foreign guests: “Tom, Tomasz, and Agosz are always in and out of the country. When they’re here, they’re here; when they’re not, they’re not. When they are here, we see them, and when they aren’t, then that’s all there is to it. Whenever they return, we see them again. Dietlin(d) is the same way, and me too.”74

The group shares stories of dealing with the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which was the agency in charge of immigration matters until it was dissolved in 2003.75 They offer each other tips on how to avoid the legal troubles associated with overstaying one’s tourist visa. The narrator ends up recounting how she ran into trouble after overstaying her own visa. When she attempted to return to the United States, she had difficulty passing through immigration at the airport. Told she would experience these issues every time she attempted to return to the United States, the narrator decides to apply for a Permanent Resident Visa. Her application is rejected:

It is this traumatic experience (based on an experience from Ito’s own life that she has written about several times in several different texts) that leads her to marry Aaron, who has an easier time naturalizing. In this dinner party scene, we see the first inklings of what Ito will eventually formulate into a botanical empathy. House Plant collects a group of people who have migration in common, but the dinner party does not necessarily bring them closer together. The narrator gets into an argument with the other non-US citizens at the party, trying to convince them that overstaying one’s visa will lead to the kind of legal difficulties she has experienced. Although she tries to express empathy for their shared precarious situation, her words fall on deaf ears.

The dinner party scene in House Plant is an image of shared migrancy, but Ito does not seem to have the botanical language yet to draw the narrator and the other guests together into a radical collective that could resist state control. A similar thing occurs at the end of La Niña. The novella ends at the Los Angeles International Airport, as the narrator has decided to bring her children back to Japan for a period of time. Although they arrive at the airport late at night, the narrator finds other parents traveling as well: “We sat in the corner of a coffee shop. Even though it was the middle of the night, the LA airport was bustling. There were many other ethnic [esunikku] parents with children besides us. The parents were feeding their children. It was always around this time that planes going to Asia, South America, and the Near and Middle East took off.”77 Here again, Ito writes herself (through the nameless first-person narrator) into a scene surrounded by other migrating humans. She does not, however, make an explicit link between their deterritorialization (to borrow a term from Deleuze and Guattari) and the migratory nature of plants, a link I have been arguing allows Ito’s later work to form more radical alliances between humans and plants alike. Without migratory plants serving as a medium through which Ito can process her own migratory experience, the other “ethnic” families remain “other.”

While the botanical realm does not help the narrators of House Plant and La Niña understand their place (or the place of the other dinner party guests or the migratory families at the airport) within secular migration, plants do figure prominently in both novellas. Newly transplanted to Southern California, the narrators are unfamiliar with much of the plant life in the region. Much like her uncomfortable relationship with the English language and the climate, House Plant’s narrator displays a tense relationship with the flora of Southern California. Eucalyptus trees, in particular, become an ominous presence:

Every time I go shopping I see it. The road goes downhill. And as it continues winding along, I look out over the lower landscape ahead. It looks a bit hazy, so I know maybe there are eucalyptus trees. But when I drive into that landscape, there aren’t just a few trees here and there; I am overwhelmed. The whole world is full of eucalyptus trees. I can’t see the sky at all. The road is engulfed, left and right; the huge eucalyptus trees cover everything; even in the daytime it’s gloomy here. Going downhill, winding or dead-end—it’s like that everywhere.78

The sheer number of eucalyptus trees overwhelm the narrator, blocking out the sun, rendering the world “gloomy.” In an ironic twist, it is plant life that keeps the narrator from realizing her own plantlike plasticity. Throughout House Plant, eucalyptus trees stand as a hindrance to acclimatization. In the narrator’s eyes, they stand out in the otherwise verdant landscape. As she describes her neighborhood, we get the sense that the eucalyptus trees do not belong. The narrator’s own anxiety over being uprooted becomes embodied in the trees: “This is a nice residential area—suburban, open, lots of Mexicans, though few Asians. Not much crime. At least this is a safe community to live in—that kind of place. The whole area is well irrigated, and most of the houses are surrounded in green. Shopping malls also are surrounded in green. Fruiting lemon trees, avocado trees, blooming bougainvillea. But we can spot a eucalyptus tree here and there, standing, growing, swaying, inhumanely, barrenly.”79

The eucalyptus tree brings something like discomfort to the narrator. Yet there is a curious inversion taking place here. In the previous quotation, the eucalyptus trees are presented as thriving to the point of overwhelming the narrator, yet in the later quotation, they are spotty and unwelcome. They sway “inhumanely, barrenly.” The narrator views these trees as an impediment to her own thriving, as they prevent her from growing anything new in her garden: “The ground is barren. Nothing grows. Even so, I’ve never given up; I planted many things and nothing grew. Someone told me that it was because of the eucalyptus trees. That’s why, I thought.”80

Ito’s later works see the thriving of unwelcome species like the eucalyptus as a virtue (as with ice plants, which become a role model). As she praises the invasive qualities of naturalized plants, Ito expresses a conviction to do whatever it takes to acclimatize in Tree Spirits Grass Spirits. There, she sees herself as plastic, as a “fierce and indefatigable” naturalized plant that may even force out “weak” native plants.81 This fierceness is all but absent in House Plant. Plant life does not offer any promise of plasticity that might help the narrator adapt to her new surroundings. The botanical subjectivity opened up in House Plant is confusing and confining: “The character of the eucalyptus trees around my house and the confusion under them can be seen from far off. The messiness of the lives of the people who live there—you can tell everything. I don’t want to be discovered so easily—I don’t, but there’s no way of hiding. I’m overwhelmed by that endless blurred impression that is where I live.”82 By the time Ito began publishing Wild Grass on the Riverbank in 2004, her impression of her surroundings in Southern California had sharpened. The hazy, uneasy feeling of being out of place, as witnessed throughout House Plant, is replaced by a near-obsessive attention to the naturalized plants that have taken root and flourished in Southern California. House Plant may acknowledge the eucalyptus as a migratory species; it does so with an uncertainty that characterizes the novella and distinguishes it from Ito’s later work: “I don’t know whether it was before the Gold Rush or afterward that they were building the railroads and they brought the eucalyptus tree from Australia and planted them to use for railroad ties. . . . I heard this story somewhere. I’m not sure whether it’s true or not. It was either Aaron or Claris who told me, but both of them came to California from somewhere else.”83

The elements to construct a notion of botanical empathy are present here: migratory humans (the narrator, her husband Aaron, and even the American-born Claris) and migratory plants (the eucalyptus that has overstayed its welcome once it was no longer deemed of use to humans), all occupying the same space that has become their home. The novella suggests a commonality between these various humans and plants, but it does not draw these migratory beings into a multispecies collective, the way Wild Grass on the Riverbank does as Natsukusa returns to the wasteland and remarks:

La Niña comes closer to reaching a botanical revelation leading to acclimatization. While the eucalyptus trees in House Plant alienate the narrator and prevent her from adapting to Southern California, the acacia tree (another non-native plant deemed invasive in California) teaches the narrator of La Niña about diversity and perseverance. As she brings her husband (who, just like in House Plant, is a fictionalized version of Ito’s then-partner Harold Cohen) to physical therapy after he undergoes surgery, the narrator of La Niña notices acacia trees surrounding the building. We see a moment of intense focus and clarity as the narrator describes how the acacia trees are all different, despite being of the same species:

I drive around incessantly, secretly continuing to observe the acacia, and I’ve gotten quite acquainted with them. I’ve noticed that even though they are all “acacias,” they are not all the same. There are some that flourish as if crawling along the ground, and there are some that become tall trees. There are those that stand up straight as a pole, no matter what their flowers look like, and there are those that have long tongue-like parts that hang down, and then there are those that seem like clouds. But each one is yellow, and there is no doubt that they are all acacias.85

This is a scene of acclimatization. The narrator becomes more familiar with her surroundings and gains a kind of knowledge about how to survive in foreign soil. Although not spelled out explicitly, this scene perfectly illustrates the tension Ito works through in her formulation of botanical empathy. The migratory human sees herself in a naturalized plant species (the acacia), and likewise comes to understand something about the migratory experience, namely, that there is great diversity among those that share the common act of becoming through migration.

Acacias appear again near the end of the novella. This time, the narrator observes how the individual trees fade away as they become a part of a collective of plants that together dye the landscape bright colors as they flourish:

After the color of the acacias had faded and disappeared from the vicinity, mustard grass bloomed all over the canyon. The canyon was dyed yellow. Everything was, from the canyon to the hills. A fair amount of the empty lots as well, and the embankment too. . . . While we sped down the freeway, I thought to myself, “A full field of mustard grass, a full field of mustard grass, a full field of mustard grass,” forever and ever. . . .

Then wild poppies, as orange began to be mixed in with the yellow. Dwarf marigolds, too, were yellow and orange, and the nasturtium that creeped about, it too was yellow and orange, and then wildflowers of all kinds of colors (I didn’t know their names) bloomed here and there. The acacias went back to just being trees, with leaves that were just leaves. They were just green, hidden quietly in the spaces between the other trees.86

Once again, the narrator pays close attention to the landscape of Southern California as she tries to make sense of her own place within it. She displays a botanical subjectivity without fully understanding the implications of her experience. The scene is a subtle comment on naturalized plants. While marigolds are native to California, both mustard grass and nasturtium are considered invasive species. They are, in other words, migratory plants that have learned how to acclimatize and flourish. They are also beautiful. As they spread across the land, their bright colors eclipse the beauty of the acacia trees. Invasive species, the narrator learns, have their merits, even if these merits are merely aesthetic.

A full field of nonnative species that come together to create a beautiful landscape—again, it is not spelled out here in La Niña, but Ito is certainly circling around the kind of connections between botanical migrancy and human migrancy that will become the focus of Wild Grass on the Riverbank and Tree Spirits Grass Spirits. The narrator of La Niña is witnessing the results of a successful (perhaps too successful) acclimatization. She is not yet able to become fully botanical, however, for she has not learned the potential for creativity of the middle, repeating instead the novella’s refrain: “two spirits, one body.” It would take Ito a few more years to fully acclimatize and see herself and her migratory experience in a field of naturalized plants and to then write this becoming into Wild Grass on the Riverbank, where the link between immigration and botanical empathy is far more pronounced.

Seeking Asylum

It is Ito’s follow-up to La Niña, titled Three Lil’ Japanese (Surii riro jyapaniizu, 2001), that tackles the issue of immigration in the most straightforward manner of any of Ito’s poems, novellas, or prose pieces. Three Lil’ Japanese diverges from Ito’s early novellas written in California. It is set in Japan and is not as directly autobiographical in nature as House Plant or La Niña. Nevertheless, it speaks to Ito’s experience as an immigrant in the United States and belies an anxiety over the biopolitical control of immigration. The story is narrated by a woman named Rika, whose husband, Taku, runs an English-language school somewhere in Kyushu. The two have a young child named Tamara. Driven by a vague but fervent frustration with Japanese society, Taku and Rika express a strong desire to immigrate to the United States (where Taku had previously lived as an exchange student). They enter their names into the “Diversity Immigrant Visa Program,” a lottery-based system that promotes the emigration of people from countries with historically low rates of immigration into the United States.

The novella portrays the extremely unlikely odds of being chosen for this program and the arbitrariness of legal immigration into the United States. Rika lays out the statistics in direct narration to the reader: “Anyone with more than a high school education can apply, and if chosen in the lottery, you can get a permanent resident visa. If you get chosen, your spouse automatically gets a permanent resident visa as well. Every year, 55,000 people are chosen from all over the world. In 1997, 448 Japanese people were chosen. 367 were chosen in 1998. I don’t know the numbers after that. There’s no information.”87

Rika and Taku are not chosen in the lottery, which prompts Rika to suggest that they go on a tourist visa instead. Taking a page from Ito’s own life (and replaying a scenario from House Plant), Taku confesses to Rika that he cannot return to the United States on a tourist visa, as he overstayed his last tourist visa and was refused entry when he attempted to reenter the country. Feeling as if they have no other options, Taku and Rika decide to drive to the Yokota Air Base in Western Tokyo—a military base operated jointly by the United States Air Force and the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force. Upon arriving at the base, they declare that they are seeking asylum in the United States. The novella ends with Taku, Rika, and Tamara being handled roughly by “large, fat” American soldiers, as Tamara wails in Rika’s arms.

The botanical realm enters the story as Taku and Rika drive from southern Japan up north to Western Tokyo.88 In line with both House Plant and La Niña (and unlike its role in Ito’s later work), plant life does not offer Rika an alternative model to rethink her subjective experience as a migrant. Instead, the rootedness of plant life keeps Rika and Taku tethered to Japan, rooted in a country they desperately wish to leave behind. As they make their way to Yokota, Rika comments several times on the many cherry trees they pass. Cherry trees are an overwrought and overdetermined image in Japan, one that Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney has called “the master troupe of Japan’s imperial nationalism” in her examination of the militarization of Japanese aesthetics.89 The cherry tree follows Rika and Taku as they attempt to escape their native home. Rika mentions the almost horrifically overabundant trees alongside violent headlines taken from the newspapers that she buys at each stop along the way. The headlines include things like: “Taxi driver is killed and robbed,” “A girl is killed in a car in the parking lot in front of the train station,” and “8 dogs are found dead in town.”90 It seems these “incidents,” as Rika refers to them, are meant to illustrate a violent instability in Japanese society that she and her husband are desperate to escape.

The unending sight of blooming cherry trees takes on an ominous character as Rika becomes increasingly panicked about the state of Japan. She puts it simply: “The cherry trees blossomed, and the incidents continued on.”91 Ito links the trees directly to military control, echoing Ohnuki-Tierney’s claim. The Yokota Air Base itself is covered in cherry trees, and they appear to physically prevent Rika and Taku from entering:

On the other side of the “Do Not Enter” sign were cherry trees in full bloom. Over the fence and grounds of the base, cherry blossoms hung down like a low hanging haze or cloud.

I read it out loud: “‘Do Not Enter.’”

My husband read it too: “‘Do Not Enter.’ It sounds like a curse.”

We had been cursed, and so we couldn’t get inside. We had been cursed, and so the flowers bloomed. They bloomed in full.92

Three Lil’ Japanese is, like much of Ito’s work, a story about family. Yet unlike her other work, and unlike the work of Osaki Midori explored in chapter 1 of this book, the plant life of Three Lil’ Japanese does not become kin. The “cursed” trees that line the roads and block the entrance to the Yokota base function symbolically, on an abstract level far removed from the personal, close attention paid to the eucalyptus and acacia trees in House Plant and La Niña, respectively. The cherry trees are of a different sort than the naturalized plants such as Sorghum halepense, Conyza sumatrensis, and Solidago altissima that populate later texts like Wild Grass on the Riverbank and Tree Spirits Grass Spirits. In their abstraction and ties to nationalism, the cherry trees in Three Lil’ Japanese lack the possibility of self-identification with the botanical realm that leads to botanical empathy.

Ito has written how, with Three Lil’ Japanese, she wanted to create a narrating “I” that was not self-identified.93 She based the story on a real-life event, in which a husband and wife (along with their two-year-old daughter) drove illegally into Yokota Air Base in May of 2000 and boarded a military plane bound for the United States. Like Taku and Riku, the couple requested asylum.94 All the same, elements of Ito’s experience in Southern California are legible in the narrative. Although the name of the city in which Taku had once studied in the United States is not given, it is clearly within the San Diego area of Southern California.95 Taku describes the city as having a military base nearby (likely the Marine Corps base Camp Pendleton, which is in San Diego County) and road signs warning of “illegal immigrants” crossing the border from Mexico:

It was a natural place with an army training base, wide with nothing else around. It was eerie because there really wasn’t anything else around. Of course, places operated by the authorities have a different feel to them. A highway ran right through the middle of the grounds. There was a checkpoint, and as you got close to the checkpoint, there was a sign asking you to watch out for people. You see them a lot, right, on highways and whatnot, the ones that have pictures of deer or raccoons on them? If I remember correctly, it was a picture of a woman running and holding a child, and she’s holding the child’s hand and their hair is disheveled. There were many illegal immigrants that would do that: cross the street and get hit by cars. Because there was a checkpoint there, and they would strictly control illegal immigration.96

Here and throughout Three Lil’ Japanese, Ito writes of the potential perils of immigration in a matter-of-fact way, drawing from the visible evidence of state control she encountered in Southern California (both the immigration checkpoints and road signs warning drivers to be careful not to hit immigrants crossing into California on foot), rather than recasting these perils through a creative engagement with plant life.

Curiously, Three Lil’ Japanese reaches, without becoming botanical, a realization that Ito finds through botanical empathy in her later works. Taku explains to Rika that he initially thought, having moved to the United States, that “illegal immigrants” all had “Mexican-like faces,” as these were the people he saw get stopped at the immigration checkpoint.97 After being deported due to overstaying his tourist visa, however, Taku comes to realize that he was similar to the other immigrants in California: “It was an area with many Mexicans. Every day, I would see illegal immigrants get caught and be deported on a worn-down bus. I watched this, thinking: ‘those people and I, we’re different.’ But we’re not different. It’s not like we were different at all.”98 Taken together with the dinner party scene in House Plant, in which non-US citizens from Europe argue with the narrator about whether or not overstaying one’s visa causes problems, this moment in Three Lil’ Japanese offers an understated critique of racial profiling in the United States. Taku thinks, based on what he witnesses at an immigration checkpoint in Southern California, that US Immigration Officers are only concerned with undocumented immigrants that he believes look to be from Mexico. He recounts how the officers would check drivers’ faces but only stop those that had “faces that looked like illegal immigrants.”99 Taku is thus surprised to learn that he, too, is subject to the same immigration laws when he attempts to reenter the United States after overstaying his visa.

“Dying Is Not Dying, and Not Dying Is Living, Right?”

Taku learns the hard way what Natsukusa learns by becoming botanical in Wild Grass on the Riverbank, that the act of migration is a shared experience that can lead to new alliances across species. For Natsukusa, this realization leads to an empowering botanical empathy. In Three Lil’ Japanese, it leads to a notion of shared punishment: deportation, arrest, and potentially even death. It is unclear what becomes of Taku and Rika, just as it is unclear what became of the real-life figures on which these characters are based. However, the escalation of panic and violence palpable at the end of Three Lil’ Japanese could easily lead to death if the narrative were to continue on. The novella’s ending suggests that all immigrants, including asylum seekers, share in the potential for a violent response at the hands of the state. It is a dark realization devoid of hope.

Like all of Ito’s early novellas written in California, Three Lil’ Japanese presents immigration into the United States as something of a dead end. It would take Ito opening up the experience of migration to the botanical realm in order for this dead end to be washed away in the “never-ending stream” that Deleuze and Guattari recognize as the middle. The figurative waters of this stream were necessary to help the seeds that Ito planted in her early California novellas bloom, seeds that would grow into the radical (and botanical) hope written into works like Wild Grass on the Riverbank, where immigrants may wither and die but continue on in their path toward naturalization. As Natsukusa becomes botanical at the poem’s end, producing bud after bud with the promise of secular migration, she gives birth to a form of hope that, phytomorphically, can overcome death.

Throughout Wild Grass on the Riverbank, bodies both human and more-than-human come back to life after dying. The poem links the ability to overcome death to plant life:

That plants never truly die is a sentiment Ito returns to time and again throughout her work.101 In Aunt Green-Thumb, she explains simply that: “for plants, ‘dying’ is ‘not dying.’ Their ‘death,’ ‘birth,’ ‘living,’ and ‘flourishing’ are fundamentally different from how we understand these concepts.”102 This is a philosophical take on life that Ito learned from tending to plants in her home and garden, where plants would die only to bloom again when the season was right. In Tree Spirits Grass Spirits, she writes of caring for an agave attenuata and learning of their ability to continue living beyond death through secular migration:

The bulbs of these attenuata—which hang down their curious flowers here and there around town—will all, before long, die. If they were human, they’d be elderly people close to 100 years old. They will, before long, die—but it’s not sad. Up until this point, they’ve made new bulbs to their hearts’ content. Each new bulb is the spitting image of its parent bulb. Their death is neither sad nor painful. It’s not even the end.

I think as I gaze at them: Dogs and humans “grow old and die,” but for plants, “dying” is “not dying,” and “not dying” is “living,” right? This is the karma unique to them and them alone.103

Ito claims here that plants alone have the karmic ability to overcome death, but she extends this ability to humans (and dogs, as well) within the poetic realm of Wild Grass on the Riverbank. Natsukusa’s fathers (there is one in the wasteland and one in the riverbank) are “corpses” that can talk, existing somewhere in the middle of life and death. Her dog in the riverbank, who runs and plays with the children, is also a “corpse.” As Natsukusa returns to the wasteland of Southern California at the end of the poem, she is reunited with her father and notes that “the law of the plants had extended to this man who had been our father, living had become more commonplace than dying for him, it had become possible for him to return, the end had vanished, and it didn’t matter how often he died, he could come back to life again.”104 From here, Natsukusa becomes botanical and produces endless buds, just like the agave attenuata written into Tree Spirits Grass Spirits. Likely, the buds she produces are the “spitting image of its parent bulb.”

In its closing moments, Wild Grass on the Riverbank stands in the middle of the botanical realm and offers hope for the future. It is a hope that looks beyond the immediate experience and hardships of the individual immigrant and focuses instead on the long durée of secular migration. It is a hope extended to all migratory bodies, alive and dead—a dichotomy that has been rethought through the model of plant life. It is a hope, however naive, that Ito extended in a gesture of botanical empathy during her poetry reading at Waseda University in 2019, to Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and Valeria—that father and daughter who died along the riverbank while seeking asylum in the United States.

Wither Hope? Or, Hope Withered

The hope written into Wild Grass on the Riverbank was hard earned, and in recent years, Ito’s writing on immigration has taken on a far more pessimistic hue. Having left the United States and returned to Japan following her partner’s death, Ito’s reflections on her experience as an immigrant in the United States have come to express a deep-seated fear and unease. In the afterword to the 2016 republication Three Lil’ Japanese, Ito writes about how the United States fundamentally changed in the years following the initial publication of the story:

I came to America in November 1997. I got my Permanent Resident Visa in June of the following year. The small incident (on which Three Lil’ Japanese is based) occurred in May 2000. In January 2001, George W. Bush became president. On September 11th of that year, there were multiple, simultaneous terrorist attacks. And then from there, everything broke down and got weird.

There was now a before and an after, and America truly changed. The change was irreversible, and I understood clearly that the sense of calm and the dreams I’d had before were now gone (those things probably hadn’t actually existed, but anyway), and that all I could do was go on living. As an immigrant living there, as someone raising kids there, that’s how it felt. And then afterwards a bleak period of not wanting to go to America continued on for a long time, even for our household. Actually, I wonder if it isn’t still continuing on even now.105

Although she is vague about the specifics, Ito hints at the increased surveillance and violence that immigrants faced in the wake of September 11, 2001. She expresses a deep dissatisfaction and anxiety as an immigrant in the United States. Published three years and one month after the events of 9/11, Wild Grass on the Riverbank somehow found a way to resist this dissatisfaction and anxiety by becoming botanical.

Ito’s anxiety only increased with the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016. In a short essay titled Trump (Toranpu) from her 2018 collection Twilight Child, Ito expresses disbelief at Trump’s election, stating that she does not know a single person in California who supported his candidacy. Written around the time Ito was debating whether or not to return to Japan after her partner’s death, the essay is uncharacteristically bleak. Upon learning of Trump’s victory, Ito expresses a strange, pessimistic curiosity about the fate of the country that had been her home for decades: “It’ll be interesting if America falls into chaos, if abortion and same-sex marriage are prohibited, if health care is repealed, if there is a recession, if its land gets polluted, if it comes to feel like all international relations deteriorate, if all ties are cut with Mexico, and if things get touch-and-go with China. I want to see how the American people recover from that.”106

Ito follows this (sarcastically?) dire prediction with a statement of empathy for fellow immigrants having to deal with the consequences of Trump’s election: “As I say these somewhat careless things, restrictions have already begun on the immigration of people from predominantly Islamic countries. There are stories of people with permanent resident visas also being stopped at airports.”107 She then once again recounts her experience overstaying her visa, and explains that the increased surveillance after George W. Bush took office felt draconian:

I illegally overstayed my visa a long time ago. After that, whenever I entered the United States, I was always brought to a special room and cross-examined. I would be let through in the end, but I was prepared to be deported. Before I got permanent residency, I paid a fine to erase the record of my illegal stay. But despite this, I started getting harassed at the airport again the moment the Bush administration took power.

It felt really terrible. An illogical door closed right before my eyes and I was treated like a criminal. But I had made a mistake, and all I could do in response was give in and agree. I couldn’t talk back.108

Ito’s “terrible” experience navigating immigration during the Bush presidency clearly continues to haunt her. A considerable amount of Ito’s Travels (Michiyukiya, 2020) discusses her efforts to help other women struggling to make sense of the US immigration policy. In one particularly poignant section, she writes of a friend named Yoko and her difficult decision of whether to divorce her American husband and relocate her children to Japan. Yoko expresses concern that relocating her children would violate the Hague Abduction Convention.109 Ito speaks with an immigration officer on the phone to get clarification for her friend but ends up thoroughly frustrated. She arrives at a bitter conclusion:

As someone who has been through it, as a woman who has gone through it before, whenever I see a young woman who is in love with someone not Japanese, I want to give them advice: Don’t get divorced. If you do, you’ll have to leave your child and return to Japan alone. Wait, no, let’s back up.

Don’t have children. Actually, let’s back even up more. If I don’t share my opinion, then it’ll be too late. Ladies: don’t fall in love with men from other countries. Don’t fall in love and leave Japan for a foreign country.110

Ito’s hope for secular migration seems to have all but withered. The water of the supposedly “never-ending” stream that runs through the zone of the middle has evaporated. Even plants seem to no longer offer potential for change. As the chapter concludes, Ito’s disillusionment with state control of migration and reproduction extends into the fields of naturalized plants that populate the riverbank near Ito’s Kumamoto home (a place Natsukusa also called home for a short while):

The leaves of the kudzu squirm along the riverbank in Kumamoto in Japan. In the gaps between them bloom bright yellow Coreopsis lanceolate (ōkinkeigiku). There were more of them a few years back. It seems that someone familiar with the Invasive Alien Species Act, someone who is passionate about environmental protection and truly detested those species designated as invasive, walks through and pulls them out. The following was written on the website for the Kyushu Ministry of the Environment: “In order to help prevent the flourishing of Coreopsis lanceolate, it is important to exterminate them before they drop their seeds on the ground, or before they go to seed.” That’s what Coreopsis lanceolate’s problem was.111

Like children under the Hague Convention, naturalized plants have been subjected to biopolitical control under the Invasive Alien Species Act, which took effect in Japan in 2004 (see figure 5.4). The “that” that Ito claims is the problem with Coreopsis lanceolate is its reproducing, its going to seed—the very thing Natsukusa accomplishes at the end of her narrative journey through secular migration. Naturalized plants no longer serve as role models for Ito but rather as cautionary tales meant to warn humans not to migrate or give birth.

Ito claims that her own dreams died in the wake of 9/11 and that her hopes for immigrants (and the United States at large) died with the election of Donald Trump. As Ito’s writing teaches us, however, “For plants, ‘dying’ is ‘not dying.’” Like the plants she has so carefully thought about and described throughout her writing career—those persistent plants always struggling for naturalization in the face of all obstacles—her dreams and hopes may indeed spring back to life in the right season, either within Ito herself or within a botanical subjectivity shared with her children, who live, as the result of secular migration, in the United States. As Wild Grass on the Riverbank states: “Living is/ More commonplace/ Than dying for plants.”112 The same is true, one can hope, for dreams of becoming botanical.