Introduction Botanical Potential

Plant Awareness Disparities

With this growing interest in plant life comes an increasingly common claim invoked in CPS scholarship about so-called plant awareness disparity.9 The argument goes that there is an inherent irony to the way humans conventionally think about plants, namely, that humans do not think about plants all that much, especially when we consider the fact that plants are the most abundant living organisms on the planet, accounting for 80 percent of the earth’s total biomass.10 It is not an exaggeration to say that humans could not survive without plants, although, as the Japanese agricultural historian and philosopher Fujihara Tatsushi reminds us, plants could indeed survive without us.11 We humans are apparently not sufficiently aware of the fact that we are fully dependent on plants for our most basic survival. We breathe the oxygen they create and consume parts of their material bodies for our sustenance, but we are not properly cognizant of what this relationship means at a deeper level. CPS thinkers often claim that, for most of us, plants linger in the background, decorating our gardens and greening our parks (or helping to constitute the settings of our fictional narratives). They may be nice to look at, nice to smell and eat, and useful as raw materials and natural resources, but rarely are they the object of serious philosophical contemplation, either in humanities scholarship or in our daily lives. The argument goes that it is only within the past decade or so that academia and the general public have turned serious attention to the botanical world, that the recent interest in plants and plant communication (as I mentioned above) is new and unprecedented.

This is a useful claim to help justify the importance of CPS scholarship, to be sure. This book, however, pushes back against the idea of plant awareness disparity and argues instead that plants have been in the critical foreground of modern Japanese aesthetics (in both literature and cinema) and in philosophical discourse for decades. As the works I bring together in this book demonstrate, Japanese artists have taken plants seriously and thought deeply about the botanical realm long before the advent of CPS as a recognizable field of academic inquiry. Some seventy years before academics were reading the CPS theorist Robin Wall Kimmerer’s influential work on moss, the Japanese modernist writer Osaki Midori was looking closely at moss and writing literary experiments that suggested humans and moss were much more alike than was conventionally believed. This is not to say that Osaki anticipated Kimmerer’s specific theoretical insights about the plant. Osaki turned to moss against a backdrop of escalating war and colonial violence in 1930s Japan, and so moss meant something different to her than it does to Kimmerer. This difference is important.

Rather than make a blanket claim about plant awareness disparity among a generalized notion of the human, I want to suggest at the beginning of this book that there is an awareness disparity within CPS itself. This is an awareness disparity that, in attempting to take plants seriously, ends up abstracting them into decontextualized figures of metaphysics rather than recognizing them as historically situated subjects in their own right. Part of the rethinking of the plant at the heart of this book is a rethinking of the historicity of plant life, of why it matters when and where a given plant is situated. To speak of moss in general is to neglect the contingencies that inform both Kimmerer’s and Osaki’s botanical imaginations. By and large, the humanities no longer treat the human as a generalized/generalizable figure, recognizing instead that specificity and context matter greatly to historical configurations of the human. Now that the plant humanities have entered the fray, it is time to recognize that specificity and context matter with plants as well. The influential Russian botanist Kliment Timiryazev (whom I discuss in chapter 2) once asked: “Has a plant its history?”12 This book intends to demonstrate that yes, a plant has its history, and this history is important.

History matters to the botanical imagination of the writers and filmmakers I discuss in the pages that follow. Like plants themselves, their botanical poetics did not grow out of a vacuum. I contend that by “following the plants” (to use the words of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari) in works of modern Japanese literature and cinema, we can gain new insight into the moments of historical crisis that inspired artists to seek out knowledge of plant life and to imagine what it might mean to be more plantlike themselves. Following the plants in works of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Japanese literature and cinema reveals how writers and filmmakers were able to construct new forms of subjectivity, navigate historical turbulence, and attempt to resist certain forms of state violence. Bringing CPS into Japanese studies offers a way to think simultaneously about the place of plants in histories of imperialism and state control while also recognizing how plants became figures of resistance to such state power. This tension is at the heart of the book, a push-and-pull that finds plants participating in the very forms of violence that drove artists to turn to plants as a model of resistance in the first place. The trope of becoming botanical, as I theorize it here, is a potential that can be used to radical ends, but it can also be used to more conservative, reactionary, and even violent ends.

Ultimately, rethinking plants can, I believe, help us rethink Japanese literary and cinematic history. A closer look at Japanese literature and cinema can, in turn, help us rethink the parameters and stakes of CPS. Therefore, this book argues that writers and filmmakers in Japan have been engaged in rethinking the plant for nearly one hundred years, and it uses the insights of CPS to read works of Japanese literature and film where plants play important, if not always central, roles. It argues that these texts rethink what it means to be human by imagining what it would mean to be more plantlike. Inspired by plant life’s ability to adapt in the face of adversity, the writers and filmmakers I bring together in this book attempted to weather moments of crisis by becoming anew, which is to say, by becoming botanical.

Toward Shokubutsusei in Japanese Studies

By claiming that there has been an awareness disparity in CPS when it comes to historicity, I do not mean to suggest that CPS scholarship has nothing to say about the plant histories discussed in this book. On the contrary, the inspiration for this book was reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss (2003) alongside Osaki Midori’s moss-filled novella Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense (1931). Kimmerer’s poetic discussion of moss was informed by intersecting forms of knowledge, both conventionally scientific (Kimmerer is trained as a botanist) and Indigenous (she is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation). What, I wondered, was informing Osaki’s poetic discussion of moss in 1930s Japan? CPS invited me to follow the plants and find surprising connections among works of writers and filmmakers that were not immediately apparent, as well as surprising links between the Japanese state and artists who resisted the state in their work.

Thinkers like Kimmerer provided a theoretical foundation to rethink my approach to modern Japanese media and find a botanical potential lying in wait within Japanese studies. This is because CPS thinkers are continually diversifying our ways of understanding not only plants but also ourselves in relation to plants. In the process, CPS has worked to erode several supposed binary oppositions, principal among them nature and culture. When viewed as a whole, it becomes clear that the CPS project of moving plants to the foreground is not a means of moving other pressing issues into the background, be it ecological crisis, legacies of settler colonialism, systemic racism, sexism, and/or transphobia. Rather, plants offer us a way of rethinking these issues in new, less anthropocentric ways. As an interdisciplinary endeavor, CPS invites us to not only think about plants as either belonging to nature (what we might call their material face) or belonging to culture (what we might call their semiotic face) but also as active yet ambiguous beings that grow across the line separating the material and the semiotic. To truly know a plant is to know both of these faces and to see them as entwined. To this end, CPS likewise works to erode the firm distinctions between science and art. CPS acknowledges the pitfalls of dominant forms of science, including the potential for objectification and instrumentalization as well as science’s complicity in histories of colonialism, racism, sexism, and resource extraction. But CPS is not antiscience. Far from it! Like the Japanese writers and filmmakers I examine in this book, CPS thinkers find great potential in the sciences, including (and perhaps especially) in nondominant forms of science. For the figures I discuss in the coming pages, it was an engagement with science (be it botany, evolution, or even spiritually inflected pseudoscience) that allowed them to know plants in new ways and bring these insights into their novels, poetry, and films. The botanical poetics I read into their works grows out of this engagement with science.

All the same, there has certainly been an awareness disparity in CPS regarding Japan (and many other non-Western cultural traditions, to be sure). Conversely, Japanese studies has heretofore been slow to engage with CPS scholarship. While Natania Meeker and Antonia Szabri claim in their coauthored work Radical Botany that we are in the midst of a “plant turn” in academia, no such turn has yet made serious inroads into the study of Japanese literature or cinema.13 This is surprising for several reasons. First, as mentioned at the beginning of this introduction, plants have long held a significant place in Japanese culture not only in the realm of aesthetics but also in the realm of spirituality and religion. From Japan’s earliest extant poetry and mythology all the way to contemporary anime and science fiction, plants abound in Japanese cultural production. Even the ubiquitous notion of “the transience of life” as embodied in the cherry blossom’s scattering in the wind is arguably an attempt to rethink human existence through plant life. Such aesthetics have never been ideologically neutral, however, and several anthropologists and environmental historians of Japan have made clear the role that certain plants (including the cherry blossom) have played in Japan’s imperial history.14 Such entanglements between botany and empire extend into Japanese literature and cinema as well, but critical attention to plant life in the study of Japanese media has been surprisingly scant. This book looks to remedy that.

The second reason I find the lack of CPS in Japanese studies surprising is that CPS texts have been (and continue to be) translated into Japanese. Translations of books by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Stefano Mancuso, and Emanuele Coccia are all easily found in Japanese bookstores. It was not until around 2020, however, that Japanese scholars began to enter into dialogue with these CPS theorists. Most notable among those who have is Fujihara Tatsushi, whose 2022 book Thoughts on Plants (Shokubutsukō) collects essays written between 2019 and 2021 that discuss Japanese aesthetics and literary texts alongside insights from CPS thinkers like Coccia and Mancuso. As Fujihara explains in his introduction, it was his research on the relationship between agriculture and Japanese settler colonialism that first spurred him on to think and write critically about plant life and to theorize what he calls shokubutsusei—what we might translate as “botanicallity” or “plant-ness.” Ultimately, however, I think the word is better left in the original Japanese, where shokubutsu means “plant” and -sei marks the nature or essence of something (and is usually rendered in English as the suffix “-ity” or “-ness”). My decision to leave Fujihara’s term in its original Japanese is not because the term is untranslatable per se. It is, rather, meant to highlight the geographical and linguistic context in which Fujihara has developed his concept. Which is to say, Fujihara’s shokubutsusei is an intervention into CPS that is expressly informed by his reading of and engagement with Japanese literature, history, and botanical scholarship, in addition to the more prevalent Western tradition that informs much of CPS theorization. To help widen the scope of CPS and draw attention to the specificity of Fujihara’s scholarship, I have kept the term untranslated in the coming pages, as one might refer to a plant’s scientific name rather than its common name. There is, I believe, an academic specificity to such an act.

In Thoughts on Plants, Fujihara puts CPS theorists like Coccia and Mancuso into conversation with Japanese authors like Miyazawa Kenji and Itō Seikō (who I also take up, in chapter 3). He discusses cultural/material botanical figurations like chinju no mori (forests that surround Shinto shrines) and specific trees growing around his home of Kyoto. As he does so, he relativizes a received cultural tradition of botanical thinking that stretches back to Greek philosophy—a tradition that has by and large served as the basis of CPS. In its attention to Japan, Fujihara’s work helps CPS open its eyes to historicity beyond the Western tradition, to different forms of knowing plant life in different historical contexts across time and place. Fujihara is not interested in a universal theory of “plant-ness” but rather in specific articulations of shokubutsusei that can be applied even beyond the botanical realm: “If we define the concept as such, we can use it to say things like, ‘the shokubutsusei of this country has fallen into an alarming condition,’ or ‘this thinker is unique when it comes to the depth of their shokubutsusei.’”15 The qualities of the shokubutsusei in Fujihara’s hypothetical country are surely different than the qualities present in the hypothetical thinker mentioned in this quote. Just as there are different plants, there are different manifestations of shokubutsusei. The concept is powerful in its recognition of plant plurality and diversity.

Fujihara’s shokubutsusei is an abstraction of plant life, but it is one intended to draw attention to particular and differing botanical characteristics throughout history. It is an abstraction in the plural. This is another reason for my keeping the term in its original language, as it can indeed be read as plural in Japanese. There are many articulations of shokubutsusei and not a singular “botanicallity” that cuts across all plants, let alone all humans or countries. The trope of becoming botanical—the primary focus of this book—is one such shokubutsusei, and as we shall see from chapter to chapter, there are many different articulations of becoming botanical. While the goal of this book is to make legible the parameters of these particular manifestations of shokubutsusei, Fujihara has implored all of us who work in the humanities to think more deeply about the shokubutsusei of our respective objects of study, be they literary, historical, or otherwise. Shokubutsusei is, in classic CPS form, an interdisciplinary concept that will hopefully inspire more CPS work in Japanese studies and beyond.

Widening the Scope of Japanese Environmental Studies

Thoughts on Plants is arguably the first text to emerge in Japan from within the current plant turn that CPS has helped steer, but it is by no means the first Japanese text to think critically about plant life. This is the third reason why it is surprising CPS has not yet made serious inroads into Japanese studies. Writers in Japan have been circling the questions raised by present-day CPS theorists for decades, but they have done so mostly outside of academia. This book brings together a somewhat unlikely group of thinkers and artists from Japan who were all deeply engaged in theorizing shokubutsusei. It is my contention that the texts I discuss in the coming pages belong within the corpus of CPS scholarship, even though they are not academic works in and of themselves. By putting CPS thinkers in conversation with Japanese writers and filmmakers, I want to demonstrate that works of Japanese literature and cinema have also engaged in “plant-thinking,” a concept developed by Michael Marder in his book of the same name. According to Marder: “‘Plant-thinking’ is in the first place the promise and the name of an encounter, and therefore it may be read as an invitation to abandon the familiar terrain of human and humanist thought and to meet vegetal life, if not in the place where it is, then at least halfway.”16 Insofar as Marder’s book (and most CPS scholarship) is devoted to traditions and knowledges of Europe and the Americas, this present study is an invitation to a different sort of encounter. It is an invitation for those interested in CPS to encounter plant-thinking in a different cultural/geopolitical context than they may be accustomed to (namely, Japan), while also serving as an invitation for those interested in Japan to encounter the theoretical world of CPS.

Put succinctly, this book is an attempt to bring CPS more fully into the realm of Japanese studies and to bring Japanese studies into the realm of CPS. It is also an attempt to widen the scope of environmental scholarship in Japanese studies more broadly. There is a need to widen the scope because a dominant paradigm has emerged within environmental approaches to the study of modern Japan and Japanese media: toxicity and environmental degradation.17 In particular, the March 11, 2011, triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in northeastern Japan (known in shorthand as “3.11”) has had an enormous impact on environmental scholarship on and in Japan.18 This makes good sense, of course, as these events are still unfolding and continue to impact lives both human and more-than-human. Important scholarship on literary and cinematic responses to environmental (often nuclear) crises of Japan’s modern era has helped push the field of Japanese studies into a new, more ecologically minded direction.

The issue of environmental degradation has been raised in the study of premodern Japan as well, stretching back even earlier in the history of Japanese studies. Conrad Totman’s classic environmental history of Japanese deforestation in the premodern period, The Green Archipelago (1989), looked to disabuse readers of what was (and continues to be) a trenchant stereotype, particularly in regard to classical Japanese aesthetics, namely that Japan has long had a harmonious relationship with nature. The ubiquity of natural imagery (including plants) in premodern Japanese poetry, prose, and visual culture has indeed contributed to an image of Japan as a nature-loving culture. Several critics since Totman have engaged in environmental scholarship with the goal of critiquing this notion of harmony. Yuki Masami, in her introduction to the 2018 collected volume Ecocriticism in Japan, explains that “quite a few scholars of different disciplines tend to see what appears to be a Japanese attitude of living in harmony with nature simply as culturally constructed and thereby often contradictory to Japan’s social reality.”19 Yuki offers Haruo Shirane’s Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons (2012) as an example of this paradigm and singles out the book’s concept of “second nature,” which she glosses as “highly stylized nonhuman nature in literature and art.”20 Shirane uses his notion of second nature to argue (in a quote that Yuki includes in her introduction as well) that “the oft-mentioned Japanese ‘harmony’ with nature is not an inherent closeness to primary nature due to topography and climate, but a result of close ties to secondary nature, which was constructed from as early as the seventh century and based in major cities.”21

Shirane’s work suggests that Totman’s history of premodern deforestation can sit comfortably alongside the notion that Japanese classical aesthetics expresses a “love of nature,” for it is only the semiotic face of nature (i.e., second nature) that is to be found in premodern Japanese literature and visual art, not its material face (or “primary nature”). Indeed, Shirane opens his investigation into classical Japanese aesthetics’ dependance on second nature by pointing out that many of the characters in the early eleventh-century classic The Tale of Genji are named after plants, but that Genji’s author, the aristocrat Murasaki Shikibu, would have primarily known these plants only through poetry, paintings, or in carefully “constructed” gardens.22 Consequently, Shirane’s second nature cannot locate the material face of Genji’s plants.23 CPS could help. Although this current book does not focus on premodern works like The Tale of Genji, it hopefully paves the way for others to approach plant life more critically within the realm of classical Japanese literature and culture more broadly. There is botanical potential there, even if (or perhaps especially if) writers like Murasaki Shikibu knew plants only as “a substitute for a more primary nature that was often remote from or rarely seen by the aristocrats who lived in the center of (the capital city of) Heian,” as Shirane claims.24

This potential extends to works that are less obviously concerned with plant life than the likes of Genji because what a CPS approach to the study of Japan allows, in either a modern or premodern context, is an expansion of what we deem an “environmental” text in the first place. One can look for the shokubutsusei of any given text and thereby engage in environmental scholarship on works that have not conventionally been thought of heretofore as eco-minded. The trope of becoming botanical—the central conceit of this book—is an environmental response to crises that do not necessarily appear environmental in nature. Only one of the texts examined in this book was written in response to the events of 3.11 (Itō Seikō’s Radio Imagination, discussed in chapter 3). The rest look for the shokubutsusei of other moments in Japan’s modern history, including crises brought on by war, colonial violence, postwar economic depression and rural depopulation, and emigration/immigration. What ties these seemingly discreet historical moments together are their entanglements with the botanical realm.

The books and films I bring together here show us how to think differently about plant life by pointing us in two directions. They show us what it could mean for humans to respond to moments of crisis in more plantlike ways, while also showing us that plants are implicated in said moments of crisis in the first place, even when they do not appear to be. The trope of becoming botanical is historically specific in its particular manifestations, but it is itself not historically contingent to any given time. Thus, this book covers nearly a century, from roughly 1930 to present day—a long stretch of time for a human, but not so long at all for a tree.

Men Are Grass

If plants have played such an important role in Japanese history and aesthetics (beginning with the earliest extant works of Japanese literature), then what, you might be wondering at this point, is ultimately so unique about the writers and filmmakers brought together here that they merit specific attention in this book? How are they not merely tapping into centuries of preestablished plant metaphors (like the cherry blossoms scattering in the wind) and/or engaging in a form of anthropomorphism that only serves to reinforce the kind of anthropocentrism that CPS actively attempts to dismantle? If one can discuss the shokubutsusei of any given text, then what is so special about the books and films discussed in the coming pages?

What makes the figures I bring together in this book unique is precisely that they do not perpetuate centuries-old botanical tropes but instead actively rethink the very relationship between plants and Japanese culture. Part of the rethinking at the heart of this book concerns both metaphor and anthropomorphism, two literary techniques that are frequently associated with the cultural understanding of plant life. The trope of becoming botanical is not metaphorical (at least in its conventional understanding), nor is it anthropomorphic. Instead, the trope rethinks metaphor along the lines of Gregory Bateson, author of the foundational Steps to an Ecology of the Mind (1972), when he argues that humans not only understand the living world primarily through metaphor but, in fact, a metaphorical logic structures the biological/material world itself. For Bateson, metaphor extends over the material/semiotic line, rendering the perceived binary untenable. He begins his argument on this account by offering the following well-known logical syllogism:

He contrasts this with what he calls a “syllogism in grass”:

Bateson likens this second syllogism to metaphor and argues that, in the long history of evolution, “metaphor was not just pretty poetry, it was not either good or bad logic, but was in fact the logic upon which the biological world had been built.”26 For Bateson, how species have evolved and how we humans understand the relationships among differing species (as well as how we understand ourselves as humans) are determined by this metaphorical logic, through the give-and-take of similarity and difference. This is a radical rethinking of metaphor, one that moves from the page into the natural world all around us (and even within us). Bateson uses the traditional, semiotic logic of syllogisms and the material, biological fact of death to expose what appears to be an absurd conclusion: men [sic] are grass.27 Bateson finds commonalities between humans and plants and consequently finds the shokubutsusei of the human. He posits that in this recognition of similarity is the potential for a new way of inhabiting the world, one in which our plantlike qualities are not mere anthropomorphism but rather the biological outcome of evolution. Taken seriously, Bateson’s syllogism in grass presents us with a subjective experience that rethinks what it means to be human by asking: What if we truly understood ourselves, materially, as grass?

This question is raised throughout the present book and serves as a jumping-off point from which to theorize phytomorphism, or the attribution of plantlike characteristics to humans. Phytomorphism is this book’s attempt to rethink anthropomorphism, turning the directionality of anthropomorphism the other way around. The writers and filmmakers I discuss were not interested in ascribing humanlike traits to plants. They sought the opposite. Phytomorphism allowed them, in writing and in film, to imagine just what it would feel like—affectually and sensorially—to experience the world as a plant might. Consequently, their figurations of phytomorphism take many forms, from Osaki Midori’s scientific speculation that humans can reverse the course of evolution and inhabit plantlike states of mind (as discussed in chapter 1), to Abe Kōbō’s more wild phenomenological speculations that find human characters moving at a very slow, plantlike speed as the rest of the world races by (as discussed in chapter 2). Phytomorphism allowed writers and filmmakers to imbue their fictional characters with a variety of botanical capacities, including extrasensory and out-of-body experiences (chapters 1 and 3), longer-than-human lifespans (chapter 4), and enhanced reproductive capabilities (what is referred to, in chapter 5, as an “aggressive fertility”).

Throughout this book, I refer to these plantlike capacities as “botanical subjectivity”—a way of experiencing oneself as plantlike. Why would one want to experience the world in this way? For the figures I discuss in these pages, theorizing botanical subjectivity allowed for the construction of new ways to work through moments of crisis. Seeing oneself as grass was a subjective experience that held the potential to break wide open confining ideologies that (as explained in each respective chapter of this book) looked to solidify racial and gendered differences; that attempted to deny wartime atrocities; that tied nature-based spirituality to wartime aggression; that suggested futurity was only to be found in capitalist development; that attempted to control human migration as one might control an invasive plant species. Seeing oneself as grass seemed to promise new ways to adapt to worsening states of affairs. If grass can change with the seasons, why can’t men, if they are grass?

In his book Men Are Grass (Hito wa kusa de aru, 2013), Hara Shōji describes the subjective experience suggested by Bateson’s syllogism as a kind of “overlap” of human and plant life: “In (Bateson’s) phrase ‘men are grass,’ humans do not stand outside of grass, separated from it and pointing at it. For both humans and grass, a self can only grasp itself as a projection within the other, and as a self that projects the other within itself. And so it can only grasp the other by means of searching for the self within that image that is projected. Humans and grass fluctuate and overlap.”28 By and large, the works I discuss in this book find a kind of liberatory potential in the fluctuation and overlapping of human and plant as Hara describes it. Phytomorphism names this fluctuation and allows the human to “grasp itself” in the search for a wholly new idea of the self within the botanical realm. In the process, phytomorphism explodes the very idea of individuated selfhood. Remember Pando, the aspen(s) I mentioned above? What would selfhood feel like for it/them? With this in mind, I stress throughout this book that a botanical subjectivity that sees itself as grass is necessarily a multiple subjectivity. Is grass singular or plural? Both? Is a human who sees themselves as grass a self or selves? Such ambiguity is at the heart of this book, where it becomes a radical gesture of rethinking the human.

Hara’s reading of Bateson resonates with a set of fundamental questions that Elizabeth Grosz poses in the beginning of Becoming Undone (2011), her feminist reading of Darwinian evolution. Although she focuses on “the animal” in these questions, we can easily substitute “the plant” as the figure of the “nonhuman”:

What would a humanities, a knowledge of and for the human, look like if it placed the animal in its rightful place, not only before the human but also within and after the human? What is the trajectory of a newly considered humanities, one that seeks to know itself not in opposition to its others, the “others” of the human, but in continuity with them? What would a humanities look like that does not rely on an opposition between self and other, in which the other is always in some way associated with animality or the nonhuman? What kind of intellectual revolution would be required to make man, and the various forms of man, one among many living things, and one force among many, rather than the aim and destination of all knowledges, not only the traditional disciplines within the humanities, but also the newer forms of interdisciplinarity?29

Grosz’s provocations serve as something of a starting point for this book, and thus I have quoted her at length. I take her call to interdisciplinarity seriously. CPS helps with this. The coming pages are my attempt to read the plant “within” the human or, to use Bateson’s words, to read “men as grass.” Bateson himself recognizes that such thinking appears absurd on the surface, but he argues that the natural world does not always align with strict logic: “Life, perhaps, doesn’t always ask what is logically sound. I’d be very surprised if it did.”30 So, too, would be the writers and filmmakers brought together in this book.

Words Are Plants

For one of the writers I discuss in the coming pages, Hiromi Ito (the subject of chapter 5), not only is the line between the human and the plant quite blurry and overlapping; so, too, is the line between plants and language itself.31 For Ito, words, too, are grass. She claims as much in a 2019 dialogue with her fellow author Machida Kō. Knowing Ito’s love of all things plant, Machida suggests that the two most important things for Ito are “grass and words.” Ito responds: “‘Grass?’ How rude. That’s not precise enough. You have to know the various classifications, the Latin names for plants, their individual personalities. But I guess it is as you say. Those two are the most important things. Words and plants—for me they are the same thing.”32 Ito clarifies that “Words, like plants, and plants, like words, flourish all around us.”33 It may appear that Ito is rehearsing one of the oldest claims about Japanese literature here. In his preface to the classic imperial anthology of Japanese poetry, the early tenth-century Kokinwakashū, Ki no Tsurayuki famously writes: “The seeds of Japanese poetry lie in the human heart and grow into leaves of ten thousand words.”34 From the earliest musings on Japanese poetry, words and plants have overlapped. But Ito, in true CPS fashion, pushes us to think beyond the semiotic here and to “know the various classifications, the Latin names for plants, their individual personalities.” Traditional poetics is not enough. To truly see “words as grass,” one must strive to know plants in all the ways they might be known, including their scientific categorizations.

In her 2014 book Tree Spirits Grass Spirits (Kodama kusadama), Ito ruminates on one of the best-known poems of the Japanese premodern tradition, a late seventeenth-century haiku by Matsuo Bashō that reads: “Summer grass—all that remains of warriors’ dreams.”35 Bashō’s haiku appears to resonate with Bateson’s claim that “men are grass,” as it laments the passing of fallen warriors and memorializes them through the grass that grows on the battlefield in the wake of their defeat. Like the trope of the cherry blossom scattering in the wind, Bashō’s grass poetically comments on the perceived transience of human existence. Bashō’s haiku (and, indeed, haiku in general) has a shokubutsusei of its own, but it is not the specific shokubutsusei under investigation in this book. Bashō’s grass, in its poetic rendering in the form of haiku, shows only its semiotic face. Taking Bateson’s lead and moving beyond conventional metaphor, Ito—seemingly unsatisfied with notions akin to Shirane’s concept of second nature—looks for the material face of Bashō’s grass:

For a long time, I had thought “summer grass” referred to large clumps of seitaka-awadachisō (Solidago altissima) or ō-arechinogiku (Conyza sumatrensis). I thought, “It’s gotta be them, those symbols of life that grow out of and prosper on top of those that have already fallen into ruin and have faded away.” But that wasn’t the case. It would be one thing if they were plants that had come to Japan in the very distant past, but seitaka-awadachisō and ō-arechinogiku both arrived after the Meiji Restoration and couldn’t have proliferated among the remains of warriors’ dreams in the middle of the Edo period. It must have been an entirely different landscape all together.36

Rethinking plants in this way and yearning to know their particular capacities allow Ito’s poetry to accomplish something we do not see in the history of Japanese classical poetry, namely, that words become plantlike at a formal level. If botanical subjectivity is a way of naming the overlap of humans and plants, then “botanical form” names the overlap of words and plants at the level of composition. Intimately familiar with the wild qualities of weeds and vines, Ito mimics their vegetal nature in her poetry through unruly prose and short, repetitive lines. Her poetry embodies their botanical form.

To read Ito’s work is to experience something akin to looking out over a dense field of grass, of simultaneously focusing in on individual wildflowers and allowing the multiplicity of the field to wash over you. It is an affectual experience that arises in excess of the semiotic meaning of her words. Inspired by Ito’s claim that words and plants are the same thing, I think in this book about how language and literary/filmic form can embody and mimic the materiality of plant life. I am interested in how the writers and filmmakers I take up have attempted to bring the logic of the botanical realm into the very structure of their art. Thus, I do not discuss haiku or other forms of premodern Japanese poetry. Instead, I locate a moss-like literary form in chapter 1—indistinct and repetitive at first glance but, like moss, carefully constructed and full of minute details on closer examination. I posit in chapter 2 that a story concerned with the objectivity bound up in the scientific naming of plants expresses this concern by employing objective language throughout the narrative. The expansive, haunting qualities of the forest are legible in the expansive, haunting volumes of Haniya Yutaka’s philosophical prose that make up the epic novel at the heart of chapter 3. In chapter 4, I turn to cinema and discuss how the cyclical manner in which forests experience time is likewise inscribed into the cinematography and narrative development of two films, one directed by Yanagimachi Mitsuo, the other by Kawase Naomi. And chapter 5, devoted to Ito, examines the wild, weedy qualities of her poetry and prose. Plants thus enter the foreground not only in what all of these texts say but also in how they say it. In other words, the trope of becoming botanical not only imagines what it would be like to be more plantlike at the level of plot; it also strives to make whatever medium it finds itself in more plantlike as well. Modern poetry, prose, and film allow for sufficient formal flexibility such that the artists who work within them can rethink both themselves and their artistic media as plantlike. Men are grass; words are plants; and so, too, this book suggests, are novels, poetry, and films, through and through.

What It Is (and What It Is Not) to Become Botanical

As I am concerned with writers and filmmakers who question what it would be like to be more plantlike not only at the level of content but also at the level of form, I have not set out to write an exhaustive glossary of botanical thinkers and artists from Japan. While much has been written in Japan about plants, not all botanical writers—those writers that Fujihara would say are “unique when it comes to the depth of their shokubutsusei”—attempted to become botanical within the parameters I outline in this book. For this reason, I do not focus on some of the key figures in the history of Japanese botany, most notably Makino Tomitarō (1862–1957) and Minakata Kumagusu (1867–1941). Both wrote texts and conducted scientific experiments that are ripe for CPS theorization, but their particular shokubutsusei emerged from a different kind of botanical imagination than the one I map out here. Likewise, there are many modern and contemporary literary authors whose works prominently feature plant life but ultimately do not fit within the figuration of becoming botanical that I sketch in these pages. Renowned modern poet and children’s author Miyazawa Kenji seems like an obvious choice for inclusion in this study (and, indeed, Fujihara discusses him at length in Thoughts on Plants). While Miyazawa Kenji’s fictional world is populated with talking trees, his works never quite take on the formal qualities with which I am interested. Makino, Minakata, and Miyazawa all had fascinating things to say about plants, but there was nothing particularly plantlike about the way they said them.

Likewise, contemporary authors like Oyamada Hiroko and Hoshino Tomoyuki write compelling works rich in their respective shokubutsusei, but they lack the experimental step taken by the writers I do consider in this book, namely, what would it look like to not just write about plants but also to write like a plant. This formal consideration extends into the filmic texts I discuss as well, as the cinematography of these films experimentally embodies the botanical subjectivity I trace throughout the book in a manner other botanically inflected works of cinema do not. Thus, I do not discuss the films of Miyazaki Hayao and his Studio Ghibli, as wonderfully plant filled as they may be. Totoro may help the trees grow in the anime bearing his name, but there is nothing particularly arboreal about the way his film is structured.

Formal considerations are not the sole driving force behind the trope of becoming botanical, however. A plantlike form is an important part of the botanical poetics that this book looks to identify, but only insofar as form reinforces thematic content. The texts I examine in this book all point toward the inseparability of form and content—a concept that is itself quite botanical. Think, if you will, of a flower. Now think, if you will, like Hiromi Ito and imagine that plants and words are the same thing. As an example of expression (a quite literal expression of matter from the plant’s body out into the surrounding atmosphere), where could one draw the line between a flower’s form and its content? A conventional dismissal would claim that flowers harbor no content, only form. A bee would disagree. A bee can read the flower, interpret it, and decide whether or not to alight on its petals. This speculative realm of more-than-human hermeneutics is fertile ground for CPS and for pushing Japanese studies toward a shokubutsusei that both reads texts about plants and reads texts like plants. It is my hope that in reading this book, readers will, to some degree, start to become botanical themselves.

To entertain the idea that a human might learn to read texts like a plant, and that to do so would open the door to new ways of inhabiting and understanding the world, is not just to rethink what it means to be a plant; it is also to rethink what it means to be human. This is the central conceit of this book, that plant life offered modern Japanese writers and filmmakers a botanical imagination through which to craft a plantlike poetics that reworked human subjectivity in response to turbulent historical events ranging nearly one hundred years—events in which plants themselves served as historical actors. These botanical poetics allowed for a reconfiguration of subjectivity beyond the confines of the human body (as plants extend their being out into the atmosphere around them and the soil down below), beyond conventional sense perception (as plants sense the world in ways radically different than humans), and beyond human temporality (as plants move at a different temporality altogether and live on timescales incomprehensible to the human).

Of course, subjectivity is a notoriously thorny term. Throughout, I deploy the word in reference to how one experiences oneself as oneself. If we take plants and their multiplicity seriously—remember again the aspen(s)—then we can say a botanical subjectivity is one in which one comes to experience oneself as more than one self. As mentioned earlier, the idea of a multiple subjectivity is important to the works I examine in this book, for it is in reconfiguring human subjectivity to be multiple (as it would be for a plant) that the writers and filmmakers I discuss attempt to expand beyond the confines of crisis and to look for solidarities across bodies and timelines. They all saw becoming botanical as a means to adapt and construct models of futurity that may allow for growth beyond the immediate violence of the present, much like grass struggling up and through the hard concrete.

In naming this reconfiguration of subjectivity “becoming botanical,” I am drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, in which a “becoming” is an ongoing process where two or more entities enter into an alliance that creates something unprecedented, something that is “neither one nor two, nor the relation of the two; it is the inbetween.”37 Deleuze and Guattari’s figuration of becoming is a challenge to ontological fixity. In her book How I Became a Tree (a pioneering CPS work that looks beyond the Western philosophical tradition), Sumana Roy characterizes A Thousand Plateaus as “a manifesto to claim another way of looking and living.”38 This assessment is apt, as Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic logic (and, indeed, form) rejects firm claims to “being” and the violence of strict definitions that may be leveraged against humans and more-than-humans alike. For Deleuze and Guattari (and Roy in turn), becoming names a striving, a gesture toward a new horizon of subjectivity, a different way of inhabiting the world that is flexible and oscillates between things. The figures at the heart of this book understood plant life as an embodiment of becoming, as an ever-changing and adapting form of life, and they imagined what it would mean to embody this botanical form of becoming themselves. These artists inhabit the in-between space of becoming—a space in between human and plant—in the belief that it holds possibilities for overcoming the crises unfolding dramatically, slowly, or even imperceptibly around them. Deleuze and Guattari ask (in a passage singled out by Roy): “What if one became animal or plant through literature, which certainly does not mean literarily?”39 The works examined in this book provide something of an answer to this question, as they inhabit a space in between literature (or cinema) and science. These works engage with evolutionary and ecological science as well as with pseudoscientific theories of plant communication popularized in Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird’s 1973 controversial best-seller The Secret Life of Plants (a text I discuss more fully below).40

In order to locate these texts in their respective zones of in-between-ness, I discuss how they are informed by science (and pseudoscience). I use scientific concepts as a means to read literary and filmic texts. My goal, in interdisciplinary CPS fashion, is to remind us that the realms of science and art are far from distinct, as I have already argued in this introduction.41 Thus, in chapter 1, I illustrate how science inspired the botanical poetics of the poet, short story writer, and early film critic Osaki Midori (1896–1971). Osaki witnessed the impending storm of the Pacific War in the early years of Japan’s Shōwa era (which began in 1926) and turned to the botanical realm to learn how to adapt to encroaching threats of Japan’s militarization. Osaki found in the science of evolutionary thought a means to bring the human and plant closer together, forging a familial connection between humans and plants in deep evolutionary time. In an era when the ideology of social Darwinism was widely used to justify colonial expansion throughout Asia, Osaki’s idiosyncratic take on evolutionary theory (written in texts that embody botanical form) pointed the way toward a potential future born of cooperation and not competition. For Osaki, becoming botanical was a utopian gesture made amid an unfolding national crisis that would eventually lead to a fully mobilized war, this despite the fact that she held her own familial connections to the practice of colonial agriculture on the Japanese-occupied Korean peninsula. Thus, while Osaki imagined a botanical becoming in the face of colonial violence, the Japanese empire was undergoing a botanical becoming of its own.

Osaki’s work demonstrates that becoming botanical is not a panacea, and chapter 2 reinforces the idea that not all botanical becomings are utopian. Sometimes the concrete is too hard to break up and through, and sometimes the history of a given plant resists its abstraction into utopian imaginaries, even as it serves as inspiration for literary allegory. This is the ambiguous conclusion reached in Abe Kōbō’s short story “Dendrocacalia,” which was originally written in 1949 and then rewritten in 1952. This story is the focus of chapter 2, where I explain how, for the prolific author and critic Abe Kōbō (1924–1993), becoming botanical was the very site of crisis and not a means of overcoming it, despite the beliefs held by his Anarcho-Marxist contemporaries. “Dendrocacalia” is an allegorical tale in which a man transforms into a rare tree that only grows on the remote island of Hahajima in the Ogasawara (or Bonin) Islands, an archipelago with a long settler colonial history that became the site of some of the Pacific Theater’s most deadly battles. In the narrative, the human-turned-tree is ultimately locked away in a government-controlled greenhouse, making explicit a fact that lies under the surface of Osaki Midori’s work, that botanical science was instrumental to Japan’s colonial project and any attempt to rethink human subjectivity as being more plantlike must reckon with this wartime legacy. At the same time, however, it is a work clearly informed and inspired by the insights of botanical science, one that uses plant biology to fascinating, experimental, and poetic ends. Abe’s story may seek to keep our posthuman desires in check, warning readers that there are dark potentials held in becoming botanical, but it simultaneously points toward the critical potential for plant life to illuminate forgotten histories. In the in-between of these two chapters, we witness how the trope of becoming botanical can bloom in different ways, be they utopian, dystopian, or, indeed, somewhere in between.

Plasticity and the Malleability of Form

The transformation of the human protagonist into a tree in Abe’s “Dendrocacalia” is the most literal figuration of becoming botanical that I discuss in this book. Yet in all cases of becoming botanical, there is a transformation that takes place, not necessarily at the physical level of a human body turning into a plant but rather at the level of subjectivity. As a process of ongoing change in the tradition of Deleuze and Guattari, I argue that becoming botanical is dependent on notions of “plasticity,” a scientific concept that has been embraced and theorized in the humanities as well. Although we may want to associate the word plasticity with a hardness and stubbornness of form (like the ubiquitous plastic objects that surround us and threaten our oceans by not biodegrading), my use of the term is meant to indicate quite the opposite. Plasticity is the very malleability of form, the ability to transform and change, but not without some effort or resistance, of course. Philosopher Catherine Malabou, who has been a central figure in the concept’s theorization, characterizes plasticity as “a sort of natural sculpting that forms our identity, an identity modeled by experience and that makes us subjects of a history.”42 Plasticity is what makes fundamental changes in identity and/or subjectivity possible in the first place. Plasticity makes legible the external pressures that occasion or force such changes (what Malabou here calls “history”). If human subjectivity is to transform into a more plantlike state, then it needs to be sufficiently malleable in the first place. If a transformation does take place, then the traces of the history that sculpted the new form must be legible in the form itself. A botanical hermeneutics, like the one I employ here in this book, seeks out the places where plasticity sheds light on historical subjectification.

All of the texts discussed in this book share the belief that whatever the human is, it is not fixed in time or place. Plasticity names the capacity (both positive and negative) for humans—and the very concept of the human—to transform. Plasticity turns being into becoming. Yet while it serves as the basis for my discussion of the term, Malabou’s figuration of plasticity is firmly centered in the human realm, in large part due to its concern with the brain and neurobiology. Plasticity is, however, an operative term in the botanical realm as well. Phenotypic plasticity names, in Beronda Montgomery’s words, the botanical potential for “change of form and function in response to dynamic environmental conditions.”43 The website for the VILLUM Research Center for Plant Plasticity at the University of Copenhagen explains that plasticity is especially important to plant life due to its sessile condition: “In contrast to animals, which are able to actively move away to avoid challenges such as a predators [sic] or a changing climate, plants have acquired the ability to biosynthesize an unprecedented array of structurally complex bioactive natural compounds with specialized roles in order to cope with environmental challenges.”44

What happens when animals (in this case, humans) are also not “able to actively move away to avoid challenges”? This is the situation explored in the texts at the heart of this book (save for chapter 5, which is focused specifically on movement through plant migration). Unable to physically escape moments of crisis in Japan’s modern history, the writers and filmmakers I assemble here attempted to take a note from the botanical realm and turn plastic, becoming “other to themselves,” to paraphrase Malabou.45 The plasticity of becoming botanical allows us to rethink the human not just as a subject of history (to return to Malabou’s claim) but as an environmental subject as well, an “open, living system” that slowly but persistently adapts to (at times catastrophic) change.46

The crises I discuss in this book are indeed catastrophic, but they are often not spectacular, at least not within the texts’ narratives. The writings of Osaki Midori respond to the violence of early Shōwa Japan, but they are not narratives of war and imperialism in and of themselves. Abe’s “Dendrocacalia” comments on the colonization and military occupation of the Ogasawara Islands, but it does so allegorically. It is my contention that by moving plants to the foreground of these texts, we can glimpse the crises serving as, to quote Christopher Dole in The Time of Catastrophe, “both a backdrop to and condition for the intimate terrain of . . . everyday lives.”47 The mosses in Osaki’s Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense and the dendrocacalia tree in Abe’s story tie these narratives into a larger historical ecosystem of war and colonialism. Plants become windows onto the historical moment of a given text. Move them to the foreground, and with them come historical and social contexts not otherwise obvious. Turning to plants and learning to understand their different temporalities allows us to see the slow unfolding of crisis and how a botanical plasticity allows for slow adaptation to slow violence (to borrow Rob Nixon’s influential concept). If subjectivity is plastic, then we can see history’s fingerprints in the mold as it becomes botanical.

The In-Between of Science and Spirituality

Throughout this book, I focus on texts where unspectacular crises structure the everyday lives of characters in damaging ways. I am interested in texts where crises largely hide in the background, as ubiquitous, unassuming, and easily ignored as the grass beneath our feet. Chapter 3, for example, begins by discussing a long-form, multivolume novel that grapples with the existential disillusionment of Japan’s defeat in World War II. Said novel, written by Haniya Yutaka (1909–1997) and titled Dead Spirits (Shirei), does not focus on the war or any of Japan’s postwar crises (US occupation and repatriation, for example) outright. The catastrophe of war and defeat is affectually palpable but not necessarily visible. While it is considered something of a masterpiece of postwar Japanese literature (Haniya began publishing it in installments soon after Japan’s surrender, in 1946), few critics have considered it an environmental text. By foregrounding forests in our reading of the Dead Spirits, however, we can see the novel as an environmental response to the background of crisis that was the postwar moment. For in the novel, characters yearn for plasticity in the face of defeat, to become anew in the face of an unspeakable trauma. They transform and become anew among trees, becoming botanical by phytomorphically extending their subjectivity out into the surrounding forest.

chapter 3 marks a shift in this book’s discussion of plasticity and transformation. In the first two chapters, it is in the in-between of literature and science that the texts under investigation attempt to rethink the human as more plantlike. In chapters 3 and 4, spirituality enters the fray. CPS thinkers have been working to bridge the realms of science and spirituality through their focus on plant life. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s work does so within the context of Indigenous cosmologies of North America, for example. Something similar happens in the works I discuss in chapters 3 and 4, albeit in very different contexts from those of Kimmerer’s work. In this section of the book, science and spirituality form an in-between that proves fertile ground for becoming botanical.

Anyone who has spent time in a forest (especially at night) has likely felt something akin to the mysterious/spiritual affect that Haniya writes into Dead Spirits and that filmmakers Yanagimachi Mitsuo (born 1945) and Kawase Naomi (born 1969) make present in their films (as I discuss in chapter 4). It may not be a religious experience for all, but something approaching the sublime seems to strike humans as they find themselves surrounded by a dark, dense green within the forest. Getting lost in the woods can be terrifying. For those in the middle of a crisis, losing oneself in the botanical realm can also be liberating. This is the conceit of the texts I discuss in chapters 3 and 4. In chapter 3, trees become a medium—by definition, an in-between—that facilitates exchange between the world of the living and the world of the dead (what I call “botanical media”). By becoming more plantlike and experiencing himself as part of the forest, the protagonist of Dead Spirits reclaims a metaphysically spiritual connection to trees that puts him in contact with the dead spirits of the novel’s title. Trees have long held such associations with the dead in Japan, and Dead Spirits is Haniya’s attempt to reconnect to this botanically spiritual realm in the aftermath of a war in which the state coopted religion to disastrous ends in the form of State Shinto.

chapter 3 pairs Dead Spirits with a novel written under very different circumstances, a 2013 response to 3.11 titled Radio Imagination, written by Itō Seikō (born 1961). Like Haniya’s work of the immediate postwar, Itō’s novel turns to trees as a medium to connect to those who have died, in this case, in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami that occurred on March 11, 2011. Trees become a bridge connecting these two moments of crisis as well as figures of plasticity that allow these two writers to rethink the human, the plant, and spirituality itself. This trend toward a spiritual understanding of plants continues into chapter 4. Against the backdrop of economic depression occasioned by an increasingly globalized timber industry, the two films at the heart of chapter 4—Yanagimachi Mitsuo’s Fire Festival (Himatsuri, 1985) and Kawase Naomi’s Vision (2018)—straddle the line of science and spirituality in their focus on the decline of Japanese forestry. Both films read destruction by fire as a means of embracing plasticity. Employing both scientific notions of disturbance ecology and religious ritual, these two cinematic texts demonstrate that the transformations found in becoming botanical can be cyclical, and that, for plants, life and death can be cyclical as well. Set the forest on fire, and a new one will (eventually) grow back. At the intersection of science and spirituality, these films ask: What happens when humans, too, strive for this kind of botanical regeneration in the aftermath of fire? Is there a shokubutsusei that can lead to rebirth?

How Pseudoscience Haunts CPS

The in-between of science and spirituality has been fertile ground for becoming botanical in the literary and filmic works I discuss in chapters 3 and 4, but it also served as the site of one of the biggest scandals in the history of botanical science, the publication of Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird’s The Secret Life of Plants. A best-seller at the time of its release in the 1970s, The Secret Life of Plants tried hard to make humans think differently about plants. It did so, in the words of Michael Pollan, in the form of “a beguiling mashup of legitimate plant science, quack experiments, and mystical nature worship that captured the public imagination at a time when New Age thinking was seeping into the mainstream.”48 Stories of plant communication, including communication with the dead and with extraterrestrials, caused a sensation that ultimately resulted in significant backlash. As Pollan explains:

[In] the view of many plant scientists “The Secret Life of Plants” has done lasting damage to their field. According to Daniel Chamovitz, an Israeli biologist who is the author of the recent book “What a Plant Knows,” Tompkins and Bird “stymied important research on plant behavior as scientists became wary of any studies that hinted at parallels between animal senses and plant senses.” Others contend that “The Secret Life of Plants” led to “self-censorship” among researchers seeking to explore the “possible homologies between neurobiology and phytobiology”; that is, the possibility that plants are much more intelligent and much more like us than most people think—capable of cognition, communication, information processing, computation, learning, and memory.49

The supposed junk science that is The Secret Life of Plants continues to haunt CPS scholarship. Its legacy is such that contemporary works engaging in rethinking the plant (and rethinking the human to be more plantlike) run the risk of dismissal as New Age pseudoscience. One of the reasons CPS has been slow to make inroads in both the sciences and the humanities is no doubt due to the tarnished legacy of Tompkins and Bird.

All the same, the history of The Secret Life of Plants is important to the trope of becoming botanical as I outline it in this book. This is because Japanese electrical engineer-turned-best-selling-parascientist Hashimoto Ken (1924–2007) is featured prominently in The Secret Life of Plants (and appears with his wife in the film adaptation of the book as well). I mentioned above that Japanese translations of CPS thinkers like Kimmerer and Mancuso can be found in Japanese bookstores. Often sitting next to them is the Japanese translation of The Secret Life of Plants. Hashimoto’s belief that plants could speak with the help of polygraph machines and that plants could serve as a conduit between the world of the living and the world of the dead is a part of the reason the book has been discredited as pseudoscience. Yet Hashimoto’s beliefs also feel at home alongside Haniya Yutaka’s Dead Spirits and Itō Seikō’s Radio Imagination. All three envisioned plants as media that could put humans in touch with dead spirits. I put the work of these three writers together in chapter 3 to once again show how literature and science (in this case, spiritually inflected parascience) are entangled. These three figures—Haniya, Hashimoto, and Itō—form an unlikely grouping that only makes sense in terms of a twice-haunted shokubutsusei, one that puts humans in touch with the dead and one that continues to haunt the legitimacy of CPS. Here is where the plant humanities can offer something of a resurgence (if not redemption) to figures like Hashimoto. From an environmental humanities perspective, the fact that the science of The Secret Life of Plants has been debunked does not mean it is any less interesting or worthy of study.

Quite the contrary! As a best-selling book that continues to be in print in both Japan and the United States despite its spurious claims, and as a work whose bogus propositions have seemingly influenced serious works of literature like Haniya’s Dead Spirits and Itō’s Radio Imagination, The Secret Life of Plants is an important cultural touchstone that we in the humanities who work in CPS can embrace and question the extent to which it inspired a generation (or generations) to look for plasticity in the botanical realm. For CPS thinkers like Stefano Mancuso and Monica Gagliano, i.e., those who actively engage in STEM research, the legacy of The Secret Life of Plants may present a burden to be overcome, but for us plant humanists, it is a text ripe with botanical potential. I believe that the particular shokubutsusei of the plant humanities allows us to give up the ghost, so to speak, and to seek the strange and revel in the paranormal possibilities plant life might offer on the page or on the screen, or even, I would argue, at the level of subjectivity.

Embracing the Untamable

It may seem surprising that rethinking the plant can lead one to a haunted, frightening realm, as it does in the works explored in chapters 3 and 4. If one does not get lost in the woods, plants do not appear all that threatening. Cacti might hurt if we touch them, but by and large, we humans feel as if we are in control of things when it comes to plants. Yet as Dawn Keetley has convincingly demonstrated, plants frequently appear in works of horror, from Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) to M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening (2008). As Keetley explains, “At its most basic, plant horror marks humans’ dread of the ‘wildness’ of vegetal nature—its untameability, its pointless excess, its uncontrollable growth. Plants embody an inscrutable silence, an implacable strangeness, which human culture has, from the beginning, set out to tame.”50 In other words, the extreme plasticity of plant life—its ability to grow and change, ever so slowly but persistently—has, at times, made it a threatening figure when it has entered the foreground. What the writers and filmmakers brought together in this book have in common is a desire to embrace the “untameability” of plant life, to turn the horror of its “implacable strangeness” into a new, potentially liberatory form of subjectivity.

This is perhaps most true of the poet Hiromi Ito (born 1955), who earlier we saw claim that plants and words are “the same thing.” Ito serves as the subject of chapter 5—a chapter that finds our investigation of becoming botanical in yet another state of in-betweenness. Much of Ito’s oeuvre is set between Japan and the United States, as the writer lived in Southern California for many years and continued to travel to Japan at regular intervals to care for her aging parents. I identify the shokubutsusei of Ito’s work as that of “botanical migration,” using the scientific notion of secular migration—in which plants themselves migrate across land through successive generations—to draw out the ways in which Ito’s work challenges biopolitical attempts to control the movement of human bodies. Ito’s work teaches us that in becoming botanical, one can phytomorphically become untamable, unruly, and potentially nongovernable.51 In the in-between movement of migration, Ito’s poetry shows us that to be more plantlike is to be always in motion, as counterintuitive as that might seem. Anyone who has kept a garden and has tried to keep weeds out of a given area knows the tenacity of plants and their ability to sprout up where you least expect them. Trying to tame weeds is often a fool’s errand. Ito’s work asks: What if we humans were more like weeds?

Ultimately, this unruly spirit runs throughout all the works I discuss in this book, albeit to differing degrees. Although the story they collectively tell unfolds across nearly one hundred years, and although they turn to plants in response to different moments of crisis throughout those nearly one hundred years, many sought a form of resistance, be it subtle (as in the works of Osaki Midori) or brash (as in the works of Hiromi Ito). Becoming botanical often allowed the writers and filmmakers gathered here to rethink the human in defiance of hegemonic structures that looked to fix human subjectivity in ways that would prove beneficial to the state in one way or another. Ultimately, learning to embody the plasticity of one’s own shokubutsusei and become more plantlike was (and remains) a radical act, even when (or perhaps especially when) state power also turned to the botanical realm as a form of control in the first place.

This is not to say that the majority of the figures discussed in this book were (or are) politically radical themselves. Some were, of course. Abe Kōbō and Haniya Yutaka both belonged to the Japanese Communist Party for a spell. But others are harder to claim as having produced works of resistance. Miura Shion (born 1976), whose 2018 plant-filled novel A World Without Love (Ai naki sekai) I discuss in the epilogue of this book, is a popular writer whose work seems far removed from contemporary politics. Yet, in its resistance to gender norms and genre conventions, Miura’s novel is unruly in its own right. Of more serious concern is Kawase Naomi, who has received much criticism for the nationalistic overtones of her official documentary film covering the controversial 2020 Tokyo Olympics. The film I discuss in this book, Vision, nevertheless turns to the forest to advocate for change, community, and nongovernability, even if it does so in an ambiguous manner that may belie her nationalist tendencies all the same. Kawase’s work reminds us, again, that becoming botanical is a potential that can be mobilized to different ends, at different points and times. Just like the plants themselves, there is great diversity in works of art that strive to be plantlike. It may take some time to see and better understand the radical shokubutsusei of some of these works. CPS can help.

This is because, at its core, CPS is itself a radical paradigm that can help us rethink many things: what it means to be human, what it means to be a plant, what it means to live, what it means to die, and, yes, what it means to resist. As a framework for building something new, plants hold much potential. This book maps how Japanese writers and filmmakers sought to actualize this potential. My hope is that this book likewise demonstrates the kind of botanical potential CPS and the plant humanities hold for rethinking Japanese studies. May it serve as a seed that struggles its way up through the hard ground that has kept the field fixed in place.