Chapter 1 Botanical Families Osaki Midori, Moss, and Evolutionary Resemblance

The Uprooting of Colonial Modernity

The uncertainty of the times took its toll on Osaki, as it did on other contemporaneous writers of the 1930s. Some, like Yokomitsu Riichi in his novel Shanghai (published between 1928 and 1931), wrote explicitly about the violence unfolding in Japan’s overseas colonies. Osaki did not. Yet the crises of the early Shōwa—and Japanese colonialism in particular—are legible in her work all the same if we foreground plants in our reading of her stories and poetry. This is because plant life played an important role in Japan’s colonial project, and, as Osaki wrote of characters engaged in botanical science, she drew from her real-life familial connection to Japan’s colonies. Osaki was intimately familiar with science’s complicity in Japan’s wartime agenda from her brother’s work researching fertilizer use in Japanese-occupied Korea, but just as she attempted to rethink the human through plant life, so, too, did plants allow her to rethink science in an era when technological progress was inseparable from empire building. In her fiction, characters learn to read botanical science like poetry. They use psychology to theorize a moss-like subjectivity that pushes back against the patriarchy. They take the insights of evolutionary thought and posit a botanical family that made kin of humans and plants alike. In the in-between of science and literature, Osaki found a way to become more plantlike and turn the chaos and psychological unrest of her time into something creative that could grow and flourish.

Even still, Osaki’s career as a writer was all too brief. Born in rural Tottori Prefecture in 1896, she spent only thirteen years in Tokyo as a writer, from 1919 to 1932. Although championed by her friend Hayashi Fumiko (who went on to become one of Japan’s best-known postwar writers), it was only after several decades since Osaki had stopped writing that critics and the public took notice of her work. Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense was republished in 1969 when it was collected in the sixth volume of Collected Works—Discoveries of Modern Literature (Zenshū—Gendai bungaku no hakken), titled Dark Humor (Kuroi yūmoa). This volume—edited by Ōka Shōhei and including works by Abe Kōbō (who is the subject of the next chapter) and Hanada Kiyoteru—reintroduced Osaki’s work to a new generation. In 1973, Hanada, one of the most influential literary and media critics of his time, went on to publish an essay in which he called Osaki “his muse.” Although she is by no means a household name, Osaki’s reputation continues to grow even today, as does critical attention to her work.11 Osaki’s life has even been portrayed on film (as I discuss below), and a manga adaptation of Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense was published in 2018.

Osaki’s life as a writer in the early Shōwa period was, by all accounts, rough, both in terms of the political landscape of the times and in terms of her personal life. This particularly turbulent era saw both the massive destruction of the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 (which effectively leveled the city of Tokyo) and the transition from the relatively democratic Taishō era to the increasingly militaristic Shōwa era in 1926. Osaki’s career coincided with an increase in Japan’s colonial activities in Taiwan (which began the year before Osaki’s birth in 1895) and the Korean peninsula (which began in 1910). The Mukden Incident of 1931—the year Osaki’s Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense was published—served as justification for Japan’s invasion of Manchuria. The following year saw the May 15 Incident, in which a failed coup attempt resulted in the assassination of prime minister Inukai Tsuyoshi.

Political and colonial violence was unfolding all around Osaki, and, closer at hand, she struggled to make ends meet in Tokyo. Having to rely on her mother for financial support, Osaki watched as her contemporaries, like Hayashi Fumiko, gained greater notoriety than she did. In 1929, she lost her brother Tetsurō to illness, a family tragedy that some speculate contributed to Osaki’s ever-worsening psychological condition.12 Tetsurō had been a student of new Buddhist thought, and Kawasaki Kenko presumes that Osaki was likely introduced to many schools of academic thought (like evolution, psychology, and vitalism) via Tetsurō.13 Osaki then lost her oldest brother, Atsurō, to tuberculosis in 1933. Atsurō had served in the navy until his untimely passing. There is a story of Osaki’s contemporaries from Women’s Arts, which included proletarian writer Toda Toyoko and Ōta Yōko (the latter of whom would go on to write of her experiences surviving the atomic bombing of Hiroshima), visiting Osaki’s apartment and listening to her talk solely of her “grief.”14 The conventional portrait of Osaki is thus one of struggle and sadness.

Given Osaki’s brief and by all accounts unhappy time spent as a transplant in Tokyo, it is easy to imagine she certainly felt out of place and uprooted in the colonial metropole. Many of her characters, including Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense’s protagonist Machiko, come to the city from a rural elsewhere. It was plant life, and moss in particular, that allowed Machiko (and thus Osaki) to see the potential in this type of uprooting. Who needed roots anyway? Mosses flourish without roots.

With moss in mind, Osaki composed an idiosyncratic environmental literature that paid close attention to plants and their potential influence on human subjectivity from within the anxious, urban setting of Tokyo. In cramped attic rooms and hospital wards, her fractured characters (most of them women) dream of flourishing by forging new connections with the botanical realm in defiance of male relatives and male psychologists who pathologize and hospitalize them. Osaki’s work attempts to resist such pathologizing and to instead greet the multiplicity of modern subjectivity as generative rather than debilitating.

Of Moss and Multiple Subjectivity

As is apparent in the title Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense, Osaki was interested in capturing the extrasensory experience of nonnormative states of subjectivity in writing. She was fascinated with doppelgangers and moments of repetition and how these instances of multiplicity caused the human subject to experience the world in strange ways. This interest helped bring her to the question: How do plants experience the world? Like the other figures I discuss in this book, Osaki concluded that a plant’s subjective experience is one of multiplicity. Theorists working in critical plant studies (CPS) argue that plants resist the easy categorization of “the individual” that is so fundamental to normative understandings of identity and subjectivity as well as mental health. Plants like mosses are themselves always already multiplicities. As Kimmerer writes: “Moss plants almost never occur singly, but in colonies packed as dense as an August cornfield.”15 Bryologist J. W. Bates likewise claims that “the colony rather than the individual is widely regarded as the functional unit for many bryophytes.”16 In general, to think of moss is to think of a multiplicity of moss, spread out over a rock or tree with fuzzy boundaries (see figure 1.1). Kimmerer recounts the difficulties of identifying mosses with her students: “Slowing down and coming close, we see patterns emerge and expand out of the tangled tapestry threads. The threads are simultaneously distinct from the whole, and part of the whole.”17 Such is their shokubutsusei, somewhere in between singular and multiple. This is the subjective state Osaki sought in becoming botanical. A unified subjectivity—a sense of oneself as one self—gets lost in the transformation that leads to a botanical subjectivity. Karen L. F. Houle refers to the act of becoming as “provisional co-creative zone(s) in which the ‘parties’ and their ‘proper functions’ are themselves effaced and augmented.”18 Augmented and effaced at the same time, things come together and lose themselves as themselves in the process of becoming. They form something new that is more than the sum of their parts. Osaki’s work asks: Could inhabiting the world this way be liberating?

Drawing from her own life, Osaki created characters that struggled with shinkeibyō and looked for ways to free themselves of its burden in dangerous and depressing times. Sometimes her characters turn to film, sometimes to drugs, sometimes to poetry. Often, they turn to plants. In her 1932 short story “Miss Cricket” (“Kōrogijō”), for example, the anxieties of nervous disorder extend into the botanical realm:

When he has to pass under the late spring paulownia blossoms, he constantly breathes out from his nostrils. This is probably to avoid, by means of a hasty breath in through the nose, letting the fragrance of a paulownia that is suffering from nervous disorder enter inside his body. After all, those with nervous disorders disavow others with nervous disorders. This is done to preemptively ward off sad feelings toward fellow travelers. Be as it may that there exists between himself and the paulownia blossoms the difference between humans and plants, on the grounds of their being similarly afflicted by nervous disorders, they are fellow travelers.19

For Osaki, humans and paulownia blossoms are “fellow travelers” as they move through the anxious uprooting of modernity. The play here between anthropomorphism and phyotomorphism (the attribution of plantlike characteristics to humans) blurs the lines between human and plant, but ultimately, in this passage, we see a human character trying to disavow his connection to the botanical realm and maintain a singular subjectivity. This is because this passage is narrated from a doctor’s perspective. It is a pathologizing of the becoming botanical that Osaki’s work actually attempted to overturn.

Unusual psychological states shared between humans and plants become a site of possibility and transcendence in Osaki’s other works. We see this in a poem dating from 1933 (one of the few works she created after leaving Tokyo):

This poem, part of a longer series titled Poems Dedicated to the Gods (Kamigami ni sasaguru shi) is a play on seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal’s famous figuration of becoming botanical in Pensées: “Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed.”21 Osaki’s poem is also a tribute to nineteenth-century Scottish poet William Sharp, who appears several times throughout Osaki’s work (including in “Miss Cricket”). Sharp secretly wrote under the female pseudonym Fiona Macleod, an instance of multiplicity that fascinated Osaki and attracted her to his (their) work. The idea of two poets inhabiting one body seemed to perfectly crystalize the potential Osaki saw in so-called abnormal psychology found in the fractured subjectivity of early Shōwa Japan. The poem continues:

William Sharp/Fiona Macleod become a creative multiplicity of selves. While a seeming impossibility for a human, such multiplicity was the very stuff of the botanical realm. The shokubutsusei of Sharp/Macleod offered a model for Osaki to find something new in the anxieties (both societal and personal) that threatened to split her apart. Thus, while Pascal calls the reed “the most feeble thing in nature,” Osaki does not. For all its feebleness, the reed is strong in its plasticity, that is, its ability to change, split, and accommodate two subjectivities at once. Osaki’s botanical imagination grows from the same soil as this reed.

Just as Sharp is both himself and Fiona Macleod, so, too, is he both human and botanical. In the same poem, Osaki writes of Sharp: “fragrant olive smells of you” (mokusei wa kimi no nioi) only to reverse the attribution a few lines later as “you smell of fragrant olive” (kimi wa mokusei no nioi).23 Sharp is the smell of fragrant olive, and fragrant olive is the smell of Sharp. The human and plant overlap and form an in-between. The human is but a reed, but in its singularity-as-a-multiplicity, it is unfathomably expansive. The human becomes botanical, forming something new and augmented, enveloped in fragrant olive. A splintered subjectivity finds liberatory form in Osaki’s botanical poetics.

In poetry, Osaki likewise finds a way to rethink the science of evolution. In this poem dedicated to Sharp/Macleod, Osaki rethinks the human through the reed as both a reduction and an expansion. The material body of human-turned-plant is “slim” and “singular,” but its immaterial spirit—its subjectivity—is “as wide as the cosmos.”24 This jump from the botanical to the cosmic reverses the trajectory found in Osaki’s review of Max Fleischer’s Evolution. While watching the story of evolution unfold in cinema, Osaki moved forward in evolutionary time and thus forward in biological complexity. The film, like the conventional understanding of evolutionary descent, travels from the cosmos toward the botanical realm: “‘I’ become gas; ‘I’ become a star; ‘I’ become smoke; ‘I’ become a slice of glacier; ‘I’ become moss.” In Osaki’s poem to Sharp/Macleod, on the contrary, the human becomes a plant that uproots (a reed, in the place of moss), and then ends up among the stars. What a transformation! Uprooting, Osaki discovered, can lead to such transcendence, should one seek the plasticity of plant life.

Repetition and the Plasticity of Form

Osaki similarly turns back evolutionary time in her unassuming masterpiece, Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense. In the novella, a patient in a mental hospital eschews human subjectivity in favor of a “moss-like disposition.” Osaki calls this phenomenon “species-reversal” (shugaeri), a term that echoes Deleuze and Guattari’s figuration of “involution.” For Deleuze and Guattari, involution is not merely the opposite or reverse of evolution. Rather, it is a creative movement that turns backward in the name of a kind of progress that “is in no way confused with regression.”25 Wandering the Realm of the Seventh Sense is full of attempted involutions, as its main character, Ono Machiko, intimately immerses herself in the miniature world of moss, that evolutionary ancestor of humans. She strives throughout to be more like moss.

It is difficult to summarize the plot of Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense, not because so much happens in the narrative but rather because so little seems to happen. To fully appreciate it, one must look closely, as if one were inspecting a clump of moss. As Kimmerer has shown, moss is difficult to identify and requires a different kind of attention: “Learning to see mosses is more like listening than looking. A cursory glance will not do it. Straining to hear a faraway voice or catch a nuance in the quiet subtext of a conversation requires attentiveness, a filtering of all the noise, to catch the music.”26 This is the kind of attention that is required of Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense, especially if we wish to identify the fingerprints of crisis that help shape the text. For what does happen in the novella happens slowly, nearly imperceptibly, and it happens several times, mostly within one location, the small, cramped house that Machiko shares with her brothers and cousin. Machiko is a teenage girl of indeterminate age with curly red hair. She uproots and leaves the countryside for Tokyo, where she comes to live with her two brothers, Ichisuke and Nisuke, along with their cousin Sangorō. It is a story about familial relationships, one that ultimately finds Machiko feeling closer to moss as an evolutionary ancestor than to any of her immediate male kin.

Each of the four main (human) characters considers themself a student, formally or otherwise. It is an odd household, with its haphazard mix of science and art. Sangorō prepares to retake the entrance exam for a music school. He practices on an old piano, annoying his housemates. Ichisuke studies a type of abnormal psychology referred to as “split psychology” (bunretsu shinrigaku)—a name that resembles the Japanese word for schizophrenia (bunretsushō) and also includes the same word for “split” that Osaki uses in referring to William Sharp as a “split poet.” Ichisuke falls in love with a female patient who refuses to speak with him, and it is she who inhabits a moss-like subjectivity by means of species-reversal in defiance of his advances. Nisuke conducts research on plants, experimenting with the fertilization of radishes and mosses. The smell of his fertilizer wafts through the house throughout the story. Nisuke studies the “love lives” of moss, mixing different types of fertilizers to encourage their reproduction. Machiko, in turn, considers herself a student of poetry. She tries to capture, in verse, an elusive sensory experience that she calls “the seventh sense.” Machiko is not taken seriously by her relatives, however. She is made to feel small, neglected, and used. As they hold forth in long conversations that last for pages at a time, Machiko cleans their rooms and cooks their meals. She is ignored for most of the novella. At one point, she becomes friends with a neighbor, but their relationship is short-lived. At the very end, she leaves the house to visit Ichisuke’s clinic. This is the only action that takes place outside the confining walls of the run-down house she shares with her male relatives.

With its unusual and meandering plot, Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense reads like a text trying to hold itself together in the face of neglect and near abuse. It is an experimental narrative, both in terms of content and form. Osaki initially envisioned the story as forming a closed loop, creating an ouroboros that ends where it begins.27 Although she ultimately abandoned this idea, the circular logic of the text bears traces of its original plotting. There is a botanical quality to this cyclicality (a formal quality I explore in more detail in chapter 4). In touch with the cyclical rhythms of the atmosphere and the seasons in ways humans are generally not, plants embody a temporality of perpetual return that Osaki builds into the very structure of Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense.

While the narrative form is temporally complex, Osaki’s prose is deceptively simple. There is clarity at the level of the sentence that exposes the uprooted subjectivity floating underneath. Things seem almost too clear, as if Machiko needs to remind herself what she is narrating at all times. As the first-person narrator, Machiko repeatedly reminds readers who, what, and where things are, offering a kind of mapping that centers characters in space, to the point of stagnating narrative flow. The story develops in these repetitious clumps and clusters that look similar from a distance but reveal differences up close. In other words, the form of the story resembles the clumps of moss that come to serve as a key element to the plot. Moss is repetitive, like the narrative itself. Nisuke may encourage moss to fall in love and reproduce via spores, but moss can also reproduce asexually. Mosses can clone themselves, make duplicates via a process called “vegetal reproduction.” Mosses are biologically repetitive.

Form and content thus overlap in Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense, and this is a key element of the trope of becoming botanical. For example, as Machiko arrives at the house early in the story, she describes the mandarin oranges that grow outside and repeats the word mandarin orange (mikan) to a conspicuous degree:

As Sangorō and I reached the house, the mandarin orange trees that formed a hedge surrounding the house were illuminated by the sun. The mandarin oranges were small in diameter and bumpy, their color no different from their leaves. This was when I first noticed. I was holding a string bag of mandarin oranges. It was a bag of leftover mandarin oranges that I had eaten while on the train, that I had unknowingly carried here. Anyway, the mandarin oranges from the hedge around this house were late bloomers. Later on, these mandarin oranges turned into poorly formed homegrown mandarin oranges: shockingly behind the season, full of bumps on their peels, full of seeds, and still small in diameter. They were sour mandarin oranges. However, beneath the light of the late autumn stars, these mandarin oranges looked beautiful.28

Machiko’s narration is frequently repetitious in this manner. It is as if she must constantly take account of the material world around her or else risk getting lost. Yet the narrative repetition also makes legible the plasticity of Machiko’s subjectivity (and the botanical form in which the text presents it). According to Catherine Malabou, “Repetition is plastic, it gives form to what it destroys. We have to think of a form created by destruction, the form of a new person, which is not the transcendental subject, but what undermines it, as the threat of its explosion.”29 In Machiko’s repetitions, we can hear her coming apart. She splinters—or, as Malabou might say, she explodes—in order to become anew, to become multiple like moss.

The repetitions throughout the novella demonstrate how Machiko pays close attention to her environment and to plants in particular. She displays a form of intense noticing that CPS theorist Michael Marder aligns specifically with plant life. It is a form of noticing in which the distinction between subject and object dissolves:

When I linger with plants, in thoughtful and physical proximity, I try to pay attention to their singular mode of attention. I notice, first, that plants do not attend to an object or group of objects. Their attention is inseparable from their life and growth. From a magnificent sequoia to a blade of grass, a plant attends to the physical elements, precisely, because the elements are not objects and cannot be objectified. Only then, in such nonobjectification, are the elements and life itself respected in their proper being. Therefore, human attention convoked and directed toward life must strive, strange as this may sound, to be similarly nonobjectifying.30

Through her close attention to the physical world, Machiko strives to be “nonobjectifying” in this way. Thus she repeatedly tries to find a way into the seventh sense, that new, extrasensory mode of experience that would allow her to attend to her environment in the nonobjectifying way that Marder posits is possible for plant life. She believes poetry can accommodate this extrasensory subject position. The seventh sense eludes Machiko for much of the novella, however, and in her repetition, she ends up unwittingly highlighting objects like the mandarin oranges.

While Machiko’s repetitive language does not allow for nonobjectification, it nevertheless accomplishes a kind of nonsubjectification. The pronoun “I” is used to an excessive degree throughout the novella, although Osaki never brackets it the way she does in her discussion of Evolution in Jottings on Film. Ironically, the repeated foregrounding of the first-person pronoun serves to destabilize any sense of a unified subjectivity precisely through its anxious attempts to solidify subjectivity. Machiko’s brothers and cousin repeat subjects of conversations numerous times while talking to one another. Everyone repeats each other’s names (often their full names) time and again, long after the narrative has made clear both who is being discussed and who they are in relation to each other. It feels self-conscious and somewhat paranoid, as if everyone is worried that they will become someone (or something) else unless they make explicit who they are in the first place. The formality of full names keeps everyone within the house (as well as the readers) at a distance. It exposes an artificiality and discomfort that comes across as anxiety. Early in the novella, cousin Sangorō mentions a book Ichisuke has asked him to purchase at the Maruzen bookstore called “‘Doppel-something.”31 The anxiety over repetition, doubling, and identity abounds. To return to Malabou’s claim about the relationship between repetition and plasticity, “it gives form to what it destroys.” Names, subjects, objects—Osaki wants to “destroy” all of these in order to rethink the human and become anew. The narrative repeats names until they come to mean nothing. Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense is not merely deconstructive in its stilted narration, however. Rather, in its repetitions and awkward exchanges, it constructs a moss-like form that accommodates a botanical subjectivity, a way of experiencing the world as moss might. Explode human subjectivity enough, and moss might just grow in the cracks.

Meeting Moss in Evolutionary Time

As she regularly cleans her brother Nisuke’s room, Machiko marvels at the mosses that “spread out with the vastness of a forest” on his desk.32 She discovers a different world in this mysterious and vast moss-covered landscape, one that eludes the confining clarity of the household in which she feels trapped and neglected. As she watches Nisuke work over this forest of moss, Machiko finally slips into the hazy, nonobjectifying (and nonsubjectifying) realm of the seventh sense. She enters into a new form of botanical subjectivity, where her senses become augmented and seem to take on a life of their own: “On the verge of falling asleep, I breathed heavily. I stayed awake for a short while by breathing air in through my nose, and then I breathed in again. While doing this, I inhabited a singular world of mist. There, my senses worked independently of each other, then merged into one, and then went astray again. My faculties continued incoherently on like this. Nisuke had just finished eagerly rubbing the top of the moss with a cotton swab, when his apron became hazy like mist, and transformed into clouds of various shapes.”33

The new world that opens up to Machiko as she watches Nisuke work is indistinct and incoherent. It is a plastic world where things transform (like aprons into clouds). It is the seventh sense, a decidedly unclear subjectivity that Machiko describes as “a mental world shrouded in extensive fog.”34 Nozoe Nobuhisa’s manga adaptation of Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense highlights the bizarre qualities of this subjective state. It inserts a scene near the end of the story in which Machiko falls asleep and is led by a double of herself directly into the realm of the seventh sense. “This is the world you’ve wanted to know,” says the doppelganger-Machiko against a moss-covered landscape populated by overlapping repetitions of portals and the faces of her male relatives growing out of moss spores.35 It is a perfect visualization of becoming botanical, full of multiplicity and metamorphosis. Hamano Sachi’s 1998 film adaptation of the story depicts Machiko’s botanical subjectivity by superimposing her image over a closeup of moss (see figure 1.2). In this scene, Machiko physically embodies the small potentiality of moss; the exuberance she feels at having gained such knowledge is legible in the smile on her face.

What propels Machiko to such moments of epiphany is evolutionary thinking. Evolution is introduced into the narrative at the start of a long conversation between Ichisuke and Nisuke (which Machiko quietly, but closely, overhears). Ichisuke suggests (phytomorphically) that human emotions such as love are inherited from vegetal ancestors: “Seeing that humans fall in love, there is no reason mosses cannot fall in love. You could say that human love is an inheritance from moss. This perspective is certainly not wrong. The theory of evolution likely imagines moss to be a very distant ancestor of humans.”36 Ichisuke then claims that he has witnessed humans inhabiting a moss-like subjectivity: “We can see a kind of evidence of this when humans are on the verge of waking from a nap and they suddenly find themselves returning to the mind of moss. It is a strange psychology, like clinging to a damp and humid bog, your body unable to move. This is evidence that the disposition of moss has been inherited by humans to this very day.”37 In this description, we see clear echoes of Machiko’s own experience watching Nisuke work. As she drifted into a misty realm on the verge of sleep and her senses started working “independently of each other,” Machiko embodied, in Ichisuke’s words, “the disposition of moss.” Machiko’s becoming botanical, then, is an evolutionary inheritance, one that holds the potential for transcendence through involution.

In her feminist reading of Darwinian evolution, Elizabeth Grosz argues that Darwin’s theory offers “the elements of an account of the place of futurity, the direction forward as the opening up, diversification, or bifurcation of the latencies of the present, which provide a kind of ballast for the induction of a future different but not detached from the past or present.”38 In other words, evolutionary thought provides a way to imagine the future as branching out and heading somewhere new from the present, like a plant does from its roots or rhizome. Flowers, stems, and leaves are different but not detached from their roots. Machiko takes note of this capability and attempts to embody it herself. As she becomes botanical, Machiko’s mundane present branches off into a hazy future along a new evolutionary timeline in which the human is rethought as more plantlike.

For her brother Ichisuke, however, turning backward in evolutionary time in order to embody a moss-like disposition is a pathology that presents a serious problem. He complains to Nisuke of a patient recently admitted to his psychiatric clinic: “That patient is silent towards me, the split-consciousness she possesses is of a completely concealed nature. This is certainly inherited from the disposition of moss in ancient times.”39 Ichisuke explains that patients take on this moss-like subjectivity in response to the feeling of uprootedness, claiming: “Those humans that have inherited a moss-like disposition have a craving of wanting to put down roots in one place.”40 Ichisuke thus understands the connection between the uprooting of modernity and becoming botanical, but he diagnoses this becoming as a mental disorder.

There is a gendered element to Ichisuke’s pathologizing of his female patient. Part of his conversation with Nisuke revolves around the fact that the patient in question is “not male” (otoko de wa nai). This somewhat curious phrasing is partially a critique of Ichisuke’s history of harboring romantic feelings for female patients. If we consider the moss, however, we also find a subversion of sex/gender norms at play here. This is because mosses (and, indeed, plants in general) challenge conventional understandings of sexual differentiation (i.e., whether a moss can be identified as male or female). As Akiyama Hiroyuki explains in his 2004 book The Story of Moss (Koke no hanashi), mosses exhibit a complex biological development such that some possess male sex organs, some possess female sex organs, and some possess both simultaneously. In this, they resemble many other species of plant life. What makes mosses a uniquely complicated species in terms of sexual identification is their particular multiplicity. Akiyama explains: “In the case of mosses, they are connected below through their underground stems and their rhizomatic structure (which is a complexly entangled network, from which stems do emerge), and so it is difficult to recognize them as individual entities. According to their stages of development and the environment in which they are born and grow, they sometimes only display either male or female sex organs even though they biologically possess both, and so it can be difficult to judge whether they do in fact possess both sexes to begin with.”41

Stella Sandford takes the question of sexual identification in plant life further than Akiyama. In her 2023 book Vegetal Sex, Sandford interrogates the historical development of botanists ascribing zoologically analogous notions of sex onto plant life. She points out that philosophers concerned with plants (such as Aristotle) did not entertain the idea of male and female plant life: “The idea of plant sex was not obvious for these thinkers because an answer to the question ‘Do plants have “male” and “female”?’ required an answer to another, more fundamental philosophical question: ‘What are “male” and female”?’”42

Sandford argues that plants can lead us to this fundamental question in part because plants—and plants alone—exhibit a dibiontic life cycle, which she explains as “two different multicellular stages, also known as alternation of haploid and diploid generations (in one generation the organism has a singular set of chromosomes; in the other it has a double set.)”43 What this means is that “although there are two generations in the ‘individual’ plant life cycle, there are at least three plants—one sporophyte and two gametophytes (one male, one female). The dibiontic life cycle thus further troubles the idea of the individual organism characteristic of the zoocentric model.”44 The shokubutsusei of the dibiontic life cycle thus simultaneously pushes against clear notions of both the male/female binary and suggests a radical reformulation of the plant as a multiplicity, insofar as Sandford claims that each plant is in fact “at least three plants.” To what extent is Ichisuke’s patient striving toward this type of sexual and subjective multiplicity by becoming botanical and adopting a moss-like disposition? Given Nisuke’s primary research on moss reproduction, and further given the historical reality that plants’ dibiontic life cycle was first identified in 1851 by William Hofmeister through the study of mosses and ferns, the question of sex and gender, and the subversion/rethinking thereof, is inseparable from the botanical imagination of Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense.45 It is also tied to the history of evolutionary thought, as Darwin himself expressed uncertainty about the distinction between male and female in plant life in his 1877 work The Different Form of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species.46

It is perhaps for this reason that for Nisuke, the student of plant biology, a moss-like disposition is quite natural. In his response to Ichisuke, Nisuke posits a certain amount of agency in the patient’s psychological state, aligning it directly with the concept of involution. He claims that his brother’s patient has performed a species-reversal and recounts a story he has heard of someone being born with a fox’s tail: “They said it was a case of a human going against the course of evolution. . . . In addition to humans species-reversing back to foxes, it’s also not a problem for human psychology to return to that of moss.”47 Of course, Nisuke does not know, or more likely does not care, that his own sister is attempting a species-reversal of her own.

While Nisuke’s research on moss allows him to see a certain degree of agency in species-reversal, only Machiko can glimpse the full potential of becoming botanical. It is Machiko who names the botanical subjectivity arrived at through species-reversal “the seventh sense.” While she fails repeatedly to capture the seventh sense in her poetry, it does momentarily offer her a means of escape, however brief, from the confines of her family and the home they share. In one particularly charged scene, Machiko brings her brothers boiled chestnuts that have arrived from their grandmother. Nisuke is hard at work on his moss research, studying the pollen that serves as a telltale sign that his moss has indeed fallen in love. After bits of a chestnut fall from Nisuke’s mouth onto a notebook, Machiko notices the striking resemblance between the moss pollen and the chestnut powder. She once again starts to become botanical:

Without thinking, I craned my neck and looked at the surface of the notebook. Then I knew. The moss pollen and the chestnut bits, they were the exact same color! And they had the same shape! And so I felt as if I had gained a vague but remarkable piece of knowledge—the poetic realm I was searching for, wasn’t it this small world of powder? Moss flowers and the insides of chestnuts, now, scattered atop the notebook. Beside this are the tips of tweezers, the thin roots of moss, and the shadow of the perfume bottle under the electric light turned into a single beam of yellow light, stretching toward the cotton swab.48

The excitement of Machiko’s narration here, with its uncharacteristic use of exclamation marks, is a moment of exuberance and possibility borne of the seventh sense. It is the pure possibility of becoming botanical within the small world of moss and powder, a world of smallness Kimmerer extols as she writes of mosses “[taking] possession of spaces from which other plants are excluded by their size. Their ways of being are a celebration of smallness. . . . In being small, limitation is their strength.”49 Machiko, who has been ignored and consistently made to feel small by her male relatives, seems to arrive at a momentary recognition of smallness as a form of strength in this way. The small world of moss and powder opens up to Machiko, and for a moment, she becomes anew. Unfortunately, the moment ends quickly. Her brother, who remains oblivious to the insight Machiko has gained, sweeps the possibility of becoming botanical away in an instant, as he “gathered the moss up in a hurry and brushed away the chestnut bits from the notebook.”50 It is only for a moment that Machiko finds a sense of escape in the mistiness of the moss forest before she is once again held back by one of her relatives. The transcendent world of evolutionary kin gives way to the confining world of patriarchal relationships.

Perhaps this was inevitable, for the near-utopian vision of evolutionary thought that Machiko finds in the seventh sense runs counter to the prevailing political adherence to social Darwinism in the early Shōwa era. Historians like Tessa Morris-Suzuki have demonstrated how evolutionary thought reinforced ideologies of racial purity and supremacy in Japan to justify imperial expansion, and how less overtly racist theories of cultural evolution likewise spurred on the creation of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.51 Osaki’s idiosyncratic take on evolution was an attempt to rethink evolution as multidirectional. It thus denied the notion that evolution unfolded in an ever-progressing path. While not an outright condemnation of Japanese imperialism, there is nevertheless a form of botanical resistance to be found in the novella’s turn back in evolutionary time. This is especially true when we consider the gendered dynamics under which Osaki’s female characters attempt species-reversal. They become moss-like in defiance of a patriarchal scientific system that looks to pathologize them. There is thus much to celebrate in Machiko’s momentary epiphany about the utopian possibilities held in an involutionary move to a moss-like subjectivity. The moss in question, however, is the subject of scientific experimentation, and it is precisely Nisuke’s scientific work that places Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense within Japan’s colonial nexus. Moving moss even further into the foreground allows us to see how the small, seemingly sheltered home shared by Machiko and her brothers belonged to a world at war and how even the moss that brought Machiko into a moment of transcendence was fertilized by the spoils of colonial extraction.

Fertilizer in the Time of Colonial Modernity

By and large, critics have read Wandering the Realm of the Seventh Sense, and the place of science within it, in the context of ero-guro-nansensu (erotic-grotesque-nonsensical), a cultural aesthetic term used both contemporaneously in the early 1930s and retrospectively to characterize Japanese modernism as a decedent movement more concerned with sensual pleasure than with the increasingly unstable politics of the early Shōwa era.52 This line of interpretation discounts Osaki’s engagement with science and botanical life as either parody or nonsense. One can partly trace this tendency to read Osaki’s work as humorous back to the republication of the novella in the 1969 volume Dark Humor. Seen as an example of “dark humor,” the seemingly anthropomorphic quality of Osaki’s moss—particularly the fact that Nisuke’s moss falls in love—was understood as “grotesque.”53 Within the ero-guro-nansensu paradigm, guro, or grotesque, could refer to acts of sexual perversion.54 On the surface, Osaki’s sexually active mosses fit this designation.

However, as I have been suggesting throughout this chapter, the violence of Japan’s colonial project serves as an important, yet often neglected, background for Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense. Taking Osaki’s moss seriously, instead of explaining it away as an example of ero-guro-nansensu, allows us to open a new window onto the historical moment from which the story emerged and helps us identify the ambient anxiety that hovers throughout the narrative. The novella’s portrayal of plant research, as unscientific as it may appear, is tied directly to Japan’s colonial project and, in turn, to Osaki’s family history. Osaki had several family members living in Japanese-occupied territories, including Taiwan (her great-uncle) and Manchuria (her sister, Aya). Her third-oldest brother, Shirō, was an agricultural researcher at Tokyo Imperial University. He was deployed to colonial Korea and participated in the creation of governmental policies surrounding fertilizer use on the Korean peninsula. Osaki visited him numerous times in what was then the colonial capital of Keijō (modern-day Seoul).55 In December of 1930, six months after Osaki watched Evolution and only three months before the publication of Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense, Shirō published an article titled “Supply and Demand of Fertilizer and Its Management” (Hiryō no jukyū to kono torishimari) in Chosen, a magazine published by the colonial governor-general of Korea.56 It seems clear that Shirō’s research served as the model for Nisuke’s research on moss. The novella takes on a new, dark aura once we read it with this in mind.

The uprooting experienced in Japan’s colonies was of a different magnitude than the one experienced by those occupying the metropole. Agricultural reforms on the Korean peninsula initiated by the Japanese colonial government displaced farmers and denied them access to the fertilizers that were necessary for their livelihoods.57 Such restrictions often resulted in violence. In the same year Shirō wrote of fertilizer management, local farmers battled with police in Gangwon Province over access to fertilizer and other necessities. Four people were killed and twenty-six were injured.58 Fertilizer played a significant role in Japan’s colonial project, as Fujihara Tatsushi recounts in his 2017 book War and Agriculture (Sensō to nōgyō). The development of chemical fertilizer was intimately tied to war, as the ammonia produced for fertilizer was likewise used in the production of gunpowder. Fujihara writes of how Chisso and Shōwa Denkō—two companies that developed chemical fertilizers—manufactured gunpowder in large quantities and how, for such purposes, Chisso (best known today for its polluting of the Minamata Bay and the subsequent methylmercury poisoning that afflicted residents in the postwar era) established a factory in what is now the North Korean city of Hungnam. The two companies constructed a hydroelectric plant that eroded mountains and lowered water levels in colonial Korea to produce large amounts of gunpowder and fertilizer.59

Around the same time that Osaki was writing Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense, proletarian writers in Japanese-occupied Korea were creating literary responses to the establishment of the Chisso factory in Hungnam. These stories viscerally demonstrate the exploitation of local workers and the overall crisis of colonial extraction.60 It is this crisis, diffuse as it may be for Machiko and her brothers, that wafts through the air of the house they share in Tokyo. For Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense mentions the smell of ammonia as Nisuke boils his fertilizer. It speaks of a “yellow liquid” that Nisuke uses to fertilize his plants, making it clear that his research concerns chemical fertilizer in addition to the organic fertilizer he boils in ceramic pots. This subtle, amorphous atmosphere of crisis drifts through the narrative, and its violent undercurrent occasionally bubbles up to the surface in odd, gendered ways. At one point, Sangorō throws Machiko out a window. Later on, he cuts her hair against her will. As Sangorō ignores Machiko’s tears and cuts her hair into a short bob, Machiko relates the violation she feels to that of being stripped naked: “My neck was suddenly cold, the unmistakable feeling of having my naked body fully exposed.”61 While obviously not commensurate with the real-world violence experienced in Japan’s colonies, such moments in Osaki’s fiction take on an uncanny hue of colonial domination and forced assimilation when read against her own familial connection to colonial Korea and subsequent awareness of botanical science’s place in Japan’s imperialism.

In her book on Osaki, Kawasaki Kenko tries to recuperate Shirō’s work, writing that “What Shirō paid attention to as a colonial bureaucrat was a system of agricultural management that had become intensified to a high degree in terms of economics and rationality. This was not simply a matter of exploiting the colony for the sake of the home country.”62 Kawasaki argues that Shirō’s approach was to teach farmers how to be self-sufficient in terms of fertilization and that he advocated for the formation of agricultural collectives. Yet at the same time, she recognizes that the national policies he helped create led to the downfall of organic fertilizers and the establishment of chemical fertilizer factories like the one in Hungnam.63 It is difficult to separate Shirō, and thus the fictionalized version of him in Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense, from the crisis experienced in colonial Korea. Osaki may not mention outright the implications of Nisuke’s botanical research, but in her less-than-favorable portrayal of the character, she herself hardly seems interested in recuperating him. What she does seem interested in recuperating is plant life itself and the utopian potential it held despite its place in Japan’s colonial network.

Love and Moss

Taking Osaki’s moss seriously in Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense not only exposes its entanglements within Japanese colonialism; it also allows us to see the extent to which Nisuke’s research engages directly with scientific theories of evolution that circulated throughout Japan in the early twentieth century. Oka Asajirō, author of a best-selling treatise on evolution published in 1904 titled Discourse on Evolution (Shinkaron kōwa), included in his 1916 Discourse on Biology (Seibutsugaku kōwa) a chapter titled, simply, “Love” (“Ren’ai”).64 For Oka, talk of love was not anthropomorphic when applied to plant life. Rather, it was an operative concept within the scientific study of biology. He begins the chapter by claiming that “(there) are various methods for sperm and egg to meet, and for this reason breeding animals are equipped with a variety of organs. . . . However, the mere arrangement of equipment has no effect in and of itself. There must also be an extremely strong instinct that derives no satisfaction if this equipment is not put to use. In this is the root of what is called love in our world.”65 Oka uses the word love to name an instinctual drive that leads both animals and plants to reproduce: “As all animals and plants carry out sexual reproduction, there is necessarily a strong love between each egg and sperm cell.”66 In relegating the concept of love to an instinctual drive at the cellular level, Oka minimizes the differences among human, plant, and more-than-human animal, just as Osaki does in her writing. For both Osaki and Oka, love leveled the hierarchical playing field of evolution in yet another strike against the logic of social Darwinism. Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense ends with Machiko falling in love with one of Ichisuke’s colleagues. The suggestion is that Nisuke’s experiments with making moss fall in love ultimately affect Machiko as well. Far from a story of anthropomorphism, one could say that Machiko’s falling in love is, in fact, phytomorphic.

Oka Asajirō, like Osaki, was particularly fascinated by moss, and he, too, saw revolutionary potential in its multiplicity. As Gregory Sullivan recounts, Oka wrote an article in 1907 about kokemushi—aquatic invertebrates commonly referred to as “moss-animals” (the Japanese name literally translates to “moss-insects”). For Oka, moss-animals were an ideal life-form, a collective body constituted by a multiplicity of individuals. He advocated that it was in the best interest of the Japanese nation near the turn of the twentieth century to “recast human nature and eliminate our selfishness in order to become like moss-animals.”67 He even went as far as suggesting that if put on public display, statues of moss-animals would be more effective at teaching public morality than statues of religious or political figures.68 Serious science, it seems, can be just as steeped in a bizarre logic as the ero-guro-nansensu aesthetics of literary modernism.

Although Osaki makes no explicit mention of Oka’s work in her writing, his influential theories informed the scientific milieu in which she wrote. In its positing of love between mosses, Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense was very much of its time. As the bryologist Arakawa Tomotsugu claims: “We can likely think that in (Osaki’s time), the concept of ‘love between mosses’ was less out of place than it is in contemporary times and had permeated the society of the time.”69 The scientific language of plant love inspired Osaki to imagine what it could mean for humans and plants to share emotions. In this scientific speculation about the in-between of human and plant, she likewise found another form of becoming, one in the in-between of science and poetry.

Rethinking Science as Poetry

Throughout her oeuvre, Osaki envisions a common ground for science and literature that could facilitate the new becoming she sought in alliance with the botanical realm. In two stories from the Machiko Cycle, “Walking” (Hokō, 1931) and “A Night in Anton’s Basement” (Chikashitsu anton no hitoya, 1932), a drama plays out between the poet Tsuchida Kyūsaku (who falls in love with Machiko) and his zoologist relative, Matsuki. Matsuki is disturbed by the scientific inaccuracies written into Kyūsaku’s poems, such as Kyūsaku’s claim that “crows are white.” Matsuki knows objectively that crows are black. (To be sure, Matsuki would take issue with Bateson’s claim that “men are grass,” as discussed in this book’s introduction.) Machiko comes to meet both men in “Walking” when her grandmother asks her to deliver food to Matsuki’s house. Matsuki in turn asks her to deliver a jar of tadpoles to Kyūsaku’s house. (It seems Machiko is ordered around even outside of Tokyo.) Matsuki raised the tadpoles in his laboratory with “the idea that when Kyūsaku goes to write a poem about tadpoles and sees the real thing, he will be unable to write poetry.”70 His prediction turns out to be accurate, and the story ends with Kyūsaku’s frustration at the scientific interference with his poetic practice (a frustration shared with Machiko in Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense when Nisuke brushes away the powder and gathers up his moss just as she is starting to becoming botanical).

While Matsuki thus appears to be an anti-art positivist, Kyūsaku learns to see the poetry hiding within Matsuki’s scientific writings. “A Night in Anton’s Basement” includes a list of fantastical-sounding scientific books authored by Matsuki: The Condition of Appetite in Goats During the Period in which Paulownia Blossoms are in Full Bloom; The Vitality of the Chameleon; the Relationship Between Monkeys and Dreams; Mammoth, Human, Amoeba; An Analysis of Film-Emitting Animality; On Whether a Jar of Tadpoles on a Night in which Fragrant Olive Bloomed Out of Season Caused One’s Heart to Change.71 This odd list of titles contains many recurring motifs in Osaki’s work, including paulownia blossoms and fragrant olive trees. Kyūsaku takes the above-mentioned On Whether a Jar of Tadpoles on a Night in which Fragrant Olive Bloomed Out of Season Caused One’s Heart to Change and reconfigures it, formally, as a poem:

Kyūsaku remarks: “When I read this work’s title, I mistook the Zoologist Matsuki for a lyric poet.”73 Machiko makes a similar remark in Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense after secretly borrowing Nisuke’s notes on his scientific research. She comments on the notes’ poetic qualities: “I had read the notes for two of Nisuke’s essays. One about his research on radishes called On the Utilization of the Soil at the foot of Wasteland Mountain, which fascinated me because it read as if it were Nisuke’s lyric poetry, and Changes in the Love Between Plants Based on the Temperature of Fertilizer (his research on moss), which had secretly become my favorite thing to read.”74 Osaki includes sections of Nisuke’s writing in Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense, and it is written in the characteristic mix of Chinese characters and phonetic katakana syllabary that marks it as a scientific text of its time. In other words, Nisuke’s scientific writing does not look anything like poetry. Machiko does not, like Kyūsaku, need to reformat the text to read it as poetry, however. For Machiko, there is a poetic affect to scientific writing that exceeds formal considerations.

Osaki was correct in believing that there was poetry to be found in the science of evolutionary thought, as, historically speaking, the two are bound together through the figure of Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802). Erasmus, grandfather to Charles, was a poet in addition to a physician and scientist.75 In 1791, he published a collection of poetry titled The Botanic Garden. Consisting of two extended poems, the work is a combination of science and poetry, and it outlines the Linnaean system of taxonomy in rhyming couplets. One of the poems is titled The Loves of the Plants. It is a title that would have appealed to both Nisuke and Oka Asajirō. Its second stanza reads:

From the outset of evolutionary thought, it seems, mosses fell in love within a realm somewhere in between science and poetry.

Yet in Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense, Machiko is ultimately unable to render the insights she gains about becoming botanical into poetic language of her own. After she reaches a new subjective state by closely observing the similarities between moss pollen and chestnut powder, she tries to write poetry of the seventh sense. She fails and instead composes a “love poem full of sadness.” The poem laments not only her loss of a new botanical self but also the trauma of her hair being cut and her complicated relationship with her cousin Sangorō. Presented as a single line, the poem reads: “Although my grandmother sent me a scarlet kadsura flower, I can no longer put it in my hair. The kiss I received on my neck while my hair was being curled was, ah, lonely like the autumn wind.”77 Machiko’s poem—the only one Osaki includes in Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense—laments the loss of her subjective agency at the hands of her male family members. Invoking the image of the kadsura flower, Machiko’s words register the loss of a potential botanical becoming. Her modern haircut—the result of bodily violation—can no longer support the flower.

Just as Ichisuke’s patient is rendered silent by her involution back to a moss-like psychology (a condition that causes Ichisuke much concern), so, too, does language fail Machiko as she tries to recount the new mode of subjectivity she glimpses among the moss. Yet like Ichisuke’s patient, who finds agency in the silence of a moss-like disposition, Machiko’s failure of language is actually no failure at all. Luce Irigaray finds in silence an ethical means to approach alterity, particularly that of plant life. She writes, in a work coauthored with Michael Marder: “Silence is crucial for a being-with, without domination or subjection. It is the first dwelling for coexisiting in difference.”78 The moss-like psychology of Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense is a being-with in this way. Better yet, it is a form of becoming-with that finds humans and plants occupying the same subject position. Machiko may express frustration at her inability to create poetry of the seventh sense, but for Osaki, silence itself was an ideal.79 Machiko is ultimately more moss-like in her silence. Silence is a key part of the evolutionary process of species-reversal that brings Machiko to the botanical realm, where she can coexist with plant-kin in a nonobjectifying familial relationship. In silence, she becomes a member of a botanical family.

Botanical Rebirth

Osaki Midori yearned for change. She recognized the plasticity of subjectivity and strove for transformation in the face of an everyday eaten away by a slowly unfolding catastrophe. In the in-between of literature and science, she attempted to forge something new and to transcend the limits of both modern subjectivity and genre. As such, critics have treated Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense as exceptional and out of step with its time.80 Yet Osaki was very much of her time. In the early Shōwa period, she responded to the times by crafting a vernacular theory of evolution as a means of self-transformation. The act of writing occasioned a kind of rebirth for Osaki. In becoming botanical, her work has indeed transcended the Shōwa period. It would be rediscovered in the 1960s and go on to influence the next generation of writers as well as film and media scholars.

Osaki ultimately outlived the turbulence of the early Shōwa era. As previously mentioned, she retired from writing in 1935 and lived out the rest of her life in solitude. In a short 1973 essay on Osaki, the literary critic Hanada Kiyoteru characterizes her post-Tokyo life in a somber tone: “It is said the female author, who suffers from a nervous disorder, was, at her family’s urging, forced to return to her native Tottori. After moving from hospital to hospital, last year she shut herself away in a room in her sister’s home, spending her afternoons working diligently on small projects at home, and her nights absorbed in the novels of Shishi Bunroku and Kita Morio. This is not a romantic end to the life of a genius.”81

Hanada writes from a place of deep respect for Osaki. One can feel his sadness as he imagines Osaki locked away, possibly against her will, with nothing but a few novels to read. However, it is possible to reframe Osaki’s retirement from writing and her quiet final years as their own form of becoming botanical. To what extent is Hanada playing out the role of Ichisuke, pathologizing Osaki’s silence as a fracture, as a deviation from what should befall a genius? The last lines of Osaki’s 1929 short story “Osmanthus” (Mokusei) reads: “I am destitute moss that has begun to wither.”82 Did Osaki, in this short, sad sentence, predict her own eventual retreat from the world? Or did she become botanical in this moment, blazing a path toward something wholly new?

If we pay closer attention to the botanical realm, we can see even in this most dire of sentences the potential for something unprecedented in alliance with plant life. The bryologist Arakawa Tomotsugu writes of this line: “Usually, dried up moss has the image of something transient and broken. When moss dries out, it becomes frizzled. However, if given water, within moments it will suck it up and come back to life.”83 Robin Wall Kimmerer likewise claims that “most mosses are immune to death by drying. For them, desiccation is simply a temporary interruption in life.”84 This, too, is their shokubutsusei. Put simply, moss can help us rethink death as a “temporary interruption.” Osaki passed away in 1971. Nearly thirty years later, the filmmaker Hamano Sachi would interweave Osaki’s life story with the fictional narrative of Machiko in her film Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense: In Search of Osaki Midori (Dainana kankai hōkō—Osaki Midori o sagashite). This cinematic portrait of Osaki unfolds like a botanical rebirth. While the narrative of Wandering in the Realm of the Seventh Sense progresses linearly in the film, the biographical portions move backward in time, presenting Osaki’s death first and ending with a young Osaki surrounded by friends, overlooking the ocean from Tottori’s vast sand dunes. As the on-screen Machiko lingers over the small world of moss on Ichisuke’s desk, yearning to become botanical, the filmic “Osaki” springs back to life like a withered moss given water. As the screen goes dark and the film fades into silence as Osaki looks out over the water, one can imagine the reverse flow of time continuing on, until Osaki becomes a chameleon; becomes moss; becomes a slice of glacier; becomes smoke; becomes a star; becomes gas . . . and on and on.