Botanical Imagination: Rethinking Plants in Modern Japan

by Jon L. Pitt, Ann Sherif (Foreword by)

Overview

Botanical Imagination explores the complicated legacy and enduring lure of plant life in modern Japanese literature and media. Using critical plant studies, Jon L. Pitt examines an unlikely group of writers and filmmakers in modern Japan, finding in their works a desire to "become botanical" in both content and form. For nearly one hundred years, a botanical imagination grew in response to moments of crisis in Japan's modern history.

Pitt shows how artists were inspired to seek out botanical knowledge in order to construct new forms of subjectivity and attempt to resist certain forms of state violence. As he follows plants through the tangled histories of imperialism and state control, Pitt also uncovers the ways plants were used in the same violence that drove artists to turn to the botanical as a model of resistance in the first place. Botanical Imagination calls on us to rethink plants as significant but ambivalent actors and to turn to the botanical realm as a site of potentiality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501780967
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	04/15/2025
Series:	The Environments of East Asia
Pages:	252
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Jon L. Pitt is Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is the translator of Hiromi Ito's Tree Spirits Grass Spirits.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Botanical Potential
1. Botanical Families: Osaki Midori, Moss, and Evolutionary Resemblance
2. Botanical Allegory: Metamorphosis and Colonial Memory in Abe Kōbō's Dendrocacalia
3. Botanical Media: Haniya Yutaka, Hashimoto Ken, Itō Seikō, and the Search for Dead Spirits
4. Botanical Regeneration: Fire and Disturbance Ecology in the Films of Yanagimachi Mitsuo and Kawase Naomi
5. Botanical Migration: Naturalization and Empathy in the Poetry and Prose of Hiromi Ito
Epilogue: Thale Cress, Herbivore Men, and A World Without Love

What People are Saying About This

Natania Meeker

Botanical Imagination is a highly engaging study of the botanical impulses that animate modern Japanese literature and media. In vivid prose, Pitt traces the turn to plants in a wide range of Japanese texts, which take on ever more expansive forms under his analysis. Botanical Imagination opens up new vistas for specialists and nonspecialists alike.

Christine Marran

Botanical Imagination is a fresh and compelling take on key authors and filmmakers in Japanese modernity through the lens of plant life in theory and representation. Jon L. Pitt's exceedingly readable book will be an exciting addition to the work on modern Japanese literature and moving images.