UC Berkeley

This dissertation argues that plant life offered a number of modern Japanese writers and filmmakers a model through which to rethink human subjectivity in response to turbulent historical events. Informed by the adaptability and resilience of vegetal life (so-called phenotypic plasticity, in which plants change in response to changes in their environments), the authors and directors I discuss posit a form of destructive plasticity available to humans in the face of crises brought on by war, colonial violence, natural disaster, and economic depression. Across genres and media—in poetry, novels, scientific writing, and films—subjectivity is reconfigured beyond the confines of the human body, beyond conventional sense perception, and beyond human temporality. Drawing from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, I call the reconfiguration of subjectivity in cultural texts inspired by plant life “becoming botanical.”

My first chapter examines two writers: poet and novelist Osaki Midori and biologist Imanishi Kinji. For both, evolutionary thinking informed by new research in botanical science provided a framework to think through and reconfigure human subjectivity amidst the violence of the early Shōwa period, as well as providing a means to envision a notion of family through shared resemblance that included plants. From their utopian figurations of becoming botanical I turn to the dystopian critique of colonial modernity written into Abe Kōbō’s 1949 novella Denodorokakariya (Dendrocacalia). A tale of metamorphosis in which a human turns into a plant native only to the Bonin Islands, Dendorokakariya uses new theories of botanical life that exposed the previously hidden internal life of plants (as characterized by the novella’s diegetic inclusion of Russian botanist Kliment Timiryazev’s scientific treatise The Life of the Plant) to expose a history of colonial violence seemingly fading from memory in the postwar moment. Chapter three examines how three writers (postwar novelist and critic Haniya Yutaka, parascientist Hashimoto Ken, and novelist and rapper Itō Seikō) situate human subjectivity on a spectrum between life and death at the intersection of science and spirituality, and posit a continuation of identity after death within the vegetal world of the forest. This chapter reads trees in the works of these three writers as media that open a channel between the living and the dead in order to work through contemporaneous trauma. Chapter four takes up the eco-films of Yanagimachi Mitsuo and Kawase Naomi, and examines how human subjectivity becomes a part of a greater forest assemblage. In this chapter I argue that Yanagimachi’s Himatsuri (Fire Festival) and Kawase’s Vision look to stage a renewal of Japan’s rural forestry communities through the logic of disturbance ecology. In both films, a ritual engagement with fire is introduced into the forest ecosystem in order to open space for a future to take hold.