Tree Spirits Grass Spirits collects twenty-one autobiographical stories about plants by the celebrated Japanese-American poet Hiromi Ito. As translator Jon L Pitt explains in the preface, these stories were originally serialized from 2012 to 2013 in a highbrow Japanese literary magazine, and it might be more appropriate to call them “philosophical prose-poems” instead of “essays.” I think it’s important to emphasize that Ito’s prose is lively and accessible, so “stories” works just fine for me. Each of the stand-alone stories in Tree Spirits Grass Spirits is gentle and thoughtful, and the collection as a whole is a breath of fresh summer air filled with the sweet taste of green and growing leaves.
Ito divides her time between the cities of Encinitas in southern California and Kumamoto on the southern island of Kyushu in Japan. Each region has a unique climate and ecosystem, and Ito is fascinated by the plants that grow in each environment, from yucca and agave to camelia and hydrangeas to grass and mold. Ito’s stories touch on botany and natural history, but their focus is on primarily humans, especially the humans in her own family.
Among my favorite of the stories in Tree Spirits Grass Spirits is “Baobab Dream,” which concerns a challenge that many people have experienced with houseplants. As Ito puts it: “They are at their most beautiful when you first purchase them, and they get progressively shabbier and shabbier, even if you take care of them. And then, at some point, they wither away and die.” And then, when you go to a garden store to get new plants, it can be a challenge to identify them, which is how Ito came into the possession of a mystery tree that she and her daughters resorted to calling “the baobab tree.”
While conducting research on what the tree might actually be, Ito considers the Latin names of various plants and arrives at the conclusion that the botanical categorizations of plants often don’t make much practical sense. How are tulips and green onions members of the same botanical family, for instance? The confusion of categorization on paper yields to broader meditations on how certain species are categorized as “invasive” as opposed to “naturalized,” and how this reflects her own experiences as someone who moves between cultures. In the end, however, such abstract concerns pale in the beauty of the plants themselves:
In the park next door, the mountain lilacs were at their peak. The peach trees and plum trees and cherry trees were blooming in folks’ yards. The roadsides were bright yellow from the acacias. The bushes of sweet-scented geranium in my own garden, too, had suddenly grown dense and were so thick that they seemed to be sweating, steeped in a green that surrounded one or two pink buds – swelling with each coming day and trying to open up any minute now.
Ito’s vivid descriptions of the physicality of the natural world carry over to her reflections on what it means to be a human moving through the environment. This is one of the many reasons why I love the story “Kudzu-san,” which is about the kudzu growing in the neighborhood around Ito’s house in Kumamoto on the subtropical island of Kyushu. As anyone who’s encountered the aggressively leafy vines can attest, kudzu is filled with vitality. If you cut it down, it will grow back twice as quickly, and its fuzzy tendrils are constantly creeping into unexpected places.
Ito remarks that there’s a certain lasciviousness to kudzu, and so she searches for poetic references to the plant in literary sources such as the Man’yōshū poetry anthology and the Tale of Genji. Such references are scare, but Ito is intrigued by a chance mention of the famous Heian-period court magician Abe no Seimei, whose mother was supposedly a fox. In Japanese folklore, foxes are shapeshifters known for their sexual allure, so it seems only fitting that Seimei’s mother is poetically associated with the visual motif of kudzu. Ito’s own encounters with kudzu are likewise filled with startling physicality:
The vines we crushed in the morning lay as they were, and stood back up erect in the evening, swaying their stems and moving in on women – I had seen this, as well. They were more like snakes than plants. Even more than snakes, they resembled those eels that sway in the ocean. There are stories in old books about snakes that enter women’s bedchambers at night, and one about a snake that slid into a woman’s vagina after she had climbed a tree. Couldn’t all those stories be about kudzu?
What I admire about Ito’s stories is that, despite their poetic beauty, her meditations often progress in strange and unexpected directions without forcing symbolism or allegory onto the natural world. Ito observes her environment closely and looks inward as she describes what she sees, but the mycelial networks between her associations expand unseen below the surface of her writing. Just as autobiography often inspires self-reflection in the reader, Ito’s “phyto-autobiography” inspires an observation of ourselves in a larger context that doesn’t always follow human logic.
Tree Spirits Grass Spirits is a welcome companion to anyone interested in going outside and seeing the world around them from a fresh perspective. Jon Pitt’s translation gracefully conveys Ito’s engaged yet casual tone while allowing space for the rhythm and mouthfeel of each sentence, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that every paragraph in this book is a joy to read. Almost all of the stories are less than ten pages long, and it’s a pleasure to dip into the collection whenever you’re in the mood to open your eyes and shift your viewpoint to a slightly less anthropocentric frame of reference.
Tree Spirits Grass Spirits is published by Nightboat Books. You can check out the book’s page (here) and order of copy from all major retailers.
Contemporary Japanese Literature 