Aya Koda’s posthumous 1992 essay collection Tree, which has been translated with sensitivity and grace by Charlotte Goff, brings together fifteen short autobiographical essays about the author’s visits to famous trees and forests in Japan.
Koda, who was born in 1904, was primarily famous as a novelist and short story writer. She was most active in the late 1940s through the 1950s, when she documented the changing family dynamics of the postwar period through her fiction. Koda focused on shifting social mores through the lens of women’s work and material culture, especially clothing.
Koda brings the same power of observation and gentle good humor to her accounts of her travels across Japan in order to satisfy a long-held curiosity about trees, forestry, and environmental science, as well as the professionals who work in these fields. As she explains her project in her own words…
It has only been a few years since I first started walking through the woods, hoping that as I encountered different trees I would be able to draw inspiration from them. I had been lucky enough to receive support and guidance from experts each time, and so in a few short years I had been afforded the chance to spend considerable time wandering the forest feeling moved by all sorts of wonderful trees.
In “Yakusugi,” Koda visits Yakushima, a World Heritage Site known for its luxuriant vegetation and the mountainous evergreen forest that inspired the Studio Ghibli film Princess Mononoke. Koda is specifically interested in visiting the Jomon Sugi, a cryptomeria cypress tree that’s at least two thousand years old (and may be much older). After braving the muddy mountain slopes, Koda is surprised to find that the tree is far from majestic, but what she calls its “squat ugliness” is impressive in its own way.
In “At Abe Pass,” Koda walks along the Abe Pass hiking trail, which is known for its views of Mount Fuji. Instead of visiting during the peak of the autumn foliage, Koda goes in May, when the leaves of the maple trees will hopefully be fresh and green. Unfortunately, the vicissitudes of nature can’t be predicted, and the maple trees are completely bare when she arrives. Koda still documents her trip with good humor, taking note of the smaller plants that are budding and flowering while also remarking on the river below, which has a tendency to complicate the postcard-perfect scenery by flooding and causing landslides.
For the reader, Koda’s essays can feel like secondhand forest bathing, but it’s also interesting to study the snapshots of cultural and natural history that she has preserved in her writing. For Koda, aesthetic appreciation is just as important as ecological understanding, and she describes her essays as an attempt to pass on a way of seeing nature that she developed as a child…
I grew up in a farm village on the outskirts of Tokyo, which is why there were always plants around. There were crops from the rice paddies, of course, scrubs of various small trees springing up alongside irrigation channels, areas of land cultivated by gardeners, and, as well as all this, just about every house had some form of greenery in or around it. Children could learn about trees and plants without even trying.
What separates Koda’s essays from a shallow appreciation of attractive landscapes is her willingness to address the more violent aspects of nature. The most powerful example is the essay “Volcanic Ash,” in which Koda visits Sakurajima, the location of a small town that has historically benefitted from the hot springs and fertile soil created by the island’s active volcano. After one of the major eruptions in the 1980s, Koda went to observe the effects of the falling ash on the plants. “It must be an extreme nuisance,” she says wryly; but, “as a natural phenomenon, you cannot simply ask it to stop.”
Though discussions of climate change had already begun in Japan in the 1980s, Koda doesn’t address this issue directly. Instead, in a very relaxed and apolitical way, she stresses the importance of learning to coexist with the environment, even when it’s inconvenient or destructive to human enterprise. By imbuing scientific curiosity with emotional warmth, Tree serves as a gentle and welcoming invitation to live attentively alongside the natural world. Aya Koda’s clear-eyed essays offer readers an entertaining and nostalgic tour of Japan’s forests, but they also provide a model for observing nature with respect and resilience.
Contemporary Japanese Literature 