Itō Hiromi is one of the most well-known figures in contemporary Japanese literature, having made her mark with sensational and unabashed poetry, widely ranging essays, and award-winning novellas. In the essay published in our Fall 2020 issue, “Living Trees and Dying Trees,” she brings the reader from California to Kumamoto and back again, observing the changes of her life and nature in tandem—the distinction of which are rendered, at times, indistinguishable.
The most recent edition of the Asymptote Educator’s Guide features a lesson plan for “Living Trees and Dying Trees,” which encourages students to engage with this work in distinguishing intercultural patterns, identifying literary forms, and discussing translation and migration. Educator’s Guides are published alongside each issue of Asymptote, and include teaching ideas for educators who want to bring world literature to their classrooms; each Asymptote piece introduced in the guide is accompanied with contextual information. possible discussion questions, and writing prompts.
Jon Pitt, the translator of “Living Trees and Dying Trees,” is a professor of Japanese Environmental Humanities, and has long studied the intersections between literature and ecology. In the following interview, Asymptote Educational Arm Assistant Mary Hillis speaks with him about the resonances of environmentalism and migration in both Itō’s work and Japanese literature overall, as well as the increasing entwinement between ecology and art in the Anthropocene.
Mary Hillis (MH): I understand that in addition to working on a translation of Itō Hiromi’s Kodama Kusadama (Tree Sprits Grass Spirits), from which “Living Trees and Dying Trees” is excerpted, you are a professor of environmental humanities. How did you initially become interested in the environmental humanities? And how does this field relate specifically to Japanese literature, film, and sound?
Jon Pitt (JP): I became interested in the environmental humanities while I was pursuing my Ph.D. I entered graduate school with the intention of researching representations of city life in Japanese literature, but along the way I discovered that representations of the “natural” were just as compelling and complex. I started thinking about trees and how they appeared in so many of the novels I was reading, wondering what would happen if I took them seriously—as more than mere scenery or background to human action. When reading scientific texts about trees and forests, it struck me how new readings of literature might be possible if put into dialogue with scientific writing. I gradually learned that this kind of interdisciplinary approach was one of the key tenants of the environmental humanities, and that there was a growing number of scholars looking for ways to approach the study of literature or film by decentralizing the human.
Engaging with Japanese literature (or film or sound media) through an environmental lens helps address a paradox that many critics have pointed out over the years: namely that there exists a persistent myth of Japanese culture stemming from a unique, “harmonious,” relationship to the natural world, in spite of serious environmental degradation and resource extraction that stretches back centuries. How can both of these things be true? How have artists helped to promote a certain relationship with nature that may hide darker histories of violence against the natural world? I think the environmental humanities help us better understand these kinds of questions.
MH: Is the study of environmental humanities what brought you to Itō Hiromi’s work? When did you first become interested in her writing?
JP: I came across Itō’s long-form poem Wild Grass on the Riverbank while I was conducting research for my dissertation (which I am currently revising into a book). I was looking at writers and filmmakers that depict plant life on some kind of continuum with human life, my argument being that these artists see plant life as a model for inhabiting the world differently in response to crisis. Wild Grass on the Riverbank does just that. The more I read of Itō’s work, the more it helped me conceptualize my argument.
MH: You’ve written elsewhere that, in the works you study, “ . . . human subjectivity . . . is rethought beyond the confines of the human body, beyond conventional sense perception, and also beyond human temporality.” Could you expand on that within the context of “Living Trees and Dying Trees”?
JP: My book project looks at works in which human subjectivity becomes more plant-like. In some cases, this means experiencing the world not as an individual, but as a part of something much larger—like a forest, with a much different notion of time and lifespan. An individual tree may die, but the forest lives on. I try to bring together writers and filmmakers that extend this reconfigured, botanical way of inhabiting the world to humans. Much of Itō’s work does this. It might be more obvious in a work like Wild Grass on the Riverbank, which ends with its main characters immigrating to Southern California, and becoming a flower that produces endless buds.
But we see this kind of thinking in “Living Trees and Dying Trees” too. There’s a moment where Itō writes of lying under a giant tree, and compares the wrinkles on her hands to the wrinkles on the tree. She’s just lost her father. Her pregnant daughter is there also, and is walking around the tree with her American husband. Itō realizes the tree is composed of older, dying leaves and new, young leaves at the same time. The story asks: what would it mean to see life not as a singular path from birth to death (like a leaf) but instead a cyclical movement of many births, deaths, and rebirths (like a tree)? It’s a botanical temporality that reframes one’s life as part of something larger, like a tree, or like a family.
MH: Yes, it’s like you wrote in the translators note, “She lost the distinction between herself and the plants about which she was writing.” That aspect reminds me of fiction like The Vegetarian by Han Kang (translated by Deborah Smith) or nonfiction like The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben (translated by Suzanne Simard).
Do you think that with the increasing awareness of climate change, ecology and literature are becoming increasingly intertwined? Or is it a primal, mystical connection with nature that has always fascinated humans to create literature about it?
JP: I think ecology and literature have always been intertwined, whether or not writers or readers have been aware of this fact. To be sure, ways of understanding and writing about “nature” have changed (and continue to change), and many great works of literature assume a kind of separation between humans and nature. An environmental humanities approach shows how such a separation never really holds up under scrutiny. Growing awareness of climate change may indeed inspire more writers to examine their own immersion within certain ecologies, but we as readers can also look at writers that never had such awareness, but were embedded in ecologies all the same. Writers like Natsume Sōseki or Charles Dickens may not have been ecological writers, but we can absolutely read their work ecologically.
MH: What do you think motivates Itō Hiromi to write about nature and plant life?
JP: My understanding of Itō’s fascination with plant life is tied to her experience as an immigrant in the United States. As we see in “Living Trees and Dying Trees,” Itō recognizes that plants also migrate, albeit on a different time scale than humans. Plants become a way to differentiate between the places she has called home (be it Southern California or Southern Japan), but they also become a means to collapse this distance. Japanese plants have migrated to and thrived in the United States, and vice versa. Itō writes herself (and her family) into this active, always in-flux view of nature, and challenges firm notions of the nation state in the process. It’s a remarkable environmental philosophy that has a spiritual dimension as well.
MH: We have a lesson plan for “Living Trees and Dying Trees” in the Fall 2020 issue of the Asymptote Educator’s Guide, so I’d like to talk a bit about literature in the classroom. What kind of university courses do you teach? How do you use literature, especially literature in translation, for these subjects?
JP: One class I teach, called “Narrating Nature in Modern Japan,” finds students engaging with texts where landscapes and nonhuman animals and plants play a central role, alongside works of Japanese environmental philosophy, environmental history, religious studies, and anthropology. I ask students to look for ways to connect literature to other kinds of writing, and to look for the literary elements of non-literary texts.
Translations are vital to my teaching practice, and to the environmental humanities more generally. If we truly want to promote an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the humanities, we need to make non-anglophone literature accessible to those students that work outside of the humanities and thus may not have the language training expected of a student in an area studies or comparative literature department. To a certain extent, the act of translation helps to democratize knowledge and art. At the same time, we should certainly question the status of English as an increasingly universalized academic language.
MH: You mentioned in the translator’s note that the multilingual nature of the tree names was something that was challenging to translate. As part of the lesson plan in the Asymptote Educator’s Guide, students are asked to research information about these trees. What kind of significance do you think these trees have in Japanese culture and beyond?
JP: There are many varieties of trees that carry cultural significance in Japan—cherry trees being the most obvious. There’s a striking passage in another story from Tree Spirits Grass Spirits where Itō recounts driving along Highway 5 in California, which cuts through large stretches of agricultural land. She sees rows and rows of almond and stone fruit trees in full bloom, and even though she knows these flowers “can’t live up” to the cherry blossoms in Japan, she feels her heart stir all the same. In an earlier novella called Three Lil’ Japanese (Surii riro jyapaniizu), Itō writes of the cherry trees in an ominous manner. They physically block a family from leaving Japan for California.
One of the things I love about Itō’s writing is that she takes symbolically loaded plants like cherry trees and asks us to consider what happens to them when they take root somewhere new. She does this with the bead trees in “Living Trees and Dying Trees.” They are native to Japan, just like her, and yet here they are in California (just like her). Itō mentions sugi (Japanese cedar) as well. Sugi are considered an ancient species in Japan. Many shinboku or sacred trees in Shinto cosmology are sugi. But elsewhere in Tree Spirits Grass Spirits, Itō writes how sugi and redwoods (like the kind found in California’s Sequoia National Park) used to belong to the same scientific family (until they were separate by the APG classification system). These kinds of observations challenge strict cultural ties to specific species of plants.
MH: In fact, the lesson plan is titled “Writing about What is Lost,” and it culminates with students producing a piece of writing on something they’ve lost (or gained) at some point in their lives. Thinking about this theme, what do you think is lost or gained in translation or in moving between cultures?
JP: As someone that has moved around quite a bit throughout my life, I know firsthand that a profound sense of loss can accompany such movement. Friends, family, food, even seasons, and certain trees and other plants—we miss these things that really were a part of who we were at a particular time. And as someone who translates literature and teaches literature in translation, I am also acutely aware of what gets lost in translation, be it cultural context, rhythm, the very sound of the words that writers like Itō Hiromi spend so much time carefully constructing.
And yet, there is undoubtedly much to gain in translation, just as there is in moving between cultures. There’s a kind of alchemy in the act of translation, especially with writers like Itō who explore the in-between spaces of cultures and language. There is a chapter in Tree Spirits Grass Spirits in which Itō discusses the English translation of Wild Grass on the Riverbank, expertly rendered by Jeffrey Angles. Itō writes: “When I read the English used in the translation out loud, I am taken in by the delusion that this is my real voice, and that I’ve always, from the very start, spoken that way. In other words, I can’t shake the feeling that the Japanese version of Wild Grass on the Riverbank is a mere translation, and that the English version is the original.” This is a powerful claim that reinforces the very ideas explored in the work. The poem is about the movement between cultures and languages. The uncertainty over which version is the original and which is the translation adds another layer to the complexity of writing about the migratory experience.
Jon L Pitt is Assistant Professor of Japanese Environmental Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. His current book project proposes that vegetation (and the scientific study of plants) offered a number of modern Japanese writers and filmmakers a new model through which to rethink human subjectivity and develop notions of plasticity in response to turbulent historical events. He is currently working on a full translation of Itō’s Kodama Kusadama (Tree Spirits Grass Spirits).
Mary Hillis is an Educational Arm Assistant at Asymptote. She earned an MA in English with a specialization in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. She lives in Japan, where she teaches English language and literature at the university level.
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