Hiromi Ito’s “Tree Spirits Grass Spirits” reviewed by Claire Huffman

Tree Spirits Grass Spirits, by Hiromi Ito, is all at once a travel journal, a memoir, and a journey to the root of the author’s poetry. Originally serialized in the magazine Tosho and now translated into English by Jon L. Pitt, the chapters of Tree Spirits trace the author’s experience living between Japan and Southern California through plants, both wild and planted in her garden.

Ito is best known for her feminist poetry, groundbreaking in Japan for its colloquial and direct language on the subject of, among other things, feminine sexuality and erotic desire. In Tree Spirits, the reader moves gently through Ito’s life without any sense of chronology, from her arrival in California, to her early childhood in Tokyo, to a roadtrip with her adult daughter, and back to the garden in California that she meticulously cared for over twenty years. Ito’s reflections on the plant kingdom are poignantly clear: “What dies, dies. What survives, survives.” Ito teases this statement out into the subsequent chapters to discuss potted plants she tried and failed to save, the violent removal of fast-spreading shrubs from her garden, nativeness as a Japanese immigrant, and her father’s death. 

The book’s structure is not highly organized (a reader will be able to tell it was originally serialized), but the overall effect is pleasing—an idea may be repeated several chapters later, connecting seemingly unrelated anecdotes from Ito’s life. And throughout the book, piquing the reader’s curiosity on every page, is the author’s lifelong interest in the language we use to classify. For nearly every plant she mentions, Ito explores their Japanese, English, and Latin names and the way they connect to and reveal things about one another. Of a plant called kyurigusa (meaning “cucumber grass” in Japanese and called “Cucumber herb” in English), which is not related to cucumbers, she writes, “Could it be that in both Japanese and English, in the consciousness of people in the distant past, the scent of cucumber was so memorable and vivid?” (Ito, 28)

Non-native plants may be called “invasive” or “naturalized” in English, depending on how long and successfully they’ve flourished in their new environment. Ito delves into this distinction, questioning the negative connotations of the word “invasive” and wondering whether a plant might ever be permitted to move from the “naturalized” to the “native” category. Of the same cucumber grass, which became “naturalized” to Japan hundreds of years ago, she writes, “If it were humans we were talking about, wouldn’t they already be considered fellow countrymen? As a humble immigrant myself, this is a question I can’t let go of.” Ito’s musings on nativeness are poetic and striking: a flower introduced to North America develops a new pink color as it adjusts to unfamiliar soil; plants in Southern California are deprived of water, develop narrow leaves and grow a fuzzy “fur,” living their lives “with scowling faces and gritted teeth.” Ito even imagines taking the thirsty plants of Los Angeles to humid Kumamoto, her home in Japan, where, she says, “they would rejoice; they would grow and spread in rapid succession, they would annihilate the meek native plants.” In this way, Ito’s beloved plants become both immigrant and invader.

The landscape and botany of Japan are compared to those of the west coast of the United States, two places that share a similar climate. This is particularly true of the Pacific Northwest, which Ito once explored by car after living for some time in Southern California. As Ito and her daughter entered Oregon, they were both overcome with how similar the landscape was to their native Japan. The damp, dense, green valleys of flourishing plants, and even “another Mount Fuji:” Mount Hood. And, in fact, several other Fujis; the peaks of the Cascade Range dot the route north and have been re-named, according to Ito, things like “Oregon Fuji” and “Tacoma Fuji” by Japanese-Americans in the area. Ito found a semblance of her home in a place she had never been, and this significance of place permeates the book. 

Several chapters after the roadtrip, Ito returns to the subject of the Pacific Northwest. She moves twistingly through a passage that begins with a Kumamoto flood that ripped groves of sugi (Japanese cedar) up by the roots, touches on  her difficulty in correctly classifying various related trees, and arrives at the Japanese and English names for American cedar trees. This brings her to the film Snow Falling on Cedars, which takes place in Washington state, “a place where Japanese Americans had lived and suffered hardships.” Ito doesn’t linger on those hardships and never directly mentions Japanese Internment Camps, where native and naturalized Japanese-American citizens were incarcerated during World War II. However, her travels up and down the west coast take on a new complexity: this place where familiar plants flourish, a place which reminded the poet Ito so much of her home, also bears a history of prejudice and forced relocation.

Many chapters take a similar winding journey to their final form. Ito, first and foremost a poet, knows how to turn a seemingly disjointed series of images and memories into discerning meditation. Beyond the individual chapters, the entire book follows this type of structure; the reader never quite knows what is coming next, except that it will be expressed first through plants.

Ito writes on immigration, family, travel, death, and, through it all, the long, multiplicative life of plants. She is fascinated by plant reproduction and seed mutation, and she connects it to her own identity as a mother. “I had prayed,” she writes in the opening chapter, “for the kind of aggressive fertility they had, but I only gave birth to three children. I didn’t have enough strength. It was disappointing.” Motherhood returns as a theme throughout the book as Ito simultaneously wonders at the miracle of plant reproduction and lifetimes. She gazes up at two-thousand-year-old sequoias in California, surrounded by their smaller offspring, “still able to give birth.” She returns to the subject of giant, ancient trees repeatedly, always with a newly appealing description of her own awe, and by the book’s final pages, she no longer seems disappointed in her own insignificance:

“The fact that one is able to confirm one’s smallness and weakness when something bigger and stronger stands in front of it, and that it’s ok to be small and weak, and that if you rely on this something big, that you can then go on living your life as yourself, just as you are—the many ways of expressing these ideas were packed tightly into the space around me, and they made me feel warm inside.”

Tree Spirits Grass Spirits provides a glimpse into a poet’s mind, and invites the reader to understand the author’s fascination with plant life. Ito’s interest in plants encompasses everything from her gardening hobby, to the concept of reproduction, to the mysteries of the world that have, as Ito writes at the book’s close, inspired her poetry for decades.